Language Death

This paper investigates the relationship between the Cornish language and officialdom over the past thousand years. The social status of Cornish is examined along with attitudes towards the language held by monarchy, government and their agencies. During the middle-ages, Cornish was relatively stable and indeed enjoyed some prestige amongst the gentry who used Cornish as their preferred language for family mottoes. However, following the Tudor accession, the number of Cornish speakers was greatly reduced following the brutal repression of several popular uprisings when a significant proportion of the Cornish speaking population were exterminated. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Cornish continued to be used amongst the poor in Cornwall's fishing communities. The revival of Cornish began around 1900 and the number of speakers grew throughout the 20th century. Nevertheless, the government and state education system provided no support for Cornish language learners until 2002 when the European Union granted Cornish official “minority language” status under Part II of the 1992 Council of Europe Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. In 2005, the government confirmed modest funding support for the Cornish language. Local government in Cornwall are currently implementing a Cornish language strategy to determine a standard written form for Cornish that can be used for official purposes, such as signage, and for education in schools.

In this article, I intend to concentrate on one type of process by which Scots has found new legitimation as a language, and how discourses surrounding the issue of Scots might seek to contribute to the creation of a new Scottish society. I whish to show how history is used as a legitimating discursive device by the various components of the Scots language revitalisation movement.

Pre-publication draft.

Zusammenfassung:

Dieser Artikel betrachtet die Entwicklung der theoretischen und ideologischen Standpunkte, die einem großen Teil der wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten zum Thema des Manx-Gälischen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute zugrunde liegen. Vorgeschlagen wird, dass in Diskussionen des Manx die Annahme herrscht, die Sprache sei ein zerfallener, anglisierter bzw. kreolisierter Dialekt, was in O’Rahillys bekannter Erklärung dargelegt wird: ‘Manx hardly deserved to live’. O’Rahillys Ansichten haben zu unterschiedlichen Graden die Auffassung nachfolgender Wissenschaftler von der Sprache beeinflusst, so sehr sie auch seine rhetorischen Exzesse verwerfen mögen. Der Artikel untersucht die Behauptungen dieser Wissenschaftler und stellt die generelle Ansicht bezüglich kontaktinduzierten Sprachwandels im Manx-Gälischen infrage. Kritisch betrachtet wird auch Williams’ Theorie eines mittelalterlichen nordisch-gälischen Patois als Grundlage des späteren Manx angesichts Trudgills Ideen zur soziolinguistischen Typologie.

Societies need a language to be able to continue their own relationship. Scientists interested in liberal arts apply language which is the most important indicator to understand mankind. They form conjectures about societies' past and future by examining language Language including everyting assaciated with human is the first referance in scientific researches Mardin which is one of the cities having multilingualism/bilingualism has a rich linguistic diversity. This city taking place in Southeast Anatolian of Turkey is mentioned as " Summery of Middle East" as well. There as many languages as there are ethnic groups in Mardin where Turkish, Kurdish, Syriac, Arab, Chechen and Armenian live together. Therefore interaction of these languages is inevitable in this city where the diffirent languages live together. The result of these interactions is seen in a lot of linguistic attainments. One of the most prominent is code switchings. Multilinguals whose main language is Arabic have borrowed a lot of words from Turkish and Kurdish. Code switchings can be in sentence/phrase., It also can be by using Turkish, Kurdish bound morpheme with Arabic free morpheme. Here is the main Language is Arabic, embedded language is turkish or Kurdish. This research handled multilinguals whose main language is Arabic in "code switchings". İt examined Turkish and Kurdish code switchings in Arabic with linguistic and sociolinguistic analiyzes. Diffeerent datas were collected from 32 subject. Mathematical datas weren't used so qualitative analiyzes were used.

Script Switching in Roman Egypt studies the hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, and Old Coptic manuscripts which evidence the conventions governing script use, the domains of writing those scripts inhabited, and the shift of scripts between those domains, to elucidate the obsolescence of those scripts from their domains during the Roman Period. Utilising macro-level frameworks from sociolinguistics, the textual culture from four sites is contextualised within the priestly communities of speech, script, and practice that produced them. Utilising micro-level frameworks from linguistics, both the scripts of the Egyptian writing system written, and the way the orthographic methods fundamental to those scripts changed, are typologised. This study also treats the way in which morphographic and alphabetic orthographies are deciphered and understood by the reading brain, and how changes in spelling over time both resulted from and responded to dimensions of orthographic depth. Through a cross-cultural consideration of script obsolescence in Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia and by analogy to language death in speech communities, a model of domain-by-domain shift and obsolescence of the scripts of the Egyptian writing system is proposed.

The Ph.D. thesis entitled “The Morphosyntax of the North-Mesopotamian Arabic Dialect of Siirt, Turkey” is a continuation of my researches in regard with the study of Arabic dialects (from Tunisia, Iraq and southeastern Turkey), having the purpose of being a monograph of the Arabic dialect spoken in the city of Siirt.

The necessity of such a research comes due to the fact that the dialects in southeastern Turkey, referred to in scholar articles as “North-Mesopotamian” of the qǝltu type, have been studied to a lesser degree, while only a few monographs exist nowadays on this subject.

The thesis has been written on the theoretical framework of such monographs like the ones of: Socin (1904), Jastrow (1973; 1978; 1981), Sasse (1971), Talay (1999), Wittrich (2001), Grigore (2007) and Lahdo (2009), dedicated to some of the North-Mesopotamian Arabic dialects and of articles that tackle the same type of dialects. Moreover, this research is based on a corpus comprised of recordings achieved by me in the spoken Arabic of Siirt.

The corpus is comprised of the recordings employed by Jastrow (1981) and on the recordings that I have carried out following several visits in the area: Siirt (July-August 2013, August 2014, May 2016), in the Siirti communities in Istanbul (August 2013), other recordings employed in Bucharest (July 2015), as well as recordings selected from conversations carried out on social networking websites.

The study is based mainly on the author’s field materials, collected between 1993 and 1997 during an ethno-linguistic research assignment. These materials include systematised observations concerning the sociolinguistic situation in the area, as well as linguistic data pertaining to language use of Pashtun migrants living and working there. The aim of the study is to define the place of Pashto speakers in the multiethnic and multilingual environment of the Northern Areas of Pakistan and to analyse the impact of this environment on their communication patterns and language use.
        Chapter one provides an overview of the socio-linguistic situation prevalent in Pakistan's Pashto speaking core areas. It contains an outline of Pashto's place within the Pakistan's language environment, a short overview of Pashto's dialectal divisions. Pashto is one of the more than 60 languages current on the territory of Pakistan, where it is spoken by about 23 million people, mostly living in the North Western Frontier Province, in Baluchistan and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The language is divided into a great number of varieties, most of them identified with one specific geographical area, some of them of supra regional occurrence. Over the centuries Pashto has been in close contact with a number of small neighbouring languages influencing their lexicon and grammar, and sometimes even replacing them. At the same time, Pashto has been and continues to be influenced by important supra regional languages, mostly by Persian, but also by Turkic and Indo-Arian languages.
        Chapter two investigates the socio-linguistic situation in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. On their territory in the mid-1990s were living and interacting more than ten large ethno-linguistic groups, who were speaking languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan, Sino-Tibetan, Iranian and Turkic language families. The numerically most widespread local languages were Dardic Shina and Khowar, Burushaski (a language isolate) and Balti (western Tibetan). Indo-Aryan Gujari, Turkic Uighur and Eastern Iranian Pashto were spoken by minorities; Urdu (member of the Central group of Indo-Arian languages) was functioning as the regional lingua franca.
        Chapter three outlines, mainly on the base of oral sources, the settlement history of Pashto speakers in Pakistan’s Northern Areas over the last 150 years, beginning in colonial times and concentrating on the decades following the opening of the Karakoram Highway in 1978. Interwoven with the narrative are childhood memories and life stories re-counted by the Pashto speakers interviewed by the author. Their stories provide a voice to the Pashto speaking migrants themselves and give the reader a fascinating insight into their lives.
        Chapter four deals with the dynamics of the Pashtuns' migration process and the patterns of linguistic interactions to be observed among contemporary migrants. The beginning of Pashtun migration to the Northern Pakistan can be dated back to the 19th century. According to their way of life, the Pasthuns of the Northern Areas were divided into two groups: permanent and temporary migrants. Permanent migrants were using their mother tongue mostly in the family domain, whereby the younger generation tended to switch from Pashto to the local dominant language while communicating among themselves each other. Temporary migrants used their mother tongue in all communication situations with other Pashtuns. Urdu was widely known among the migrants and employed by them while communicating with non-Pashto speakers.
        Chapter five deals with the phenomenon of language shift among permanent Pashtun migrants. Similar to the Pashtun core areas, also in the Northern Areas Pashto was a perceived as a strong identity marker. This perception played a key role in the decision of permanent Pashtun migrants to transmit their mother tongue to their children. In the mid-1990s for a majority of permanent Pashtun migrants, most of them living in urban settings, the preservation of their traditional mother tongue was indispensable: A comparatively smaller group of permanent Pashtun migrant families, most of them settled in rural areas, was in the process of giving up Pashto and shifting to the local majority langue.
        An annex contains a political map of the Northern Areas and adjoining regions and a table demonstrating the continuity of the use of Pashto among permanent Pashtun migrants within the family domain.

Con la presente contribución pretendo revisar algunos aspectos teóricos y metodológicos referentes a la definición, a la clasificación y al estudio histórico de las unidades que gran parte de los analistas del discurso denomina “marcadores”. Menciono la dificultad que existe en delimitar las características de estas unidades como “clase de palabras”, dificultad que el análisis histórico del discurso avala. Considero que la perspectiva semasiológica frecuentemente aplicada al estudio de los marcadores, aunque rentable, debe ser ampliada de manera que estas unidades puedan ser descritas desde un enfoque onomasiológico más abarcador. Aplico el modelo funcional propuesto por López Serena y Borreguero (2010, Borreguero y López Serena 2011, López Serena 2011) para estudiar distintas características discursivas de un corpus basado en las traducciones castellanas de algunos de los Coloquios de Erasmo de entre 1527 y 1529 e intento demostrar que la perspectiva funcional produce interesantes resultados en lo que atañe al análisis histórico del discurso

En las siguientes páginas abordaremos diferentes problemas que afectan al estudio de la oralidad y la escrituralidad en la literatura, como la indefinición de algunos términos que se relacionan con estos conceptos; la posibilidad de investigar la oralidad en los textos literarios, siempre teniendo en cuenta los imperativos estilísticos de la época y el peso de la tradición retórica; la necesidad de trabajar con los parámetros comunicativos definidos por Koch y Oesterreicher (2007[1990]: 26-27), con el fin de caracterizar los rasgos lingüísticos de un texto como más próximos a la inmediatez o a la distancia comunicativas, y los factores, debidos a razones puramente creativas y/o también ideológicas, que entran en juego en la traducción de la oralidad de dos fragmentos extraídos de los Coloquios de Erasmo y algunas de sus traducciones castellanas, todas ellas coetáneas (siglo XVI).

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's (2009, 2020) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, languag...

University of Edinburgh undergraduate dissertation, Celtic and Scottish Studies, 2014.

The nominal system of Manx Gaelic has two genders as in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. These partially reflect natural gender (in animate nouns), but inanimate nouns display an arbitrary grammatical gender, only partially predictable by phonetic shape and vague semantic categories. As in other Celtic languages, gender is marked in two ways: (1) agreement inflection, principally initial mutations within the noun phrase marking feminine gender, and (2) pronoun replacement.

It has been observed that grammatical gender in inanimate nouns had lapsed completely or almost completely in the terminal generation of speakers recorded during the twentieth century (Broderick 1984–86 i: 25) (i.e. all inanimate nouns are treated as masculine, and/or initial lenition becomes arbitrary), but scholars have been uncertain as to the degree to which the gender system was preserved in the earlier stages of the language, from the 17th century Manx of Phillips’ prayer book translation down to the last generations of speakers for whom Manx was a full community language with a significant proportion of monoglot and Manx-dominant speakers.

The questions to be answered essentially are as follows: at which stage, if at all, in the history of Manx did grammatical gender break down to be replaced by natural gender, and was it a gradual or a sudden process? Furthermore, if changes are observed, can probable causes be identified?

With some qualifications, the position taken by previous scholars such as Thomson (Thomson 1953: 15) and Broderick (1999: 106, 165) is that the system of grammatical gender in Manx gradually declines throughout the attested history of the language, with feminine marking of inanimate nouns being restricted to a very small class of common nouns, insofar as it is preserved at all, until it reaches a point in the final speakers where all inanimate nouns are treated as masculine. In this dissertation I advance an alternative view, that the grammatical gender system was largely preserved until the mid-nineteenth century, only breaking down significantly in the language of the terminal speakers, for reasons associated with the death of Manx as a community and household language. I present corpus evidence to support this interpretation, and discuss the probable mechanics of the loss of gender in the terminal speakers.

This thesis aims to compare the process of language revitalization and the influence of the community on this process. In the theoretical part, terms such as language death, language revitalization, language vitality, or cultural assimilation are defined and described. The subjects of the comparison are two speech communities: the Wymysorys speech community in Wilamowice (Poland) and the Inari Sámi speech community (Finland). Both communities have been undergoing intensive language revitalization over the last ten years. In the practical part, there is an analysis of community involvement according to the book Language Death (Crystal, 2000).

The article restates and comments on the most common arguments against language maintenance and revitalisation found in popular texts and discussion articles from academic journals. By grouping them and assessing their validity we may better see which objections must be faced and which are based on easily disproven misconceptions. The described counterarguments are divided into four groups and based on the ideas of linguistic natural selection, peaceful death of a language, reductionist approach to the language, and sociopolitical factors. Most of them seem to use overgeneralisations and fail to recognise the deeper causes behind language obsolescence. The most valid, depending on the individual situation, are the arguments based on socio-political reasons. Generalisations and essentialising discourse, however, are also found in the opinions of the proponents of language maintenance. The author claims that the truly universal arguments in favour of language maintenance are in fact only those based on the subjective convictions of the people involved, as all rational arguments can be undermined in certain contexts.

Isleño Spanish diminutive suffixes, found in the conversations of a fluent speaker, create vocabulary with varying degrees of relatedness to their original lexical bases. Not all diminutives are productive: some (-illo, -ete, -uela) are lexicalized; only -ito is used creatively. Semantically, diminutives may indicate small size, but an important function of -ito is pragmatic: it signals the speaker's affection, intensity or emphasis on the word and the phrase in context. The creative use of diminutives in Isleño Spanish demonstrates that although the dialect is endangered, it is not moribund or pragmatically impoverished.

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's (2009, 2020) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, language revival, language ideology, language shift, language contact)*

Published open access at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-in-society/article/continuity-and-hybridity-in-language-revival-the-case-of-manx/FFAC5B3FC9E340F17EA26EBA4A7512D7 under the following creative commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

There are theories that as a language becomes obsolescent, some features of that language begin to erode as the number of speakers decreases. A linguist conducting fieldwork in a moribund language needs to consider how to elicit the most language from their consultant in the time that they have. Terminal speakers of a language will be able to communicate in that language to different levels of fluency. This dissertation looks at three different cases of language death, and in particular, the fluency and knowledge of the last speaker of each of these languages. There are various methods of testing how much a terminal speaker knows, such as looking at their ability to use complex sentences, looking at their vocabulary, and in particular, as Dorian (1977:29-30) suggests, looking at previous studies in order to evaluate how the language has changed. It was found that although different types of terminal speaker can be categorised, it is not possible to generalise how much terminal speakers know of their languages; it varies based on the individual. However, one of the most significant factors affecting how much a terminal speaker knows is the period of time between where they ceased using their language to communicate with other speakers, and the time that they became a consultant of their language.

The paper is devoted to the phenomenon of mother tongue change, which is known as the most common course of language death. The languages under consideration are Domaakí, with ca. 350 speakers in the Nager and Hunza Valleys, and Pashto as spoken by permanent migrants in ca. 150 households scattered all over the Northern Areas (Gilgit-Baltistan). By analysing and comparing the social environment of both speech communities the author attempts to illustrate the importance of the speakers' attitude towards their own mother tongue in the process of language shift.

Yiddish was spoken in pre-war Poland by just under 3 million people (Birnbaum 1979: 41) and thrived as a literary, theatrical, cinematic and political language in addition to being the daily vernacular of the majority of Polish Jewry. Today, a few native speakers of the Polish dialect of Yiddish remain in Poland but are more likely to be found in centres of Jewish culture around the world, such as London or New York. Other varieties of Yiddish continue to be spoken, but in highly specialised (i.e. ethno-religious) contexts. The status of Yiddish as an endangered language worldwide is thus well established (Brenzinger 2007: 2). Given the imminent danger of ‘extinction’ that the language appears to be facing in the twenty-first century, its use in a tokenistic way in American comedy sitcoms might appear counterproductive. This paper explores such use in the face of language endangerment and suggests that such a development is a natu-ral one, given the language’s cultural history and traditional status in Jewish societies (and lately, further afield). It further argues that, from a critical sociolinguistic perspective, the strong presence of the language in the domain of comedy is actually a creative response to language endangerment, which challenges in many ways the assertion that ‘Yiddish is dying.’

The paper was written together with Siôn R. Williams and published in: Asmus, Sabine and Barbara Braid (2014) "Unity in Diversity. Cultural and Linguistic Markers of the Concept", Cambridge: Scholars Publishing. After an overview over major developments in the social history of Welsh, structural weakness in Welsh institutions as well as an overdiversification of registers (whilst the standard is weak) and subsequent language forms are identified as major problems in its maintenance.

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An endangered language is a language that is on the verge of extinction. Kharia, (in some versions Kheria) an Indian language, is classified as a vulnerable language by the UNESCO"s Atlas of the World"s Languages in Danger (2010). Languages die with the physical loss of almost all the speakers of the language because of war, genocide, natural disasters, spread of infectious diseases, or reprisals. Languages die because of economic reasons too. Conquest and colonialism is another cause of language death. Several steps should be taken to protect a language from dying.

Selk’nam is an obsolescent Chonan language, spoken in what is nowadays Tierra del Fuego, in the southernmost territories of the South American Republics of Chile and Argentina. Its people suffered from a progressive decimation, which ended in the last decades of the 20th century when the last fluent speakers of the language passed away. This was not only a great loss in humanitarian terms but a substantive loss of important anthropological, historical and linguistic information which we will not be able to retrieve again.

Unfortunately, the last fluent speakers of the language passed away between the seventies and the eighties, leaving any attempt to write a complete modern scientific description of the language as an unattainable dream. In the case of this language, its sociolinguistic situation as well as its state of description correlate substantially. This situation surprisingly changed in the last decade, when a Selk’nam speaker appeared in the media and the hope for a new description of the language became feasible.

In this talk some characteristics of Selk’nam will be discussed: its very Andean-like phonological system, its grammatical profile, some interesting facts related to its syntax as well as some innovative sociolinguistic phenomena happening in the zone where the language was spoken, what I dub, the “New Selk’nam”.

This study examines schwa deletion and insertion in the Louisiana Regional French (LRF) spoken in Ville Platte, Evangeline Parish, Louisiana. Since stylistic range tends to contract towards an informal register in dying languages (Dressler 1972, Dorian 1977), and other varieties of LRF exhibit reduced register differentiation (Rottet 2001), the investigation tests whether or not there is a relationship between the formality of the speech event and schwa behaviour. The analysis shows that schwa has a highly variable phonetic realization in LRF. Furthermore, instances of deletion reveal that speech register and a word’s status (root or clitic) play a role in schwa deletion. Moreover, environments encouraging schwa epenthesis underline this vowel’s interaction with morpho-syntactic, syllabic and pronunciation constraints. A quantitative analysis of these processes is complemented by an Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1994) analysis.