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Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: a 21St Century Perspective

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MULTILINGUAL MATTERS 116 Series Editor: John Edwards Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective Edited by Joshua A. Fishman MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto • Sydney Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective/Edited by Joshua A. Fishman. Multilingual Matters: 116 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Language attrition. I. Fishman, Joshua A. II. Multilingual Matters (Series): 116 P40.5.L28 C36 2000 306.4’4–dc21 00-024283 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-493-8 (hbk) ISBN 1-85359-492-X (pbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Australia: P.O. Box 586, Artarmon, NSW, Australia. Copyright © 2001 Joshua A. Fishman and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Index compiled by Meg Davies (Society of Indexers). Typeset by Archetype-IT Ltd (http://www.archetype-it.com). Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd. In memory of Charles A. Ferguson 1921–1998 thanks to whom sociolinguistics became both an intellectual and a moral quest Contents Contributors . vii Preface . xii 1 Why is it so Hard to Save a Threatened Language? J.A. Fishman . 1 The Americas 2 Reversing Navajo Language Shift, Revisited T. Lee and D. McLaughlin . 23 3 How Threatened is the Spanish of New York Puerto Ricans? O. García, J.L. Morín and K. Rivera . 44 4 A Decade in the Life of a Two-in-One Language J.A. Fishman. 74 5 Reversing Language Shift in Quebec R.Y. Bourhis . 101 6 Otomí Language Shift and Some Recent Efforts to Reverse It Y. Lastra . 142 7 Reversing Quechua Language Shift in South America N.H. Hornberger and K.A. King . 166 Europe 8 Irish Language Production and Reproduction 1981–1996 P.Ó Riagáin . 195 9 A Frisian Update of Reversing Language Shift D. Gorter. 215 10 Reversing Language Shift: The Case of Basque M.-J. Azurmendi, E. Bachoc and F. Zabaleta . 234 11 Catalan a Decade Later M. Strubell. 260 v Can Threatened Languages be Saved? Contents vi Can Threatened Languages be Saved? Africa and Asia 12 Saving Threatened Languages in Africa: A Case Study of Oko E. Adegbija. 284 13 Andamanese: Biological Challenge for Language Reversal E. Annamalai and V. Gnanasundaram . 309 14 Akor Itak – Our Language, Your Language: Ainu in Japan J.C. Maher . 323 15 Hebrew After a Century of RLS Efforts B. Spolsky and E. Shohamy . 350 The Pacific 16 Can the Shift from Immigrant Languages be Reversed in Australia? M. Clyne . 364 17 Is the Extinction of Australia’s Indigenous Languages Inevitable? J. Lo Bianco and M. Rhydwen . 391 18 RLS in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1989–1999 R. Benton and N. Benton . 423 Conclusions 19 From Theory to Practice (and Vice Versa) J.A. Fishman . 451 Index . 484 The Contributors Professor Efurosibina Adegbija teaches at the Department of Modern Eu- ropean Languages, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. His major interests are sociolinguistics, pragmatics and applied linguistics, especially in a natural ESL context. His current research interest is language attidudes. He is the author of Language Attitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Sociolinguistic Over- view (Multilingual Matters) and he has published several journal articles on that topic. His present focus is on language and attitude change. E. Annamalai, Director Emeritus, Central Institute of Indian Languages, works in the areas of language planning, language education, language contact and grammar. He has designed and guided research on the indig- enous languages of India for their codification and use in education. He has been a Visiting Professor in Tokyo, Leiden and Melbourne. His recent publications include Adjectival Clauses in Tamil (Tokyo, 1996) and Man- aging Multilingualism: Languages Planning and Use in India (New Delhi, 2000). Maria-Josi Azurmendi is Professor in the Department of Social Psychol- ogy, University of the Basque Country (Donostia/San Sebastian, in Spain). She is a specialist in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistic and social psychol- ogy and language, applied mainy to the Basque language. Her most recent book is Psicosociolingüstica (Bilbao, 1999). Erramun Bachoc has been Associate Professor in the Department of Psychopedagogy of Language, Univerity of the Basque Country (Donostia/ San Sebastian, in Spain). Currently, he is the president of the Basque Cul- tural Institute, for promoting the revival of the Basque language in Iparralde (Baiona/Bayonne, in France. Nena Eslao Benton has been resident in New Zealand since 1971, after starting her research career as an urban anthropologist in the Philippines, specializing in family and kinship networks. She was involved in the plan- ning and execution of the sociolinguistic survey of Maori language use carried out by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research in the 1970s, and directed an internship programme to train Maori students in all vii The Contributors viii Can Threatened Languages be Saved? aspects of research, from planning and field work to publication. This led on to pioneering research on the recognition of prior learning in higher ed- ucation. Her involvement in Maori language revitalization efforts has continued, most recently as a consultant to the NZ Government’s Maori Development Education Commission. Richard Benton is currently Director of the James Henare Maori Research Centre at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Associate Direc- tor of Te Matahauariki Institute at the School of Law of the University of Waikato. He first became involved in efforts to secure an acceptance of the Maori language as an essential part of New Zealand’s national life as a stu- dent in the late 1950s. Since then he has studied, written about and lectured on language policy, revitalization of minority languages and related sub- jects in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Professor Richard Y. Bourhis was educated in French and English schools in Montreal and then obtained a BSc in Psychology at McGill University and a PhD in social psychology at the University of Bristol, England. He taught social psychology at McMaster University in Ontario and then at the University of Quebec, Montreal where he is now full Professor. He has published extensively in English and French on topics such as cross- cultural communication, discrimination and intergroup relations, accul- turation and language planning. Michael Clyne, who holds a PhD from Monash University, is currently Professorial Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and was previously Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Language and Soci- ety Centre at that university. His research interests are multilingualism/ language contact, sociolinguistics, inter-cultural communication, and sec- ond language acquisition. Joshua A. Fishman, PhD (Columbia University, 1953: Social Psychology); Ped.D. (Hon.) (Yeshiva University, 1978); D. Litt. (Hon.) (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1986). Distinguished University Research Professor, Social Sci- ences, Yeshiva University. 1966–, Emeritus, 1988, and Visiting Professor, Linguistics and Education, Stanford University, 1992–; Visiting Professor of Education, New York University, 1999–; Long Island University 2000–. Fellow at Centers for Advanced Study: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1963–1964), Institute for Advanced Projects, East–West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii (1969–1969), Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. (1975–1976), Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wasenaar, Netherlands (1982–1983), Israel Institute for Advanced Study, Jerusalem (1983). Specialises in the The Contributors ix sociolinguistics of minority languages, small languages and small lan- guage communities, particularly in connection with their language planning processes and reversing language shift. Ofelia García is Dean of the School of Education at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University. She has published extensively on bilingual edu- cation, the education of language minorities, especially Latinos, bilingualism, sociology of language and US Spanish. A Fulbright Scholar and Spencer Fellow, she is the editor of Educators for Urban Minorities.In 1997 she co-edited, with Joshua A. Fishman, The Multilingual Apple: Lan- guages in New York City (Mouton de Gruyter). V. Gnanasundaram is Deputy Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages. He has prepared learning/teaching materials and trained teachers for the minority languages of India. He coordinated the Insti- tute’s project to record India’s endangered languages. Durk Gorter studied sociology and sociolinguistics in Groningen, Amster- dam and Santa Barbara (USA). Since 1979 he has been a researcher in the sociology of language at the Fryske Akademy in Ljouwert/Leeuwarden, and a part-time Professor of Frisian at the University of Amsterdam. He has been involved in studies of the Frisian language situation and European minority languages on which he has published a number of books and arti- cles. He is currently working on a book about language surveys in Friesland and he also does comparative work
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