Course Description
An overview of the extra-linguistic factors that either promote the maintenance of a minority/heritage language or affect the shift towards the majority or hegemonic regional or national variety. Specific emphasis is placed on the methods and data sources for conducting qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistic analysis.
Athena Title
Language Maintenance Shift
Prerequisite
LING 3060 or LING 3150 or LING 3150W
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
General Competence • Understanding of the basic correlation between social structure and language use • Understanding of the function of social institutions and social networks in preserving a minority language within a given linguistic community • Understanding of the interaction between extra-linguistic factors and language acquisition, maintenance, and shift Specialized knowledge • Broad overview of the theoretical approaches and experimental methods to studying language maintenance or language shift, as caused by language-external factors • Close familiarity with primary sources used to study social structure within heritage/minority linguistic communities • Close familiarity with common experimental protocols for measuring language use within heritage/minority communities, especially tracking changes over time Specialized abilities • The ability to track and model quantifiable changes in the demographics and composition of heritage/minority language communities over time, including migration, settlement, contact, and assimilation • The ability to model domain-specific language use in a heritage/minority community at a given point in time • The ability to correlate language-external (social) factors with events of language maintenance or language shift, specifically the shift to the socially dominant language • The ability to identify domain-specific language use for earlier historical stages of a heritage variety, based on language-external (social) evidence
Topical Outline
1. Introduction: Migration and contact 2. Community Theory: the role of social institutions in language acquisition/maintenance/shift 3. Social Network Theory: the role of social interaction in language acquisition/maintenance/shift 4. Domain-specific language use: Religion, education, media 5. Language shift and diglossia 6. Language shift and gender 7. Language shift and labor 8. Qualitative approaches: ego documents, language ideology, speaker agency, meta-linguistic discourse 9. Post-vernacularly: emblematic use of a formerly productive language 10. Linguistic substrates
Syllabus