LANE 422 SOCIOLINGUISTICS

1. LANE 422 SOCIOLINGUISTICS Summarized From SOCIOLINGUISTICS An Introduction to Language and Society Peter Trudgill 4thedition. 2000, Prepared by Dr. Abdullah S. Al-Shehri

2. Chapter 10 Language and Humanity

3. In the previous chapters.. • We looked at a number of cases in which irrational attitudes and discriminatory decisions often made by governments or other official bodies acting out of ignorance or prejudice, have led to language policies which have had detrimental effect on children’s education and even on societies as a whole.

4. Also.. • We saw that the British government in the eighteenth century attempted to make the speaking of Gaelic illegal. • We considered the way in which non-standard dialects of English, such as the African American Vernacular English (AAVE), have incorrectly been regarded as inferior or inadequate. • We noticed the extent to which varieties of pidgin English were looked down on as ‘broken English’. • We observed the political disadvantage at which speakers of minority languages such as Romany can often find themselves.

5. In France.. • In 1994, a French minister tried to outlaw the use of English words in French, on the totally erroneous ground that the French language is under some kind of threat from English.

6. In the USA.. • There has also been a powerful political movement in recent years, known as the ‘English only’ movement, which has been attempting to exclude languages other than English from the educational, cultural and political life of many American states. • Some of those in favor of this movement argue that the position of English is being threatened.

7. How do such attitudes impact language? • One of the very distressing consequences that attitudes of this type can have is language death. • One of the questions linguists are often asked is: how many languages are there in the world? • It is not too inaccurate to say, however, that there are about 6000 languages in the world today. • This number is most certainly smaller than it used to be and is getting smaller all the time.

8. What happens is that.. • Communities go through a process of language shift. • This means that a particular community gradually abandons its original native language in favor of another language. • This has been a relatively common process in the sociolinguistic history of the world.

9. Language shift is a prelude for language death • Most of the population of Ireland were native speakers of Irish Gaelic. • Now, the vast majority are native speakers of English. • Before the Roman conquest, the population of much of what is now France were speakers of the Celtic language Gaulish. • Subsequently, however, they shifted to the language of their conquerors, Latin, which eventually became French. • Later on, the northern part of France was conquered by the Germanic-speaking Franks. • These conquerors, however, eventually went through a process of language shift and ended up speaking French too.

10. More on language shift.. • The Norwegian-speaking Vikings who subsequently conquered and settled in the part of northern France we now call Normandy also shifted from their Scandinavian language to French. • A few generations later, as a result of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, these former Scandinavians took the French language to England. • Once in England, however, it took the descendants of the Norman conquerors only a few generations before they shifted once again; this time to English.

11. In Europe.. • A number of languages have died even in quite recent times. • Cornish, for example, died out in Cornwall in the eighteenth century. • Manx, a close relative of Irish, lost its last native speaker on the Isle of Man in the 1950s. • Many other European languages are currently under threat of dying out: Scottish Gaelic, Breton in Brittany, Frisian in the Netherland and Germany, Sami in Scandinavia, and Romansch in Switzerland.

12. In the Americas.. • The problem is much more serious. • At the time of the first European contact in the fifteenth century, at least a thousand different languages were spoken. • In the last 400 years, at least 300 of those languages have died out completely. • Of the remaining 700, only 17 languages have more than 100,000 speakers, and only one of those, namely Navaho, is in North America. • More than 50 languages have died in the USA alone since the arrival of Europeans.

13. In the Pacific Ocean.. • The problem is even more serious. • Perhaps as many as a quarter of the world’s languages are spoken in this area, and very many of them indeed are under threat of being lost totally. • In Australia, for example, there used to be about 200 aboriginal languages. • Of these, 50 are already dead, and another 100 are very close to extinction.

14. What Causes Language Shift? • There are very many, often complex, reasons why language shift takes place. • Perhaps a very important reason, however, are people’s attitudes to languages. • Frequently, though, people abandon the language which is the repository of their culture and history and which has been the language of their community for generations because they feel ashamed of it.

15. Dialect Death • Just as in the case of language death, so irrational, unfavourable attitudes towards vernaculars, nonstandard varieties can also lead to dialect death. • This disturbing phenomenon is as much a part of the linguistichomogenization of the world. • In many parts of the world, we are seeing less regional variation in language.

16. However.. • We have to acknowledge that much dialect loss in modern Europe (and in many other parts of the world) is due to processes connected with geographical mobility and urbanization and is therefore probably sociolinguistically inevitable. • There are nothing we can do about that. What we can work against is that kind of dialect loss which is the result of attitudinal factors.