ENG 610 Sociolinguistics

Name : Widanti Septiyani

Student Number : 202000010006

Weekly Summary – Week Eleven

LANGUAGE CONTACT 1: Maintenance, Shift and Death (Mesthrie et al., 2009)

A language is a communication tool used by people from different cultures and

backgrounds as a means to convey information. As their social interaction increases, speakers of
different languages consequently interact with one another, particularly people from neighboring
territories. Drawing on this phenomenon, people may use shift and borrowing from other
languages as language strategies by adapting them into their mother tongue’s phonetic and
grammatical system. This phenomenon might happen because of several factors, such as
colonization, the spread of Christianity, technology, modernity, power, and prestige that a
language offers. What becomes a paramount concern is whether people may lose or retain their
mother tongue because of this phenomenon. Anthropological linguists perceive borrowing and
shift as language strategies that enrich a language's registers rather than entirely switching to the
new language. Yet, the death of some ancient European languages, such as Pictish, Etruscan, and
Gothic, has become another linguists’ concern. The fact that indigenous people and their
languages are dying out or being assimilated into modern civilization have caused this
unfortunate fact.
. To retain the mother tongue in the societies, community leaders often attempt to
maintain a language's continuing use to avoid being swamped by terminologies from a more
dominant language. Kloss (1966), as cited in Mesthrie et al. (2009), has pointed out some factors
that may enhance a language’s possibility to survive: (1) presence of higher educated people
speaking the language; (2) relatively large numbers of speakers; (3) a greater similarity between
groups speaking the dominant and dominated languages respectively; and (4) positive attitudes
of the language (p. 249). In addition, Mesthrie et al. (2009) summarize other factors, such as
economic changes, status, demography, and institutional support, that have caused the decline of
a particular language (p. 249).
The phenomenon portrayed above is also relevant to the Indonesian context, where some
people speaking their local languages start using Bahasa Indonesia in their daily conversation. It
 ENG 610 Sociolinguistics

commonly happens in urbanized areas, such as Jakarta, in which people from different regions
live as neighbors. One of the motives that tend to trigger them using Bahasa Indonesia is that
numerous local language varieties sometimes lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding
because of different pronunciations and homonyms. Yet, some people still retain their mother
tongue to some extent, such as Batak people speaking their mother tongue to their family
members at a Bataknese wedding.

(391 words)

References

Mesthrie, et al. (2009). Introducing Sociolinguistics (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.

Critical Reading Questions

1. The fact that people tend to minimize the use of local languages in their social
interactions, particularly in Jakarta, indicates a local language death phenomenon. What
efforts should be made in order to retain the local languages?

2. As a language teacher, what is our role in retaining the mother tongue language? How do
we design language teaching resources and activities to address the language death issue?