Language Variation, Spread;

Endangerment &
Revitalization

Week 12/13 (p2)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hale IŞIK-GÜLER

The remainder
of term with
MODULE-2:

-We will also provide

more information about
Data Collection
(Interviews) today!
Language variation and the
spread of global languages
Weber, ch4
Variation
There is a
continuum
• (1) unstable and shifting boundaries of languages between these
(i.e. how languages leak into each other), two types of
(previous lecture) variation, and all
these variation
• (2) “leakage” within a language (today’s topic) types feed into
multilingualism.

• Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages or

varieties.

What are some types of language variation you can talk about?
Language variation
• No two speakers of a language speak exactly in the same way;
• nor does any individual speaker speak the same way all the time.
• Variation is a natural part of human language, and is influenced by
such factors as socio-economic status, region, and ethnicity, etc.

Variation may be at o Phonetic level

WHAT levels? o Phonological level
o Morphological level
o Syntactic level
o Semantic level 5
African-American English
• African-American English (AAE) is the variety spoken predominantly in
the black community in the US and popularized all over the world
through the urban black youth culture of rap and hip hop.

• AAE is characterized by systematic grammatical features such as:

• invariant or habitual be and
• double or multiple negation.

Discussion on AAVE (remember your 146 lectures!)

[Link] (Prof. Ziegler’s students discuss AAVE)
[Link] (lots of examples)
 ..-15

[Link]
VgPl9tQ

XX1
African-American English
• AAVE? BLACK ENGLISH? EBONICS?

• More on its features:

1. Many African-American English speakers do not use –s in third person singular present tense forms
E.g. He go, She like
2. The copula verb to be is absent
E.g. She real nice, He not American
3. There is the use of ‘invariant be’
E.g. She usually be around
4. Singular-plural be variation is missing (We was eatin’)
5. Question inversion, existential it and negativized auxiliary preposition (I asked her where did she do, It’s a
boy in my class name Joey, Doesn’t nobody know that..)
6. Double negation
E.g. I ain’t got no money. The grammar of AAE is as complex and systematic as that of
standard English, and the attacks of language mavens who look upon
AAE as ‘deficient’ or ‘illogical’ are completely ill-founded.
Distribution of African Americans in the
United States
• For ‘AAE’, as with other varieties, there is not
one single monolithic entity but a range of
varieties that depend on both social and
regional factors.

• This is a major difference with standard

English, since standardization always involves
an attempt to stop or slow down linguistic
change, by ‘fixing’ the language in
dictionaries, grammar books and textbooks.

• Due to the standard language ideology (as

discussed in the previous weeks), the standard
variety is also the one that is perceived as the
most uniform and systematic.

XX
Language Contact and Change
A functional perspective: (Matras, 2009)
Possibilities and outcomes of contact
• In language contact situations, two or
more distinct languages or dialects come
into contact with each other either
-- directly through social interaction of the
speakers or
-- indirectly through education, media or
literature.

• Outcomes of such contact include (1)

borrowing, (2) code-switching
(translanguaging), (3) pidgins and creoles,
(4) the adoption of a different (third
language) Lingua Franca, etc.
 Borrowing
The adoption of linguistic elements from
one language (DONOR) into another
(RECIPIENT).
Loanwords in Turkish:
Borrowing can be lexical (both overt and
covert), (the borrowing of words and «Televizyon» (French: télévision)
phrases) or structural (the borrowing of «Trend» (English: trend)
phonological, morphological or syntactic «Perde» (Persian: perde)
patterns). «Kalem» (Arabic: ghalem)
«Semaver» (Russian: sema:ver)
These words are commonly referred to as «Varoş» (Hungarian: város)
loans or loanwords. «Bitter» (German: bitter)
«İskele» (Italian: scala)
Mısır, 2023:
on SMI Vlog (video + blog)

What about Anglicisms? Lets now

take a look at Mısır’s data)
 From (Mısır, 2023)

anksiyete bravo entersan klip prodüksiyon spiritüel

antibakteriyel bronz favori kolajen prosedür spontane
antijen bronzer fiber kolektif prova sprey
antioksidan bronzluk figür kompakt reaksiyon star
aora dambıl fit kondisyon retinol statü
aranje detoks fondöten konfor revize stil
artisan dezenfekte fotoselli konsantre ritüel stok
baget dizayn full konsept sauna toksin
bandana efekt global kontür seans tonik
baz ekstra graffiti koreografi sebun top
blok enjekte kür pigmentasyon skala transparan
kaos popülarite slogan trend
kardiyo potansiyel spesifik vintage
• Gómez Capuz, J. (1997). Towards a typological classification of
linguistic borrowing (illustrated with anglicisms in Romance
languages).
 İnovasyon?
1 inanılmaz güzel oldu ya

<text on the phone:

trying the kiss lash glue liner >

2 aa ben şok
3 bu bir yani inovasyondur
arkadaşlar
 PALET?
1 S1 bir paletini mi temizlesen

2 S1 bir su içsen

3 S2 evet temizliyorum

An example of idiosyncratic transliteration- does it convey the

meaning? What is meant by palet? Is the word invented/borrowed
and understood by the interlocutors mutually? Why? A potential
candidate for the dictionary?
What motivates the borrowing of linguistic
matter? (Matras, 2009)
• The two most frequently cited motivations for structural borrowing are
gaps in the structural inventory of the recipient language, and the prestige
enjoyed by the donor language.
• “The ‘gap’ hypothesis assumes that bilingual or semi-bilingual speakers
notice that one language is in possession of expressive means that do not
exist in the other. In an effort to extend the range of expressive choices
when communicating in the other, the supposedly ‘poorly equipped’
language, they replicate the structure that is available in the ‘better-
equipped’ language.”
• Other view: ‘Gaps’ are therefore not to be interpreted as deficiencies in the
recipient system, but rather as speakers’ attempt to avail themselves of their
full inventory of linguistic resources, at all times and in all contexts of
interaction.
 “Like ‘gap-fillers’, prestige loans can in this way enrich the
lexical inventory of the recipient language.”

• The ‘prestige’ hypothesis assumes that speakers imitate elements of

the speech of a socially more powerful, dominant community in order
to gain approval and social status.
• What this means in practice is that bilingual speakers associate certain
elements within their repertoire with a particular set of contexts in
which these elements are normally used.
• By using those elements in other settings, speakers seek to activate
those associations.
• Unlike cultural loans or ‘gap-fillers’,‘prestige’ loans often have
parallel expressions in the recipient language.
The frequently cited borrowing scale proposed by Thomason
and Kaufman (1988: 74–75) is an attempt to relate the
likelihood of structural borrowing to the
intensity of contact…
How do “semantic domains” have an effect?
(Matras, 2009, p.168)
Code-switching
Other definitions:
Code-switch, code-mix, or code-mesh??
• Codeswitching occurs at sentence or discourse level
• Codemixing takes place at the level of words or morphemes, i.e. the
L1 and L2 are mixed within the same word.
• Both cases imply the transference of linguistic elements from one language to
the other, occurring at the phonological, morphological, grammatical, or
lexical level (Crystal 1997, p. 66).
• Codemeshing is the combination of local, vernacular, or colloquial
varieties of a language used in daily interaction in order to embrace
and articulate a host of local and global ways of being and seeing the
world.
 Monolingual view, CS
and
Translanguaging

DYNAMIC VIEW:
MONOLINGUAL LANGUAGES AS A
VIEW TO
BILINGUALISM UNIFIED BANK OF
RESOURCES
 Translanguaging (Trawsieithu)
Cen Williams (1994)
(a Welsh educator and a language activist)

• Translanguaging is “the ability of multilingual speakers to

shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages
that form their repertoire as an integrated system”
(Canagarajah, 2011, p. 401).
• «Translanguaging is contextualized in the linguistic realities
of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic
practices that transcend the boundaries between named
languages, language varieties, and language and other
semiotic systems» (Li, 2018, p. 9).
• «Named languages are social, not linguistic, objects» (Otheguy,
Garcia, & Reid, 2015, p. 281).
Translanguaging

• Rather than “Codeswitching” a very new movement to look

at this phenomena: Translanguaging!
• Garcia and Wei (as cited in Molina & Samuelson, 2016) think
that translanguaging is different from code-switching.
• Code-switching is seen as the process of changing two
languages, whereas translanguaging is about “the speakers’
construction that creates the complete language
repertoire” (p. 3).
Briefly Translanguaging…
• Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing
different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as
autonomous languages and systems, in order to maximize
communicative potential. (Ofelia García, 2009, p.140)
• Translanguaging is about communication, not about language itself.

There is a BIG difference in researching these areas of

bilingual development as code-switching searches for
“language interference and transfer” while translanguaging
analyses “how bi/multilingual individuals are involved in
their linguistic practice” (Hornberger and Link, 2012, p. 267).
Translanguaging as ability/asset
• For Canagarajah (2011), ‘translanguaging is the ability of multilingual
speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse
languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system’ (p. 401).

• Cook (2008) considers it to be an ability that is part of the

multicompetence of bilingual speakers, whose lives, minds, and
actions are necessarily different from monolingual speakers due to
the simple fact of having two languages coexisting in their minds and
interacting in complex ways that always keep both languages in the
foreground.
Garcia’s video lecture on Translanguaging:
[Link]
k0
• Translanguaging is a holistic conceptualization and a new vision of
languages, speakers, and repertoires (Cenoz, 2017). Practically, it
considers speakers' deployment of their full linguistic repertoire
simultaneously in flexible and creative ways.
• Theoretically, it problematizes the validity of the views which have
conventionally sustained a fixed national language regime which
means we don’t speak a language in the most rigid fixed way but we
invent our idiolect, our own style of speaking a language.
• Sentence Level
• Phrasal Level
• Morphological Level
• Lexical Level
• Phonetic/Phonological
Level

(Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk, 2021)

•Sentence Level:
sana sorucağımızı bilmiyorduk we're sorry my lady.
• Phrasal Level
tamam askım we’ll speak like that bundan sonra
Morphological Level
Neden triggerlandınız [celebrity’s name] Hanım? İngilizcenin
bütün dünyada hypelanmış olması su götürmez bir gerçek.
Üstelik siz de [username] resmi yerine [username] official yazan
da sizsiniz.

Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk, 2021

35
Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk 36
Rank Digital lexis Gloss Token (Rf) Type

1 link hyperlink 142 37

2 story short video post 48 14
3 vlog video blog 31 13
4 influencer social media influencer 30 11
5 fav favorite 17 7
6 like to like a post 13 4
7 affiliate affiliate link 11 1
8 reel reel (short video on Instagram) 10 6
9 YouTuber YouTuber 9 4
10 kod coupon code 8 3
11 DM direct message 7 5
12 emoji emoji 7 3
The organic evolving nature of the diffusion of lexical innovations:
13 mail e-mail - DM or emoji expanded the meaning: like 7 link-lemek, story2 atmak,
14 post shared content
likelamak 6 6
15 bot robot (Internet
- Furtherbot)
translanguaging transform the 6form, function and 2meaning of
linguistic entities. (story, affiliate) Mısır, 2023
Mısır, Hülya & Erdoğan-Öztürk, Yasemin. (2021). Metadiscourses of Turkish-English mixing and
linguistic purism: A gateway to translanguaging. American Association for Applied Linguistics Virtual
Conference 2021.
Translanguaging Practice on Social Media

ama olmaz ki biraz substitute şart

ama 😅
English structures (example at the lexical level)
Turkish structures
The language of
Emoji (Li, 2016) hello bebegim hav ar yu
(example at the phonetic/phonological
level)
Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk, 2021

Li, W. (2016). New chinglish and the post-multilingualism challenge: Translanguaging ELF in China. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 5(1), 1–25.
[Link]
Translanguaging Practice on Social Media
#socialdistancing
#sosyalmesafe
Hashtags (#)
as a translingual #ülkemdesuriyeliistemiyorum
resource
(Erdoğan-Öztürk & Işık-Güler,
2020)
#idontwantsyriansinmycountry

#blacklivesmatter

Erdoğan-Öztürk, Y., & Işık-Güler, H. (2020). Discourses of exclusion on Twitter in the Turkish Context:
#ülkemdesuriyeliistemiyorum (#idontwantsyriansinmycountry). Discourse, Context and Media, 36, 100400.
[Link]
LINGUA FRANCAs
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TWO DIVERSE SPEECH
COMMUNITIES NEED TO COMMUNICATE?
• They find a LINGUA FRANCA!
• Lingua Franca is a language used for
communication between 2 people first/native
language are is different.
• In the world today, the lingua franca is
predominantly ENGLISH.
• the unrivalled instrument of international
communication across national borders in science,
business, aviation, technology, the internet, pop
culture, etc.
Q: Will it always remain this way?
How do languages become a Lingua Franca?
What are some related issues?
Historically,
• Imperialism, Colonialism
• "the system or policy of a nation seeking to extend or retain its authority over other people
or territories"
• Post-colonialism
•… For more on the Spread of English, visit:
[Link]
Currently,
• World Englishes
• Native speakerism/the myth of the native speaker?
• NNEST (pronounced: en-NEST): non-native English-speaking teachers is an
acronym that refers to the growing body of English language teachers who speak
English as a foreign or second language.
Q: What will be the language(s) of the future?
 Whose English? The «Ownership» of English
EIL: English as an International Language
ELF: English as a Lingua Franca

Kachru's
three-circle-
model:

Figure adapted from

Crystal, D.
(1999), The
Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the
English Language.
Cambridge: CUP,
p.107.
Pidgin

• Speakers of mutually unintelligible languages who are brought

together (perhaps by social, economic, or political forces), and
need to communicate with one another develop various ways of
overcoming the barriers to communication. Thus, they create
pidgin languages.

• Pidgin languages are usually made up of mixtures of elements

from all of the languages in contact.

• Pidgins are not grammarless or broken languages!

• Many pidgin languages, regardless of their source languages, share
certain characteristics (phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics).
• Ethnologue currently lists 17 pidgins used aorund the World.
Creole
• Creole languages develop from a pidgin language when it is adopted
as the first, or native language of a group of speakers.

• All creoles seem to be languages that were initially non-native to any

group of speakers and were adopted as first languages by children in
some speech community.
• This process is called nativization (of a pidgin).

• There are currently 92 listed by Ethnologue:

[Link]
Jamaican Creole:
[Link]
Caribbean ‘nation language’ Video Lectures on NL
Part 1: [Link]
(West Indian Creole) Part 2: [Link]

• Language choice in the Caribbean is

complicated by the ethnic mixture or hybridity
of its population.
• With the virtual extinction of indigenous
peoples (mostly Carib and Arawak), the
majority of present-day inhabitants of the
Caribbean are the descendants of slaves or
indentured workers.
• Poets use Caribbean Creole as a way of
disidentifying from standard English and of
challenging monolithic, restrictive conceptions
of identity – whether it is Caribbean or British
identity.
Edward Kamau
Brathwaite
introduces the term
‘nation language’ for
West Indian Creole.
 The
many
Island
French and
English
creoles…
for the slave as for the
present-day inhabitant of
the Caribbean, the use of
standard English/French
can be hegemonic,
whereas the use of
creolized English may be
considered a subversive
act.
Singlish
Singlish
• a variety of English spoken in
Singapore, incorporating elements
of Chinese and Malay.
• Singlish is widespread in
Singapore, but it is valued in very
different ways by the Singapore
government and by its speakers.
• The government started a Speak
Good English campaign in 2000,
with the aim of getting
Singaporeans to use standard
English for purely instrumental
reasons.
Singlish –use or eradicate?
• Standard English, they argue, is needed for
international business and science in this
globalized world.
• As for Singlish, it is looked upon as bad English,
and the government would like to eradicate it.
• However, it has not been very successful in this
attempt, partly because it failed to realize that
one can promote standard English without
having to eradicate Singlish and partly because
it underestimated the strength of the link
between Singlish and Singaporean identity for
many citizens.
 Singlish

Though it is a
working class
variety, it also
has a lot of
‘covert prestige’
as the language
of solidarity
that binds
together
Singaporeans.
[Link]
edu/satocenter/lang
net/definitions/singl
[Link]
• “Singlish is a patchwork patois of Singapore’s state languages — English, Malay,
Mandarin and Tamil — as well as Hokkien, Cantonese, Bengali and a few other
tongues. Its syntax is drawn partly from Chinese, partly from South Asian
languages.”
Pennycook’s (2000):
notion of ideology in relation to six frameworks for
understanding the global role of English…
1. Colonial celebration (English brings all the advantages of a
rich, sophisticated, modern language);
2. Laissez-faire liberalism (everyone should have the choice to
use English as well as other languages in different domains;
the policy of leaving things to take their own course);
3. Language ecology (all languages should be preserved, and
the spread of English threatens this);
4. Linguistic imperialism (English is dominant because of the
power of English-using countries and their institutions);
Pennycook’s (2000):
notion of ideology in relation to six frameworks for
understanding the global role of English…
5. Linguistic human rights (the use of one's language is a
fundamental right, and English threatens it, as Skutnabb-
Kangas, 2000 also argues)
6. Postcolonial performativity (English should be seen in
particular contexts to understand how it is used and who is
empowered by this use)
+Linguistic hybridity: languages constantly change and adapt,
mix and ‘hybridize’…this is only natural. (appropriation)
Verlan

• A linguistic diversity example from within France

• Verlan is a form of French slang that consists of
reversing the syllables in a word. It is actively spoken
in France and words have become so commonplace
that sometimes you can’t even remember what the
correct word is.
• spoken mostly by young people in the banlieues
(suburbs) of Paris and other big cities such as Lille, Lyon
and Marseille.
• Many speakers of Verlan are marginalized youths of
North African origin, referred to as les beurs (Verlan for
Arabs), also spoken by young people of many other
origins (including French).
• Despite all the French state’s
efforts, since the time of the
French revolution, to construct
a homogeneous and
monolingual community, the
reality has been and is that of a
heterogeneous population and
of linguistic diversity.

• Verlan is always
changing.
“With each
generation
Verlan
becomes
more
complex and
strange,
where kids
reverse
already
reversed
words.”
• Doran’s (2004: 119–20) study highlights:
To conclude …
1. Linguistic variation is a characteristic of all languages,
from the smallest to the largest ones.

2. All varieties, whether they are perceived as languages or

not, are both systematic and rule-governed, and leak
into each other, with no clear boundaries between
them.

3. Identity work plays a big part when it comes to choice.

As a follow up,
Why don’t you….

Explore one of the mixed youth languages such as:

• Kanaksprak (Turkish –German) in Germany,
• Sheng (Swahili – English) in Kenya or
• Tsotsitaal (a mix of many languages including Zulu,
Xhosa, Sotho, Afrikaans and English) in South Africa.
Good resources to start reading from:
-Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou (2003)
-Stenström and Jørgensen (2009)
Revitalization of endangered
languages
Ch5, Weber
Discussion point:
• Is this issue “essential” or
“sentimental”?
• Why, why not?
???
• Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not
translate precisely into another language.
• Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories,
songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written
forms.
• With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.

• WHY ELSE?
Why do languages get “endangered”?
More and more languages are endangered in our globalized world. This
is due to two main factors we already discussed:
• 1. the politics of nation-state building, with states typically promoting
one language as the ‘national’ or ‘official’ language, while often
repressing the languages of both indigenous and immigrant minority
groups.
• 2. Due to the spread of global languages such as English with ever
higher instrumental value, there are strong pressures on minority
group members to drop their minority languages and to use instead
the national or official language of the state plus a global language
such as English.
Other
categorical
reasons?:
How many languages?
• It is widely agreed that there are around 7,200 languages spoken in
the world today, but their sizes and distributions vary greatly.
• largest 10 languages each have 100+ million speakers (Mandarin,
Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Japanese)
and together have 2.6 billion speakers (40% of world total)
4% of world’s languages are spoken by 96% of world’s
population, i.e. only 4% of world’s population speaks 96%
of world’s languages so there are many languages that are
very small (50% have less than 10,000 speakers, 25% have
less than 1,000)
L1 speakers:
All languages L1, L2, Lx combined
On the
internet?
Academic
publications?
Language Death
• There have been radical reductions in speaker numbers in the past 60 years for
languages across many regions of the world together with increasing age profiles
of remaining speakers, mostly as a result of language shift to more prestigious
and socio-economically powerful regional or state languages.

• May (2006): it is predicted on present trends that between 20 percent and 50

percent of languages will “die” by the end of the twenty-first century’. (that
would account to 3,500! languages)

• Concern for threatened languages has been combined with recognition of

linguistic and cultural rights of minorities, ethical and political considerations
(history of genocide, land rights etc.) and exercise of political power.
Levels of
endangerment
 Big discrepancy… mending a colonial past only?
• There is a big difference
here between indigenous
minority languages, which
have recently received a lot
of support (especially in
Europe through the EU’s
Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages), and
immigrant minority
languages, which have
received very little support.
[Link] Language rights of indigenous peoples
Article 13 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples states that indigenous peoples have the
It is estimated that one
indigenous language dies every right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future
two weeks. The threat is the generations their languages, oral traditions, writing systems and
direct consequence of literatures. Further, it provides that States shall take effective
colonialism and colonial
practices that resulted in the
measures to protect this right, including through interpretation
decimation of indigenous in political, legal and administrative proceedings. Articles 14 and
peoples, their cultures and 16 state indigenous peoples’ rights to establish their educational
languages
systems and media in their own languages and to have access to
an education in their own language. Indigenous peoples’
• E.g. (also own language rights are also guaranteed under the Indigenous and
initiatives) Native
Hawaiians have Tribal Peoples Convention (No. 169) of the International Labour
promoted Organization. Other relevant international instruments are the
Hawaiian International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
language medium and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among others.
education
For more information
go to:
[Link]
rg/languages-
atlas/[Link]?hl=e
n&page=atlasmap&c
c2=TR
Language Loss/Death

Tevfik Esenç
and Ubykh
language
(Ubıhça) died
in 1992 in
Balıkesir,
Turkey.

More on this last known speaker of the language: [Link]

son-tashyyycysy
A Citizen Science
initiative:

The
Endangered
Languages
Project:

[Link]
dangeredlang
[Link]/
University
of London
(SOAS)

Go to:
[Link]
[Link].u
k/elar/
Endangered
Languages
Archive

Go to:
• [Link]
[Link]/ma
p/
Language Revitalization (efforts)
Rescuing a language from near extinction due to colonialism, expansionism,
assimilationist policy, migration (in diasporic communities)
and more recently… globalization

• more or less successful revitalization of indigenous minority languages:

• Maori in New Zealand or Aotearoa,
• Sámi & Kven in Norway,
• Hebrew in Israel,
• Breton and Corsican in France
•…
Why revitalize? (Olko & Sallabank, 2021, p.10)
A range of social, psychological, and physical categories/stimuli:

(1) connecting with ancestors, the past, and cultural heritage;

(2) healing;
(3) building community;
(4) knowledge and culture;
(5) well-being; and
(6) cognitive benefits.
How can
you
assess
LV?

Language
Vitality
Index
When is Language revitalization the most
successful?
• Language revitalization is most
successful when it is simultaneously:
• promoted by a grassroots movement and
• by the state,
• by international minority rights
organizations.
Maori in New Zealand: a revitalization success
story (?)
• The Maori people are
the indigenous Polynesian
people of mainland New Zealand.

• Māori originated with settlers

from eastern Polynesia, who
arrived in New Zealand in several
waves of waka (canoe) voyages
between roughly 1320 and 1350.
 Maori in New Zealand: a revitalization success
story
• Maori became an official
language of Aotearoa (New
Zealand) – alongside English
– in 1987.
• New Zealand is ‘the only
example where the first
language of an indigenous
people has been made an
official state language’, since
other indigenous languages
such as Sámi in Norway only
have ‘regional official status’.
The Maori example has been such a resounding success
that other communities have adopted the same
teaching and learning philosophy… e.g. Hawai’i-Hawaiian,
e.g. Sámi and Karelian

• After a long period of colonial oppression and assimilationist policies in

education, Maori had become a highly endangered language.
• But the introduction of Maori-medium schooling from the 1980s onwards
has led to a successful revitalization of the language.
• In 1982 the first Maori-medium pre-schools (Te Kohanga Reo ‘language
nests’) were established, largely run by the Maori communities themselves;
rapidly extended to primary level and beyond.
• In 1985, the first Maori-medium primary schools (Kura Kaupapa Maori
‘Maori philosophy schools’) opened, and the first Maori-medium
secondary schools and tertiary institutions followed in 1993–94.
Home language versus school language?
• In spite of all these achievements,
• it is still a moot point whether Maori will be effectively
fully revitalized.
• because of the all-powerful position of English in New
Zealand society,
• it is not clear whether Maori will become (one of) the
home language(s) of many Maori again or whether it will
remain a (mere) school language.
Interest from sociolinguists and
discourse analysts (e.g. Prof. Janet
Holmes):
Please read on from Weber:
• Sámi and Kven in Norway: differential positionings on the success–
failure continuum

• Hebrew in Israel: the costs of revitalization

Revitalization of Hebrew took place at the expense of many other
languages, including such Jewish languages as Yiddish and Ladino,
which were ‘perceived as threats to the revival of Hebrew’.
On the revitalization of Hebrew

• Official documents written in the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how
Hebrew was imposed upon all the people.
• these documents stress the need to eradicate all non-Hebrew newspapers,
• to ban theatre performances in other languages,
• to change people’s personal names into Hebrew ones.
• (even an attempt) to force people to speak Hebrew at home. Home visits
were made to assess people’s proficiency in Hebrew and to identify language
violations.
• In this way, the imposition of Hebrew was accompanied by an
attempt to eradicate all other languages.
After class, look at the following sections from
Weber and identify differences in approach:

• Breton in France: how (not) to standardize

• Corsican and the polynomic paradigm

• Luxembourgish: constructing an endangered language

Q- Strategies adopted- same or different? What are the

after effects?
Extra Resource: Olko & Sallabank (2021)
…
Please research some attempts:
(un)Successful language revitalization
• Which examples have you studied?

• What factors promote language maintenance?

• What are successful revitalization strategies?

• How can the costs of revitalization be minimized?

• Please share your personal findings with us!

Follow up…
• Look at the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger
([Link]
atlas/[Link]?hl=en&page=atlasmap).

• Choose a particular country that you are interested in and an endangered

language in this country.
• Then carry out some research on this language: has there been an attempt
to revitalize it?
• To what extent has it been successful?
• Is the language fully standardized,
• (if not), has there been an attempt to standardize it?
• What have been the costs of revitalization?
Any questions?