Language Maintenance and Shift
Language Maintenance and Shift
Language Maintenance and Shift
This chapter covers the following key topics: Language shift in different communities, Language
death and language loss, Factors contributing to language shift, How can a minority language be
maintained?, and Language revival.
Language maintenance denotes the continuing use of a language in the face of competition
from a regionally and socially more powerful language. Language shift is the opposite of this: it denotes
the replacement of one language by another as the primary means of communication within a
community. The term language death is used when that community is the last one in the world to use
that language. Sometime, a language is defined as both dead language and shifted to another language
when it is extinct, or shifted without death when it is shifted but the original language is still existed. The
extinction of Cornish in England is an example of language death as well as shift (to English). And the
demise of Norwegian as an immigrant language in the USA exemplifies shift without death, as
Norwegian is of course still spoken in its original setting in Norway.