s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Agnieszka Stępkowska
more and more spheres of life, and the Romansh dialects put up resistance,
though rather weak in the final analysis.
When we move further on the Haugen’s cycle, we arrive at what Uriel
Weinreich (1968 /1953/: 1) described as “the practice of alternately using two
languages”, i.e.,, bilingualism. If prolonged, bilingualism may result in shift.
Haugen (1972) distinguishes between supplementary, complementary, and replacive
bilingualism. These three kinds of bilingualism may occur together or
separately in any social context. They may ensue in a chronological order,
marked by the gradual change of the generations, like in the Romansh case.
Their communicative needs cannot be fulfilled entirely by any of the Romansh
dialects and, in consequence, they need to learn German. Thus, they may learn
it as a supplement to Romansh for specific needs. Or, they may wish to learn to
read and write Standard German, which thereby fulfills a complementary function
to the first language. Or, in the replacive bilingualism, German may gradually
take over all the communicative needs of the speakers so that the use of
Romansh is rendered useless and, in the end, consigned to oblivion.
If bilingualism is not secured at a steady level, then the process of shift ensues.
The first symptoms are indicated by fewer users and a diminishing political
status. If the replaced language begins to lose economic attractiveness and
its knowledge is no longer demanded in pursuing professional career, as well as
if its social prestige starts to shrink, then that language should be regarded as
seriously threatened. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (2003: 33) deplores the situations
of shifts, arguing that “big languages turn into killer languages, monsters that
gobble up others, when they are learned at the cost of the smaller ones. Instead,
they should and could be learned in addition to the various mother tongues”.
Thus, the shift is complete when the replaced language has disappeared completely
– a state also referred to as language loss or, to use a more elaborate
term, glottophagia, i.e., “the suppression of the minority language by that of the
majority” (Calvet 1974, in Nelde 1992: 391). The shift between languages reflects
the proportions or balance of powers, which means that the demise of
a language is always brought about by non-linguistic causes (Maurais 2003:
28). When a language dies, no single native speaker of it is left and “all its functions
or uses have been usurped by another language” (Pauwels 2004: 719).
Thus language contact, being the prerequisite of language shift as well as its
first potential stage, may (though it does not have to) involve linguistic competition.
3. Researching language shift
For several decades the study of the erosion of Romansh grew multidisciplinary
in nature, and this fact is reflected in the multitude of research method