I Kadek Dony Suantika

1001305057

Language Maintenance & Shift and Factors Contributing To

It,
Language Death, Loss & Decay
1. Language Maintenance & Language Shift
There are possibilities language maintenance and language shift to be
happened when one language meets the other. It has to do with these three
conditions; the maintenance of a given language, its displacement by
another language and language transfer or language replacement (which
language shift sometimes referrers to).

Migrant minorities

Pressure from the host society made language shift is the indicator of
successful assimilation between languages. We may take an obvious
example of language shift process from migrant family cases. The language
shift of 2nd generation immigrants is L1 monolingual (used by the immigrant
family), L2 monolingual (used by people in the host country or used by the
local majority), and then the second generation will be able to speak
bilingual L1 and L2.

Non-migrant communities

Language shift due to political, economical and social changes can occur
in a community, and as a result linguistic may change too. For example, in
Oberwart, an Austrian town on the border of Hungary, the community has
been shifting gradually from Hungarian to German for some time. They use

two languages, Hungarian for talk to each other and with outsiders, they use
German. When industrial revolution came, the functions of German
expanded. German became the high language. It is used in most public
places such as: school, official transactions, and economic advancement.
Hungarian was low language and it just used at home and for friendly
interactions reason between people.

Migrant majorities

When the local minorities meet the migrant majorities, language shift also
appeared. This is happened under some circumstances. For example is
colonization. When colonial powers invade other countries their languages
often became dominant. When language shift occurs, it is almost always shift
towards the language of the dominant powerful group. Language shift could
occur when one primary indigenous language is used.
2. Factors Contributing to It
Factors contributing to language shift: Economic, social, and political
factors.

Demographic factors large numbers of speakers of the same L1 living

together;
Occupational factors working with fellow speakers of the L1, with

restrictive socio-economic mobility;

Educational factors e.g. official provision of the L1 as a medium of
instruction; social networks and group attitudes about the L1 as an ethnic

symbol
Psychological attachment to the L1 for self-identity.

3. Language Death, Loss & Decay

Language loss is an overarching term which includes both language shift
and language attrition. The distinction is Language shift is often investigated

in several generations and usually refers to an intergenerational and group

process. Language attrition usually refers to decreasing competence in the
mother tongue of individual speakers (Myers-Scotton 2002).
Loss can be seen in:

Form - what word sounds like or is spelled

Position - types of words occurring before and after--patterns in which

word occurs (collocations)

Function - where word is likely to be used (appropriateness)--frequency

of occurrence

Meaning - association with other words with similar meaning, forgetting

meaning of word, or forgetting word with a specific meaning

Language death means the end or extinction of a language in term of

linguistic. A language is considered to be dead when it has no native speaker

anymore. When all people of a language die, usually the language dies too.
Its called endangered languages. Distinctions are commonly drawn between
an endangered language (one with few or no children learning the language)
and an extinct language (one in which the last native speaker has died).
Language death occurs in unstable bilingual or multilingual speech
communities as a result of language shift from a regressive minority
language to a dominant majority language. " (Wolfgang Dressler, "Language
Death." 1988)
Sometimes a community takes deliberate steps to revitalize their
language in which they became aware firstly that theirs is in danger of
getting disappear. Language revival can be shown from the community
attitude, like the strong will of the speakers who want to revive the language
and their reason for doing so.