s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Agnieszka Stępkowska
By way of recap, it seems purposeful to recall some generalized points
made by Edwards (1985) whose surveys, in fact, converged to form a list of
universal observations readily applicable to any minority language struggling
for survival. These points are also true of Romansh. That is to say, all languages
on the decline are mostly spoken by an older generation and are not transmitted
further on to younger people; languages undergoing shifts are often cramped
into poor and rural areas; bilingualism is only of transitory nature; the most
explicit desire for language maintenance is voiced by small unrepresentative
groups; and, finally, a group identity usually survives language death. All in all,
reversing language shift is highly unlikely in practice if not completely impossible.
Usually, efforts to revive a dying language prove to be artificial, or “removed
from a realistic overall appreciation of social dynamics” (Edwards 1985:
169), and therefore doomed to failure. Language decline needs to be researched
and understood in a wide social context “with full appreciation of the processes
of social evolution which have created contemporary conditions” (Edwards
1985: 169). If these conditions are natural and normal in every way, then the
final consequence they lead to should also be regarded as such. And, this is
what May (2004) calls the “resigned language realism”.
5. Rumantsh Grischun – one instead of five
Under the territorial principle all language groups are relatively stable and easy
to define. Georges Lüdi (1992: 46) elaborates on this description as follows:
The validity of the territoriality principle in Switzerland changed its administrative map into
a patchwork of monolingual cantons with the exception of a few overlap areas in case of
a couple of officially bilingual cantons. Depending on the viewpoint, the territoriality
principle either constrains or permits the use of one official language. As a result, the other
national languages in any given monolingual canton enjoy the status comparable to that of
Spanish or English.
The situation of Romansh communities has remained unsolved, and it will
remain as such, unless the numbers in statistics concerning Romansh come to
a halt. In the opinion of Lüdi (1992), the territorial principle deals rather poorly
with school problems and migration across the language borders. The formerly
unforeseen abundance of language contacts, brought about by industrial and
economic development and the power of the mass media, will not stop at the
cantonal borders. According to Blommaert (2004: 59), “territorialization stands
for the perception and attribution of values to language as a local phenomenon,
something which ties people to local communities and spaces. Customarily,
people’s mother tongue (L1) is perceived as territorialized language” (my emphasis).
Nevertheless, for the dispersed Romansh communities the issues of