Colonization language map

Why Speakers Shift Languages: What Linguists Should Not Ignore

Colonisation, Globalisation, and the Future of Languages in the Twenty-first Century

Colonisation and Globalisation: Not Such New Phenomena

Imperial Languages and Language Endangerment: A Myth that Cannot Go On

Prestige alone will not favour a particular language (variety) over others. Shifting to a particular language is typically associated with particular benefits to be derived from its usage, especially economic benefits.

Otherwise, speakers stick to the languages they have traditionally spoken, although they may learn another one for interaction with outsiders.

Immigrants to the New World and Australia shifted to the dominant languages because they had emerged as the only languages of the colonies’ economic systems and they had something to gain from the shift, or at least they avoided the danger of not being able to compete at all in the new labour markets.

Now the question arises of whether linguists can help some languages to thrive by encouraging their speakers to have pride in their ancestral heritage, even if they lack control over situations that have led them to give up their languages. Over the past decade language endangerment has become a major preoccupation among linguists.

Language diversification has overwhelmed the indigenous languages, losing their speakers in favor of newly adapted European languages.

Linguists have typically bemoaned loss of linguistic, especially typological, diversity.

Rarely have they focused on speakers themselves in terms of motivation and costs and benefits to them in giving up their languages.

Seldom have they addressed the question of whether the survival of a language would entail more adequate adaptations of its speakers to the changing socio-economic ecologies.

The current literature on language endangerment has presented the phenomenon primarily as one of the negative side-effects of European expansion and colonisation of most of the non-European world over the past half millennium.

However, today’s colonisation differs from that of earlier times more in size and complexity than in kind. It is not so common to refer to the dispersal of the Bantu populations from the southern Nigeria and western Cameroon area into central and 27southern Africa as colonisation.

The same applies to the spread of Indo-Europeans from Asia Minor to Europe. In reality, these are instances of colonisation, at least in the population-genetics sense of relocation to a new territory.

Also significant is the fact that, as in former exploitation colonies of Asia and Africa, it was after the colonisers had left that the important proportions of the indigenous populations adopted the coloniser’s language in today’s Romance Europe.

Colonised since the fifth century, some Celts such as the Irish did not become subjects of the United Kingdom and have to speak English as a vernacular until the nineteenth century, long after Oliver Cromwell had initiated the settlement colonisation of Ireland in the seventeenth century and potato plantations had become one of its major industries.

In this case, the loss of indigenous languages did not start until the assimilation of the local people to the current socio-economic system.

Noteworthy in all such cases is the fact that absorption of the indigenous population by the colonisers has generally led to the loss of indigenous languages, especially when the colonised are kept in a subordinate position.

The critical factor is their involvement in an economic system in which they must use the language of the new ruler in order to compete in the labour force and function adaptively.

This is an aspect of globalisation as homogenisation, requiring that things work more or less the same way in the colony as in the metropole, especially in the exercise of power and control of the working class.

Languages such as English and French to compete with each other as imperial or hegemonic languages. These are languages that need not serve as lingua francas among the elite of the indigenous populations (although they often do) but are primarily needed to interface local economies (regardless of how globalised they are) with foreign and more globalised systems.

For example, French in Haiti is needed to maintain some economic ties with France, although the elite also use it to isolate themselves from the proletarian masses

Practical considerations prevail a great deal more than linguists have acknowledged. Proximity to North America has made English more attractive than French to many Haitians today. Economic or technological aid from the United States (even if only symbolic), rather than ideological drives on the part of France to propagate French culture, has made English more attractive to several LICs.

It is also noteworthy that Spanish and Portuguese are widely spoken today largely thanks to the settlement colonisation of several parts of the world by their European speakers since the fifteenth century.

The best lesson here comes from the fact that standard varieties of the same languages have generally not displaced their nonstandard vernaculars, just as acrolectal varieties have not displaced basilectal and mesolectal ones in creole-speaking territories.

Conclusion:

Language endangerment is a more serious issues than expected. The influence from otherlanguages has led to language shift, making original indigenous languages obsolete.

Integration happens when populations coexist in some sort of peace. This state of affairs makes it ironical and inadequate to speak of language wars, rather than of competition as a coexistence relation in which alternatives have different ethnographic values to speakers, such that they often must select one or another alternative during their verbal interactions.

It has become a language competition throughout the years to adapt a lingua franca to a colonized civilization, often gaining economic power through the colonies adapting and developing international businesses practices.