Choosing your language: multilingualism and language planning
The focus of Chapter 11 was on variables within a single language, i.e. what is termed microvariation. But in many situations, the rules governing macrovariation, or the selection of one particular language or variety over another, are highly complex and an important part of what a competent speaker needs to ‘know’ in order to function properly in society.
In this chapter we will consider macrovariation from two perspectives: that of the individual, and that of the wider society, whether that be the speech community or the nation-state of which it may form part.
Bilingualism and diglossia
Viewed from the prism of the Anglo-Saxon world, monolingualism for many seems to be the normal state of affairs: we work, play, love, raise families, watch television, read introductory linguistics textbooks and do all the other things that human beings need or want to do through the medium of English, generally without giving a second thought to the language we use. The ‘languages’ menus on English language DVDs not infrequently offer only ‘English’, or ‘English for the deaf or hard of hearing’, as if no other languages were worth bothering about. This state of affairs is not, however, typical of all or even most societies across the globe: probably a majority of the world’s population needs to use more than one language on a regular basis.
An individual’s proficiency in two languages is known as bilingualism (likewise the terms trilingualism or multilingualism are used to denote a speaker’s competence in more than two languages). At the level of the nation state, again multilingualism rather than monolingualism is the norm, though the extent to which individuals within them control more than one language varies considerably. Within Europe, only Portugal and Iceland are generally reckoned to have no significant indigenous linguistic minorities (though, as we saw in Chapter 1, it all depends how one draws the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’). Switzerland has four official languages (French, Italian, German and Romansch); Belgium has three (Dutch, German and French), as does Finland, where Finnish, Swedish and Sami enjoy official status.
Spotlight: Bilinguals
A true bilingual is someone who has been raised from a young age to use two mother tongues and is equally proficient in both: the term does not normally extend to individuals who have an aptitude to learning languages at school or university, or who have lived for a long time in a country where a language other than their mother tongue is used. Such people may in some cases be able to approximate closely to native speaker competence in their new language, but cannot claim to have that language as a mother tongue. Famous English-speaking bilinguals are Richard Burton (Welsh/English), Sandra Bullock (German/English), Charlize Theron (Afrikaans/English) and Mila Kunis (Russian/English).
Leaving aside the languages of recent immigration (around 300 are believed to be spoken in London alone), a patchwork of indigenous minority languages within the United Kingdom reflects historical patterns of settlement and displacement. Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic are still spoken in northern and western peripheral areas to which Celtic peoples were displaced following Anglo-Saxon invasions between the fifth and seventh centuries. Two other Celtic languages have been lost: Cornish, the language of Cornwall, died probably in the early nineteenth century but has since been revived and now has a number of speakers raised as modern Cornish–English bilinguals, while Manx in the Isle of Man died as a mother tongue with its last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, in 1974. In the Channel Islands, which became subject to the Crown after the Norman Conquest, Romance varieties similar to French are spoken by dwindling numbers of speakers: Jèrriais in Jersey; Guernésiais in Guernesey and Serquois in Sark; only a handful of Auregnais speakers now remain on Alderney. Norn, a descendant of old Norse, was spoken in Shetland and Orkney and Caithness until probably the early nineteenth century, following Scandinavian settlement from the ninth century onwards. The appearance of monolingualism in the British Isles therefore belies considerable linguistic diversity.
An important kind of arrangement in multilingual communities involves a functional separation between varieties known as diglossia. The term was first coined by Charles Ferguson in 1959, and originally defined as follows:
DIGLOSSIA is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any section of the community for ordinary conversation.(Ferguson 1959: 435)
Examples of diglossia include classical and spoken Arabic, High German (Hochdeutsch) and Swiss German (Schwyzertütsch) in Switzerland, or katharevousa (‘Church Greek’) and dhimotiki (‘demotic Greek’, or ‘people’s Greek’) in modern Greece. In all these cases, Ferguson argued, the two related varieties continue to co-exist because each serves a particular set of functions. One, which can be labelled the High (H) variety, is used in a range of more formal settings and functions, while the other Low (L) variety is used in more familiar or intimate contexts. Ferguson illustrates this division of labour as follows:
Table 12.1: Functional separation of H and L varieties in diglossia (after Ferguson 1959)
Key idea: Diglossia
Diglossia involves the use of two languages in a community, with a strict functional separation between the High (H) and Low (L) variety.
Case study: Language shift in Oberwart, Austria
After four centuries of stable German/Hungarian diglossia, the Austrian border town of Oberwart saw a decisive shift in favour of the H language, German, in the post-war period, as can be seen in the table below. The implicational scale of female speakers and interlocutors shows increased German use with all interlocutors among younger speakers, with only God still consistently addressed in Hungarian.
Table 12.2: Language choice by age and interlocutor in Oberwart: female informants (full scale in Gal 1978: 6)
Key: G: German; H: Hungarian
Interlocutors: 1 = God; 2 = grandparents and their generation; 3 = parents and their generation; 4 = bilingual government officials; 5 = doctors
The shift in favour of German has been triggered by economic change. While German had become associated with the status of industrial worker, Hungarian was the traditional language of the peasant farmer. Until the Second World War, neither status dominated: while workers often had more disposable income, peasants enjoyed the security of land ownership. The post-war consumer boom, however, greatly improved living standards for salaried workers, undermining the relative prestige of the peasant farmer, whose lifestyle now acquired the negative associations of long hours of toil for relatively little reward.
As the two languages came to symbolize the changing statuses of the two lifestyles, bilingual speakers were able to exploit these associations metaphorically in language selection and code-switching: explaining to a neighbour how to fix a car in Hungarian, for example, might be perceived as a friendly tip, while the same information in German, the language of modernity and sophistication, would be taken as expert advice. A switch from Hungarian to German when reprimanding a child would signal a more serious tone, and indicate that the parent was now demanding compliance.
Language shift in Oberwart has no implications for Hungarian across the border in Hungary, where it is healthy, but in cases where shift leaves a language without native speakers it is appropriate to talk of language death. In most cases, death is slow and follows a period of ‘leaky’ diglossia. Only in extreme circumstances – for example, the extermination of 250,000 speakers of the Tasmanian language in the nineteenth century – does it occur suddenly and not from gradual erosion of its functions. Cornish and Manx, for example, both died because speakers increasingly began to use English in domains formerly reserved for the Celtic language, until eventually bilingual speakers chose to raise their children only in English, leaving the threatened language with no new native speakers. Languages never die out because they are somehow ‘not good enough’: they die because their speakers’ economic or other needs induce them to use a dominant language in more and more domains, leaving the obsolescent language with fewer and fewer functions.
Key idea: Language shift and language death
Breakdown of stable diglossia occurs when the functions of one language are taken over by the other. This can lead ultimately to language shift, or language death in cases where the dying language has no native speakers elsewhere.
REVERSING LANGUAGE OBSOLESCENCE
For linguists, the loss of any language is to be mourned in the same way as a zoologist mourns the loss of a species. Many languages can indeed be likened to ‘endangered species’: only around 10 per cent of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages are thought sure to survive to the end of the twenty-first century. For activists, too, the loss of a language represents a loss of cultural heritage which must be resisted.
Arresting the decline of a language or language variety is known as language revitalization, and often begins with demands for its recognition by a nation state and for the granting of language rights to its speakers, for example the right to be educated or tried in that language in a court of law, or merely to have it included in the school curriculum. Noteworthy language revitalization success stories include Catalan, suppressed for decades under Franco in Spain, but now a first language for most Catalans (almost all of whom also speak Spanish), and enjoying co-official status with the national language in Catalonia, and Welsh, which has stabilized after years of decline.
All too often, however, activists face an uphill battle. Firstly, by the time a language has become threatened, both it and its speakers have generally become stigmatized as ‘backward’ or ‘old-fashioned’, while the dominant language is perceived to symbolize modernity by virtue of assocation with socially favoured groups. To speak the threatened language is then to identify with qualities which mainstream society presents as undesirable, reinforcing these negative associations in what quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A second major problem is the lack of a standard or prestige variety. As we shall see below, standard languages tend to emerge because they are associated with a prestige or elite group, but in the case of a threatened language, those who would form such a group are generally among the first to abandon it as they rise in society.
The absence of a recognized standard removes normative pressure, leaving the language to fragment into microdialects, which are either mutually incomprehensible or, equally importantly, perceived to be so by speakers themselves, prompting recourse to the dominant language as a lingua franca. This in turn means that attempts to produce a standard language are less likely later on to be supported by the speakers themselves. This has important consequences, because resources are generally too limited to support preservation of a multiplicity of obsolescent microdialects.
Activists may well see promotion of a standard variety as the best route to preserving a language, but a standard created artificially by intellectuals (e.g. Breton: see Case study below), may well encounter resistance, as indeed might a standard variety created on the basis of regional criteria, as in Ireland, where a standard Irish was based largely on Connacht usage, a central variety seen to bridge north and south. A final option is polynomia, i.e. a multiplicity of norms: in effect ‘anything goes’. This approach appears to have worked reasonably well in Corsica, an island community where linguistic and physical boundaries coincide, and internal communications are good enough for most Corsican speakers to be aware of other variants, but it would not appear a practical option in Brittany or in Gaelic-speaking Scotland, where dialectal fragmentation is coupled with isolation.
Case study: Standardizing a threatened language: Welsh and Breton
Welsh and Breton are Celtic languages spoken in the west of Britain and France respectively, both of which have struggled against more powerful and prestigious national languages. While Welsh has long been subject to dialectal fragmentation, it does at least have a recognized standard variety as a result of two historical factors. The first was the bardic tradition of coming together in an eisteddfod (literally ‘sitting’), for singing and poetry recital, in which the bards from different parts of Wales formed a spontaneous literary koiné (see Chapter 13), or mixed dialect, by selecting the forms most comprehensible to the widest range of speakers, rather than highly localized ones. This koiné became the basis for an early translation of the Bible into Welsh in 1588, and laid the foundations for a standardized language which was widely accepted, and is used in broadcasting, Welsh medium education and for other official purposes within Wales, which, notably since the creation of the Welsh Assembly in 1999, has been keen to promote Welsh-English bilingualism in the Principality.
In Brittany, however, where the Breton language was officially suppressed by the French Republic as a matter of post-Revolutionary national policy, no such standardization occurred, and the use of Breton became more an expression of localized identity at the level of the village than a ‘national’ variety for the Celtic peninsula. Attempts to create a standard have therefore been based on ‘top down’ efforts from activists, favouring either forms perceived to be the most widely understood (and thereby discriminating against the most divergent varieties) or those seen to be ‘pure’ Celtic forms rather than loans from other languages. The resulting hybrid appears to have pleased no one: a small minority of children are schooled in Breton-medium Diwan schools, but return home often to non-Breton-speaking parents, and grandparents whose ‘village’ Breton diverges so far from standard variety that it is, to all intents and purposes, a foreign language to them.
Language standardization
A variety is then selected as a standard (competing varieties might no doubt be selected by different parts of the community, yet only one of them might become the standard in the long run); this variety is now accepted by influential people, and then diffused geographically and socially by various means (official papers, the educational system, the writing system, discrimination of various kinds, both direct and indirect, against non-standard speakers).(Milroy & Milroy 2012: 22)
While for linguists ‘all languages are equal’, it is certainly not the case that all languages enjoy equal prestige. In developed societies, a variety of high status, taught in schools and generally used for H functions, is known as a standard language, and the process by which it emerges and develops is called standardization. In his famous 1966 model, Einar Haugen saw standardization in terms of four interconnected processes, two social (selection of norms and acceptance) and two linguistic (elaboration of function and codification).
Selection of norms refers to the emergence within a speech community of a variety perceived to be superior to others. This variety begins as a consequence to acquire a wide range of roles befitting its new status: this is known as elaboration of function, and may require additional resources to be acquired, for example via lexical borrowing. This may in turn lead to calls for codification of the language, i.e. the setting out of clear rules for correct usage. There is thus a constant tension between elaboration, the goal of which is maximal variation in function, and codification, which strives for minimal variation in form (ideally a single grammatical, phonological or lexical variant deemed ‘correct’ for each function).
Finally, a standard language, if it is not to be dismissed as dead, must have a body of users. Acceptance of the norm, even by a small but influential group, is part of the life of the language. Any learning requires the expenditure of time and effort, and it must somehow contribute to the well-being of the learners if they are not to shirk their lessons. A standard language that is the instrument of an authority, such as a government, can offer its users material rewards in the form of power and position. One that is the instrument of a religious fellowship, such as a church, can offer its users rewards in the hereafter.(Haugen 1966: 109–10)
The last process, acceptance, involves recognition – even by those who prefer not to use it in everyday life – that the standard variety enjoys higher status than others and is appropriate for use on formal occasions. Haugen’s four processes are well illustrated by the standardization of English, to which we now turn.
Key idea: Haugen’s model
Haugen’s standardization model involves four processes: two social (selection of norms and acceptance) and two linguistic (elaboration of function, codification).
THE EMERGENCE OF STANDARD ENGLISH
One consequence of the Norman conquest of 1066 was to make England a triglossic nation. The new Norman ruling class spoke a language similar to French, which had developed from the Latin spoken by Roman settlers in Normandy, and had been influenced by subsequent contact with Norsemen in the seventh and eighth centuries. This is called Norman French – or, with specific reference to varieties spoken in England, Anglo-Norman. By virtue of its association with the small but powerful ruling élite, Anglo-Norman became the prestige spoken language of England for at least two centuries, with Latin also enjoying prestige as a language of education, writing and religious practice.
English at this time was very much the ‘poor relation’ of the three in terms of prestige, and this lowly status of English post-Norman conquest finds echoes in the modern English lexicon. When people say: ‘He uttered an Anglo-Saxon expression’ as a euphemism for ‘he swore’, they do so with good reason: much of our modern earthy or taboo vocabulary carries the stigma of low-status English in medieval England, while its socially acceptable equivalents have generally been borrowed from Norman French. The social divide between the new ruling class and the subjugated English is also evident elsewhere in the lexicon. Pork, mutton and beef, delicacies available only to the Norman-speaking élites in the Middle Ages, are terms of Anglo-Norman origin, but the names of the animals which provide them, pig, sheep and cow, all come from Anglo-Saxon, the language of the farmers who produced the meat for the rulers’ table.
By the end of the thirteenth century, however, English had risen from its lowly status to become the favoured language within England, and Anglo-Norman was in decline. The factors favouring English over its prestigious rivals were, of course, social and economic rather than linguistic. For all its prestige as a lingua franca, classical Latin was a dead language, which had never in any case been widely spoken in Britain at the time of Roman occupation (first to fifth centuries AD). To learn Latin required an expensive education and/or a clerical background, and a significant investment in time. Anglo-Norman, on the other hand, was the living language of a very small élite, deprived of their continental lands after the fall of Normandy to Spain in 1204 and forced to focus on their English possessions, and needing to work with – and increasingly marry – the numerically superior English-speaking population. In addition to its numerical advantage, English gained increasingly in prestige with the emergence of a growing and ever more prosperous anglophone mercantile class.
As the English experience shows, selection of norms is a continuous process, in which the relative statuses of languages can change quite radically. English was now emerging as a prestige language, but which variety of English would be selected as the standard? The variety which emerged as ‘first among equals’ in fifteenth-century England was the east Midlands dialect spoken in and around London, the prestige of which was boosted by Thomas Caxton, England’s first printer, who selected it for publication. Caxton discusses the motivation for his choice in the Preface to his Eneydos (a translation of the Aeneid). He first laments the rapidity of change, and diverse nature of the English language:
And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used and spoken whan I was borne (…) And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother
His selection of the emergent London English koiné, infused with features from northern and midland dialects as the capital became a magnet for migrants, was merely a reflection of the socio-linguistic reality that the English of educated people within the London–Oxford–Cambridge triangle was already perceived as a desirable speech norm. Equally importantly, from the perspective of a publisher needing to sell books, it was a dialect that could be readily understood even outside that zone.
Case study: Anglo-Norman in modern Britain
Language shift happens by gradual replacement of one language by another in all of its functions. In England, the H language functions gradually shifted from Anglo-Norman to English over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but Anglo-Norman retains some vestigial functions even today.
Towns associated with the Cinque Ports signpost this historical status in Anglo-Norman, and the highest order of chivalry within the British honours system, the Royal Order of the Garter, which dates from 1348, has an Anglo-Norman motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense (‘Evil be to him who evil thinks’).
Figure 12.1: Order of the Garter
When the British government presents proposals for Royal Assent, the responses on behalf of the Monarch are still given in Anglo-Norman, for example: ‘La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult’ (The Queen thanks her good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so) or ‘La Reyne/Le Roy le veult’ (The Queen/King wills it).
Once a standard variety had been selected, elaboration of function soon followed as English replaced Anglo-Norman as the language of record and of government, and increasingly ousted Latin from its pre-eminent position as the language of education. To fulfil its new roles, English borrowed extensively, notably between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Norman and central French, Greek and Latin.
Expansion of English predictably brought calls for codification, including proposals in the eighteenth century by the author Jonathan Swift, among others, for the establishment of an Academy along the lines of the Italian Accademia della Crusca or the French Académie Française to serve as an arbiter for ‘correct’ usage. These were impractical, but this period saw a profusion of prescriptive grammars and the first authoritative dictionary, Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. This remained the pre-eminent reference work on the English lexicon until publication of the Oxford English Dictionary nearly 150 years later. It is this codified variety of English, often referred to as the ‘Queen’s’ or ‘King’s’ English which became accepted as the variety taught in England’s public (i.e. private and exclusive) schools, and later used by the BBC and other public institutions.
The norms of standard English are not fixed, but constantly contested and subject to change. Lexical items such as gay or wicked have changed their meanings in the last 30–40 years, and pronunciations deemed unacceptable by the BBC in the immediate post-war years have become standard. Even RP users, for example, now tend to use glottal stops in preconsonantal position (e.g. football [fɷbɔ:ɫ], fortnight [fɔ:naIt]), and the CAT vowel has now lowered to \[a] from \[æ]. A good way to stir up controversy is to say the word controversy on British broadcast media: its pronunciation provokes a flurry of animated comment from the self-appointed guardians of the language, some convinced that the first syllable should be stressed (CONtroversy), others equally adamant that the stress should fall on the second (conTROVersy). All this tends to confirm the suggestion by Lesley and James Milroy in Authority in Language that standardization is best seen as an ideology, in which the ideal of one correct form for one meaning is never actually achieved.
Case study: French, English and the ‘Allgood’ law
French has borrowed extensively in recent years from English, and examples are not hard to find: le fast food, le self-service, le showbusiness, people, la musique funky. But these loan words have not been universally welcomed. For many French politicians, these Anglo-Saxon incursions represent a threat to the French language, and indeed to the French way of life, and have prompted legislation. The Bas-Lauriol law of 1975 proscribed the use of non-approved loans in certain contexts, notably in tendering for public contracts and in broadcast media, but foundered (ironically enough in Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ year, 1984) over the prosecution of a Paris furniture salesman, Hugues Steiner, for selling his merchandise from a place he called Le Showroom and not La Salle d’Exposition as required. The prosecution failed, and Steiner, an Auschwitz survivor, publicly compared what he saw as attempts to shackle his free expression to the language purification policies followed by Nazi Germany.
A more ambitious law, passed in 1994 by the then Culture minister Jacques Toubon (inevitably dubbed ‘Monsieur Allgood’ in the French popular press), proved equally controversial. Parties of the right and far left, for different reasons, approved the measure, but objections from centrists and the Socialist party were upheld by France’s Constitutional court, on the grounds that the constitutional right to free speech could not be maintained if the state dictated the words in which it could be expressed. This left an awkward legal limbo in which public sector employees were obliged to use the prescribed terms, but restrictions were not extended to the private sphere. As Rodney Ball (1997: 214) points out, this means that a car salesman may vaunt the advantages of un airbag, but the official from the ministry of transport checking the specification of the same vehicle must refer to un coussin gonflable.
Language planning
For a number of reasons, intervention by the state in linguistic matters may be perceived to be necessary or desirable: this is called language planning. As we saw above, few societies are genuinely monolingual, and there is often a mismatch between national and linguistic boundaries. Deciding which language(s) should be recognized and accorded special status, i.e. status planning, can have important resource implications, particularly in highly multilingual countries such as Papua New Guinea, where over 800 languages are spoken, and can be fraught with practical and political difficulties. There may be good reasons why a vehicular language, i.e one which serves as a lingua franca, may not sit well as a national language. The perhaps surprising status planning solution adopted in Cameroon, a country of at least 200 languages, was to grant official status to the two former colonial languages, English and French, rather than choose from among 200 indigenous varieties.
Corpus planning involves decisions about what does and does not belong in a language which has been accorded special status; it may also involve decision-making with respect to a writing system, or correct spelling. In some cases, a language is regulated by an official body such as the Accademia della Crusca for Italian, or the Académie Française for French (even the Frisian language of the north-west Netherlands has had an academy since 1938), or by government itself. Demands for a regulatory body often reflect genuine fears that an uncontrolled language will change too rapidly, with the result that a document drafted today will be incomprehensible in a few decades. But corpus planning may also be a proxy for other political ends, as for example in the Nazis’ attempts to ‘purify’ the German language of French loan words. France has passed two laws in the post-war period aimed at limiting the use of franglais, or recent English loan words (see Case study on p. 260), but neither has been conspicuously successful.
Key ideas: Language planning
Language planning is intervention by the state or public bodies in linguistic matters.
• Status planning concerns the granting of favoured or ‘official’ status to one or more varieties, e.g. as a national language for education purposes.• Corpus planning involves selection of items for inclusion in the ‘official’ or ‘standard’ language, and the fixing or modernization of orthography.
PERSONALITY AND TERRITORY PRINCIPLES: BELGIUM
Multilingual nation states have generally framed language policies according to one of two principles. The Personality Principle allows citizens to choose their language in all circumstances, while the Territory Principle requires public use of a single language in a given area, and offers services only in that language.
Figure 12.2: Bilingual street signs in Brussels
Unusually, Belgium applies both principles. In officially bilingual Brussels, street names and all public institutions are given in both official languages, French and Dutch, and all public services must by law be provided in both languages. Outside the capital, however, the Territory Principle applies, according to which French-speaking Belgians are required to use Dutch in the neerlandophone zone and vice-versa, with no official accommodation to the other language in either case.
Belgium’s chequered linguistic history shows that neither principle, even when sensitively applied, is without difficulties. Dutch speakers resent the fact that French now dominates in the capital, a city squarely in the Dutch-speaking zone. They also complain of the tache d’huile (oil slick) effect, in which Brussels-based francophones take residence in officially Dutch-speaking suburbs, and turn them into de facto francophone areas. French speakers, on the other hand, resent being required to use Dutch in areas where they have become the majority language group.
Figure 12.3: Linguistic divisions in Belgium
Matters came notably to a head in the 1980s following the election of José Happart as bourgmestre (mayor) of the small town of Fourons/Voerons (pop. 4,000). Although designated as Dutch-speaking in the 1920s, Fourons had become a majority francophone community, and Happart, elected largely by francophone speakers, was unable, or unwilling, to take a Dutch language test as the law required. This provoked a constitutional crisis, and a lengthy political stand-off which was resolved by some rather messy compromises, in which Happart was allowed to serve as ‘first alderman fulfilling the functions of mayor’ (see Ball 1997: 35).
Key idea: Personality and Territory Principles
In multilingual states, the Personality Principle enshrines the right of a citizen to use whichever language he/she chooses, while the Territory Principle recognizes only one language in a given area.
Fact-check
[1](answers.mdx#rfn12-1) What does diglossia require?
State language planning
Two languages on equal footing
A strict functional separation between two languages
Widespread individual bilingualism
[2](answers.mdx#rfn12-2) When does a language die?
When diglossia ‘leaks’
When its last native speaker dies
When the state withdraws its official status
When it loses prestige
[3](answers.mdx#rfn12-3) Minority language activists are often hampered by what?
The absence of a standard variety for the threatened language
Negative associations of the threatened language
Dialectal fragmentation
All of the above
[4](answers.mdx#rfn12-4) What does the territory principle state?
Services in a given area must be provided in all the major languages spoken by its inhabitants
Only one language is recognized as official in a given area
Individuals are free to use whichever language they wish in a given area
Monolingualism should be actively promoted in a given area
[5](answers.mdx#rfn12-5) Why does language shift generally happen?
Economic or social pressures make one language become more prestigious than another
One language simply isn’t good enough
A hostile government tries to eradicate linguistic diversity
A language loses state support as a result of pressures on resources
[6](answers.mdx#rfn12-6) What does elaboration of function frequently lead to?
The writing of dictionaries
Lexical borrowing from other languages
A perception that one variety of a language is ‘superior’
Competition between varieties
[7](answers.mdx#rfn12-7) What does corpus planning involve?
Deciding which language is to be given official status
A language purification policy
Creating a regulatory body, for example a language academy
Deciding what counts as acceptable or ‘standard’ for spoken and/or written purposes
[8](answers.mdx#rfn12-8) Which of these situations is likely to be unstable?
Diglossia with bilingualism
Diglossia without bilingualism
Bilingualism without diglossia
Neither bilingualism nor diglossia
[9](answers.mdx#rfn12-9) Which of these is not a standardization process as defined by Haugen?
Status planning
Selection of norms
Codification
Acceptance
[10](answers.mdx#rfn12-10) When is situational code-switching likely to occur?
When speakers have to switch language to make themselves understood
When bilingualism is common, and speakers can exploit the symbolic associations of the varieties involved
When the personality principle applies, and speakers may use the language they prefer
When language shift is taking place
Dig deeper
R. Fasold, The Sociolinguistics of Society (Blackwell, 1990), esp. Chapters 1, 2 & 7–10
C.A. Ferguson, ‘Diglossia’ (1959), Word 15: 325–40
J. Fishman, ‘Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism’ (1967), Journal of Social Issues 23 (2): 29–38
S. Gal, ‘Peasant men can’t get wives: language change and sex roles in a bilingual community’ (1978), Language in Society 7: 1–16
Also: Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria (Academic Press, 1979)
E. Haugen, ‘Dialect, language, nation’ (1966), American Anthropologist 68: 922–35; reprinted in J.B. Pride and J. Holmes, Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings (Penguin, 1972)
M. Jones and I. Singh, Exploring Language Change (Routledge, 2005), Chapters 4–6
R. Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (6th edition, Blackwell, 2010), esp. Chapters 4, 14 & 15
On Breton, see:
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, special issue 223 (September 2013), ‘Breton: The postvernacular challenge’