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Language shift in the Raeto-Romansh community 211
value” and he is far from calling it “calamity”. Nevertheless, deplorable as the
loss of language may be for some linguists, it should be remembered that it does
not have to be intrinsically correlated with the loss of cultural identity. Luckily,
the identity of a group is demonstrated by not a single, but several markers that
were broadly categorized by Pandharipande (1992) as linguistic, regional and/or
geographic, religious, and racial and/or ethnic. Only together do they constitute
the cultural identity of a social group.
As a way of concluding, it seems befitting to stress that language, being one
of the identity markers, does not stand for the entire cultural identity of any
speaker. It is because culture, by definition, comprises several elements, and is
not limited to any one of them. Thus, the shift in language does not necessarily
amount to the shift in the cultural identity of the speech community. Another
point to note is that, often due to a language shift, the loss of one identity
marker tends somehow to reinforce other identity markers. Finally, the language
shift need not always be caused by external factors. It may rather be a conscious
decision made by the community to give up its own language identity as
a means of counterbalancing social and economic pressures (see Pandharipande
1992). Since no stage of change involved in the Haugen’s cycle is inevitable,
and it can be stopped or even reversed at any time, today the Romansh minority
can be allotted a place of unstable bilingualism resulting from the ever decreasing
numbers of Romansh speakers in statistics, which in fact means that they
keep moving towards a full shift. The shift in the Raeto-Romansh minority is
progressing at an unusually slow rate and to be completed, it will certainly take
more than three generations.
References
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