Bilingualism and Bilingual

Education
PRAYER
Come, Holy Spirit, Divine Creator, true source of light and
fountain of wisdom! Pour forth your brilliance upon my
dense intellect, dissipate the darkness which covers me,
that of sin and of ignorance. Grant me a penetrating mind
to understand, a retentive memory, method and ease in
learning, the lucidity to comprehend, and abundant grace in
expressing myself. Guide the beginning of my work, direct
its progress, and bring it to successful completion. This I
ask through Jesus Christ, true God and true man, living and
reigning with You and the Father, forever and ever. Amen.
 CHAPTER 3
Languages in Society
 TOPICS
• Diglossia
• Endangered Languages
• Language Planning
• Language Shift and Language
Maintenance
• Language Decline and Death
STATISTICS
STATISTICS
 INTRODUCTION
• Bilinguals are present in every country of the world, in every social class and in all age groups.
• The bilingual population of the world is growing as international travel, communications and
mass media, emigration and a planetary economy create the global village.
• People who speak two or more languages usually exist in networks, communities and sometimes
in regions. People who speak a minority language within a majority language context may be said
to form a speech community or language community.
• The movement and development in language use of a minority language often moves downward.
A language minority is rarely stable in its size, strength or safety.
• The rapid growth of information (e.g. across the World Wide Web) and inter-continental travel
has meant that language communities are rarely if ever stable. Some languages become stronger
(e.g. English); other languages tending to decline, even die. Some languages thought to be dead,
may occasionally be revived (e.g. Manx in the Isle of Man).
 DIGLOSSIA
• Diglossia is used to describe and analyze two languages existing together in a society in a
relatively stable arrangement through different uses attached to each language.
 DIGLOSSIA
• Fishman (1980) combines the terms bilingualism and diglossia to
portray four language situations where bilingualism and diglossia may
exist with or without each other.
 DIGLOSSIA
• Diglossia and Bilingualism together
The high language is used for one set of functions, the low language for a separate
set of functions. For example. the high language is used for education and
government; the low language is used in the family and local neighborhood.
• Diglossia without bilingualism
There will be two languages within a particular geographical area. One group of
inhabitants will speak one language, another group a different language. One
example is Switzerland where, to a large extent, different language groups (German,
French, Italian, Romansch) are located in different areas. The official status of the
different languages may be theoretically equal. Fluent bilingual speakers of both
languages may be the exception rather than the rule (Andres, 1990).
 DIGLOSSIA
• Bilingualism without diglossia
Most people will be bilingual and will not restrict one language to a specific set of purposes.
Either language may be used for almost any function. Fishman (1972, 1980) regards such
communities as unstable and in a state of change. Where bilingualism exists without diglossia,
the prediction is that the majority language will become even more powerful and extend its use.
The other language may decrease in its functions and decay in status and usage.
• Neither bilingualism nor diglossia
One example is where a linguistically diverse society has been forcibly changed to a relatively
monolingual society. In Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the native languages have been
exterminated. A different example would be a small speech community using its minority
language for all functions and insisting on having no relationship with the neighboring majority
language.
 DIGLOSSIA
• The boundaries that separate one language from another are never permanent. Neither
a minority language community nor the uses that community makes of its low/minority
language can be permanently compartmentalized. Even with the territorial principle (a
language being given official status in a specific geographical area), the political and
power base of the two languages changes over time. The territorial principle occurs
when language rights or laws apply to a specific region.
• In contrast, the personality principle applies when status to the language is given to
individuals or groups wherever they travel in a country (Paulston, 1997).
• Asymmetrical principle as conceived by its Canadian advocates (e.g. in Quebec), the
principle gives full rights to minority language speakers and less rights to the speakers of
a majority language. This is a form of positive discrimination, seeking to discriminate in
favor of those who are usually discriminated against.
 ENDANGERED LANGUAGES
• The languages of the world are rapidly declining in number with predictions of 50-90% of the
world’s languages dying or near death in the next century.
• Evolution, social and political factors, power, prejudice, discrimination, marginalization, and
subordination are some of the causes of language decline and death.
• Bases of argument on language extinction (Krauss, 1995, p. 4):
a. 50% of the world’s languages are no longer being reproduced among children.
b. An additional 40% are threatened or endangered. Economic, social, and political change is
one such threat.
c. As few as 600 languages (10%) may survive, although Krauss (1995, p. 4) believes this is
unrealistic.
d. If 90% of the world’s language are vulnerable, language planning is urgently required for
language survival.
ENDANGERED LANGUAGES
 ENDANGERED LANGUAGES
• The world’s language and cultural diversity is endeangered.
• Arguments on the importance of retaining language diversity:
a. Diversity is essential - Diversity contains the potential for adaptation. It is directly related to satbility;
variety is important for long-term survival.
b. Languages express identity - Identity provides the security and status of a shared existence.
c. Languages are repositories of history - Languages provide a link to a personalized past, a means to
reach the archive of knowledge, ideas and beliefs from past.
d. Languages contribute to the sum of human knowledge - Language varieties provide a rich mosaic.
Different languages contain different understandings of people as individuals and communities, different
values and ways of expressing the purpose of life, different visions of past humanity, present priorities and
our future existence.
e. Language are interesting in themselves - Each language has different sounds, grammar and vocabulary
that reveal something different about linguistic organization and structure.
ENDANGERED LANGUAGES
 LANGUAGE PLANNING
• The solution to avoiding language death involves language planning.
• Language planning also callled language engineering, refers to
“deliberate effort to influence the behavior of others with respect to
the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their language
codes” (Cooper, 1989, p. 45). This includes:
a. Acquisition planning - home and education
b. Status planning - key institutions
c. Corpus planning - standardization and modernization
 LANGUAGE SHIFT AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE
• Minority language are in a constant state of change. Such language
shift may be fast or slow, upwards or downward, but never absent.
• Language shift - in the language planning literature, this refers to a
downward language movement. The last stage of language shift is
called language death.
• Language maintenance - refers to relative language stability in
number and distribution of its speakers, its proficient usage by
children and adults, and its retention in specific domains.
• Language spread - concerns an increase - numerically, geographically
or functionally - in language users, networks and use (Cooper, 1989).
 LANGUAGE SHIFT AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE
• Factors that create language maintenance and shift according to Conklin and Lourie (1983):
 LANGUAGE SHIFT AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE
• Factors that create language maintenance and shift according to Conklin and Lourie (1983):
 LANGUAGE SHIFT AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE
• Factors that create language maintenance and shift according to Conklin and Lourie (1983):
 LANGUAGE DECLINE AND DEATH
From studies:
Susan Gal (1979) studied in detail the replacement of Hungarian by
German in the town of Oberwart in eastern Austria. After 400 years of
relatively stable Hungarian–German bilingualism, economic, social and
family life became moreGerman language based. Using an anthropological
style, Gal (1979) studied theprocess of language decline. For Gal (1979) the
issue was not the correlates oflanguage shift, but the process. Gal (1979)
showed how social changes (e.g. industrialization and urbanization) change
social networks, relationships between people, and patterns in languageuse
in communities. As new environments arise with new speakers, languages
take on new forms, new meanings and create new patterns of social
interaction.
 LANGUAGE DECLINE AND DEATH
From studies:
Nancy Dorian (1981) carried out a detailed case study of the decline of Gaelic in east
Sutherland, a region in the north-east Highlands of Scotland. In the history of the region, English and
Gaelic co-existed with English generally being the ruling language and the ‘civilized’ language. Gaelic
was regarded more as the ‘savage’ language of lower prestige. In this region of east Sutherland, the
last two groups to speak Gaelic were the ‘crofters’ (farmers of a small amount of land) and the
fishing community. Dorian (1981) studied the fishing community who had become a separate and
distinct group of people in a small geographical area. Surrounded by English speaking communities,
these fisher-people originally spoke only Gaelic and later became bilingual in English and Gaelic. The
fisher-folk thought of themselves, and were thought of by their neighbors, as of lower social status.
They tended to marry within their own group. When the fishing industry began to decline, the Gaelic
speaking fishing-folk began to find other jobs. The boundaries between the Gaelic speakers and the
English speakers began to crumble. Inter-marriage replaced in-group marriage, and ‘outside’ people
migrated to the east Sutherland area. Over time, the community gave up its fisher identity and the
Gaelic language tended to decline with it.
 LANGUAGE DECLINE AND DEATH
For John Edwards (1985, 1994a), language shift often reflects a
pragmatic desire for social and vocational mobility, an improved
standard of living, a personal cost–benefit analysis. This provides a
different slant on the language garden analogy. One answer to the
environmentalist who wishes to preserve a garden of great beauty is
that, when the priority is food in the stomach and clothes upon the
back, ‘you can’t eat the view’. Sometimes, there may be a gap between
the rhetoric of language preservation and harsh reality.
 CHAPTER 4
Language Revival and
Revitalization
 TOPICS
• A Model of Language Shift and Vitality
a. Status Factors
b. Demographic Factors
c. Institutional Support Factors
• Language Revival and Reversal
a. Assumptions of Reversing Language Shift
b. Steps in Reversing Language Shift
c. Limits and Critics
INTRODUCTION
• There are increasing pleas for dying languages to
be protected and for endangered languages to be
revived and revitalized.
• The questions are:
a. How is language vitality achieved?
b. How can a language be revived and reversed?
A MODEL OF LANGUAGE SHIFT AND VITALITY
Three Factor Model (Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor, 1977)
• Status Factor - The key issue in language status is whether the
langauge minority is in the ascendancy (superordinate) or is
subordinate. The survival of Swedish in Finland is partly
explained by the high status of Swedish speakers in Finland.
Language minorities are more often in subordinate status to a
language majority. There are different types of language status
to consider like economic status, social status, and symbolic
status.
 A MODEL OF LANGUAGE SHIFT AND VITALITY
Three Factor Model (Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor, 1977)
• Demographic Factor - One part of this is the territorial principle:
two languages having their own rights in different areas within a
country (see Chapter 3); or, in Ireland, there being designated
heartland areas where some protection and maintenance of the Irish
language is encouraged (the Gaeltachta). A second part of this factor is
the number of speakers of a certain language and their saturation
within a particular area. The high numbers of Spanish speakers in
Miami has been a component of Latino vitality, both economic and
cultural, within that area.
 A MODEL OF LANGUAGE SHIFT AND VITALITY
Three Factor Model (Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor, 1977)
• Institutional Support Factors - Language vitality is
affected by the extent and nature of a minority
language’s use in a wide variety of institutions in a
region. Such institutions will include national,regional
and local government, religious and cultural
organizations, mass media, commerce and industry, and
not least education.
A MODEL OF LANGUAGE SHIFT AND VITALITY
• Husband and Khan (1982) criticized the theory of vitality by
Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor (1977) with these reasons:
a. First, they suggest that the dimensions and factors are
not separate and independent of each other.
b. Second, different language contexts have widely differing
processes and recipes that affect language vitality.
c. Third, the theory is not easy to operationalize in research.
 LANGUAGE REVIVAL AND REVERSAL
• Joshua Fishman (1991) provides a list of priorities to halt language decline and
attempt to reverse language shift. provides a basic philosophy and set of assumptions
that are required before establishing priorities in reversing language shift.
a. First, when a society or community is losing its language and culture, it is likely to
feel pain.
b. Second, the basis of reversing language shift is that a more global village, a world
more unified by mass communication and speedy travel, a more integrated eastern
and western Europe, does not bury the need for local language and local culture.
c. Third, and most importantly for Fishman (1991), the political basis of the plan is to
support cultural pluralism and cultural self-determination.
 LANGUAGE REVIVAL AND REVERSAL
• Joshua Fishman (1991) provides a list of priorities to halt language decline and attempt to
reverse language shift. provides a basic philosophy and set of assumptions that are required
before establishing priorities in reversing language shift.
d. Fourth, an ethnic or culture group that has lost its language is different from a group that
retains their minority language.
e. Fifth, to help understand language shift, Fishman (1991) clarifies the relationship between
language and culture in terms of three links: a language indexes its culture, a language symbolizes
its culture, and culture is partly created from its language.
f. Sixth, Fishman (1991) makes an argument for language planning that such planning has as its
base ‘re-establishing local options, local control, local hope, and local meaning to life. It reveals a
humanistic and positive outlook vis-à-vis intergroup life, rather than a mechanistic and fatalistic
one. It espouses the right and the ability of small cultures to live and to inform life for their own
members as well as to contribute thereby to the enrichment of human kind as a whole’ (p. 35).
LANGUAGE REVIVAL AND REVERSAL
• Steps in Reversing Language Shift
Fishman’s (1990, 1991, 1993, 2000c) Graded Intergenerational
Disruption Scale (GIDS) is an aid to understanding language
planning and attempted language reversal from an
international perspective. Fishman’s scale gives a guide to how
far a minority language is threatened and disrupted in
international terms. The higher the number on the scale, the
more a language is threatened.
 LANGUAGE REVIVAL AND REVERSAL
• Steps in Reversing Language Shift
 LIMITS AND CRITICS
• For Fishman (1991, 1993), it is the informal and intimate spoken language reproduced across
generations that is the ultimate pivot of language shift.
• The language community needs to be awoken and mobilized to support its language, especially
at a family and community participative level.
• Through the provision of bilingual education, government services and a minority language
television service, the central government may come to support its minority languages.
• For a language to survive inside the individual, a person needs to become bonded in the
language community while at school, and particularly after leaving school. There needs to be pre-
school, out-of-school and after-school support and reward systems for using the minority
language.
• The minority language needs to be embedded in the family–neighborhood–community
experience and in the economics of the family.
 LIMITS AND CRITICS
• Fishman’s (1991, 2000c) eight stages must be seen as overlapping and interacting. In
language revival, it is not the case of going one step or stage at a time. The myriad of
factors in language reversal link together in complex patterns. A language at Stage 2
may still be securing elements of previous stages. A language at Stage 6 may be
engaged in long-term planning to secure higher stages. Also, different
communi_x0002_ties and different geographical areas may be at different stages
within the same nation. One area may have secured bilingual education provision, a
neighboring area may have undeveloped bilingual education provision. Minority
language literacy may be strong in some communities, weak in others. The use of the
minority language in business and the local economy may vary considerably from
rural to urban areas, and according to closeness of access to airports, roads, railways
and sea links. In some villages, language death may be close. In other villages within
the same region, most community life may be in the minority language.
 LIMITS AND CRITICS
• Williams (1992) suggests that the viewpoint of Fishman
tends to be of a consensus nature, concerned with
integration, equilibrium, order and cohesion. Williams (1992)
regards the work of Fishman as politically conservative with a
consequent limited discussion of deviance, power, struggle
and conflict. The preference is to play down the conflict
while ignoring power relationships, thereby not expressing
the anger, discrimination and frustration felt by language
minority groups and their members.
 LIMITS AND CRITICS
• Ó Riagáin (2000) also argues that Reversing Language Shift does not indicate the
economic interventions that are so important for language revival. For parents to
raise their children in the minority language, for schools to have a strong reason
for content teaching through the minority language, economic and employment
incen_x0002_tives and rewards are crucial to language revival, but not sufficient
in themselves (Fishman, 2000a). Economic prescriptions are needed to provide a
strong rational for intergenerational transmission. Integrative motives and cultural
sentiment may not be enough to persuade parents, educators and students to use
the minority language. The economic base of the language community can be a
vital safeguard to the maintenance of a threatened language. The state, and not
just the local language community is thus important (e.g. in economic
regeneration of a language minority area).
REFERENCES
Baker, C. (ed.), 2001, Foundations of Bilingual Education
and Bilingualism. Great Britain: Biddles Ltd.
THANK YOU!