Language shift

Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a community of speakers of a language shifts to speaking a completely different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin that occurred in what is now France during the time of the Roman Empire.Language shift can be understood best as a social strategy through which individuals and groups compete for positions of prestige, power, and domestic security ... What is important, then, is not just dominance, but vertical social mobility and a linkage between language and access to positions of prestige and power ... A relatively small immigrant elite population can encourage widespread language shift among numerically dominant indigenes in a non-state or pre-state context if the elite employs a specific combination of encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases ... demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their languages in non-state situations. Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a community of speakers of a language shifts to speaking a completely different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin that occurred in what is now France during the time of the Roman Empire. For prehistory, Forster et al. (2004) and Forster and Renfrew (2011) observe that there is a correlation of language shift with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not necessarily with intrusive female mtDNA. They conclude that technological innovation (the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, or from stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in the abduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland) causes immigration of at least some males, who are perceived to be of higher status than local males. Then, in mixed-language marriages with these males, prehistoric women prefer to transmit the 'higher-status' spouse's language to their children, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today. The process whereby a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language is called assimilation. When a linguistic community ceases to use their original language, language death is said to occur. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of individuals with a given mother tongue who speak another language more often in the home. The data are used to measure the use of a given language in the lifetime of a person, or most often across generations within a linguistic community. In the context of the Indo-European migrations, it has been noted that small groups can change a larger cultural area. Michael Witzel refers to Ehret's model 'which stresses the osmosis, or a 'billiard ball,' or Mallory's Kulturkugel, effect of cultural transmission.' According to Ehret, ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies, due to the cultural, economic and military choices made by the local population in question. The group bringing new traits may initially be small, contributing features that can be fewer in number than those of the already local culture. The emerging combined group may then initiate a recurrent, expansionist process of ethnic and language shift. David Anthony notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through 'chain-type folk migrations', but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which are emulated by large groups of people. Anthony explains: Anthony gives the example of the Luo-speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century, whose language spread rapidly in the 19th century. Anthony notes that 'Indo-European languages probably spread in a similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe', carried forward by 'Indo-European chiefs' and their 'ideology of political clientage'. Anthony notes that 'elite recruitment' may be a suitable term for this system. Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welsh and Standard German thriving today. Until the mid 19th century, southern Carinthia in Austria had an overwhelming Slovene-speaking majority: in the 1820s, around 97% of the inhabitants south of the line Villach-Klagenfurt-Diex spoke Slovene as their native language. In the course of the 19th century, this number dropped significantly. By 1920, already a third of the population of the area had shifted to German as their main language of communication. After the Carinthian Plebiscite in the 1920s, and especially after World War II, most of the population shifted from Slovene to German. In the same region, today only some 13% of the people still speaks Slovene, while more than 85% of the population speaks German. The figures for the whole region are equally telling: in 1818, around 35% of the population of Carinthia spoke Slovene; by 1910, this number dropped to 15.6% and by 2001 to 2.3%. These changes were almost entirely the result of a language shift in the population, with emigration and genocide (by the Nazis during the Second World War) playing only a minor role.