Language Obsolescence Research Paper

The obsolescent phase of a language accompanies speech community members’ shift to the use of some other language. Such a shift often comes about as a response to changes in political conditions (e.g., introduction of state-controlled schooling, transfer of territory to the control of a different state) or in economic conditions (e.g., heightened contact with outsiders through decline of traditional livelihoods or through new exploitation of local resources), or both. Language shift may also be prompted primarily by ideological factors, as in the case of Taiap, a language spoken only in Gapun village, Papua New Guinea. Despite physical isolation, limited school exposure, and continued pursuit of largely traditional subsistence activities, shift to the geographically expanding creole Tok Pisin proceeds apace among Taiap-speaking villagers, chiefly because ideology links language, gender, and affect in ways that have steadily devalued the local vernacular as indexical of women (Kulick 1992).

1. The Emergence Of A Proficiency Continuum

Except where a physical calamity (volcanic eruption, infectious disease, genocidal attack, etc.) brings about the death of most speakers within a short period, obsolescence advances gradually, accompanied by the development of a proficiency continuum. The oldest members of a speech community typically speak the ancestral language with high proficiency and some other language(s) equally or less well, while younger members speak the ancestral language with diminishing proficiency and some other language(s) with higher proficiency.

1.1 Segmenting The Proficiency Continuum

While such continua are prominent in accounts of the structural effects of gradual obsolescence, no general consensus prevails on the levels of proficiency that should be recognized across the continuum. In one model, speakers of obsolescent languages are characterized as strong, with full or nearly full competence; imperfect, with less than full competence; weak, with restricted speaking competence; and at the low end as rememberers, capable of producing only words and isolated phrases (Campbell and Muntzel 1989). In another model, fully fluent speakers are divided into older and younger fluent speakers, according to age-related degrees of retention of conservative grammatical features; those who make grammatical mistakes recognized as such by the fully fluent are considered semispeakers and are again subdivided according to level of control of conservative grammatical features (Dorian 1981). The existence of ageatypical individuals can complicate the segmentation of a proficiency continuum. While there is normally an overall correlation with age, individuals within any age cohort may by reason of personal history be atypical; childhood residence with grandparents sometimes produces age-exceptional proficiency in the receding language, for example, whereas periods of residence away from the linguistic heartland may have the opposite effect.

1.2 Assessing Structural Changes By Sampling Along The Proficiency Continuum

By sampling the usage of speakers at various points along the proficiency continuum, ongoing changes in phonological and grammatical structure can be identified in an obsolescent language. Caution is necessary both in identifying and in interpreting evidence of change, however. In assessing change, the norms against which any deviation is measured must be established strictly in terms of the most conservative local usage. Local norms are essential, since any standardized or official form of the language may be historically irrelevant to the local form, based mainly on quite different dialects, for example, or relatively recently devised. Furthermore, structural changes found to be in progress are not necessarily the unequivocal result of obsolescence as such since intensive contact with another language often promotes structural change, whether language shift is underway or not. Reports of structural convergence appear, for example, both where a language long in contact with others has become obsolescent (as with Tariana, cited above) and where languages long in contact with one another all continue to be maintained (as in the Urdu, Marathi, and Kannada case discussed by Gumperz and Wilson 1971). Generally speaking, the broader the age-range encompassed by the proficiency continuum and the larger the number of speakers sampled at various points along it, the greater the likelihood that changes to which obsolescence contributes substantially can be identified. Where circumstances permit, longitudinal sampling can offer important additional evidence, by determining the degree to which innovative structural features once absent or rare among the oldest and most conservative speakers establish themselves subsequently among those who were previously the younger speakers.

2. The Rise Of Interest In Language Obsolescence

Interest in language obsolescence arises in large part from the very structural deviation that generally accompanies reduction in use and incomplete transmission. This is a striking reversal of earlier attitudes and preoccupations. Until the last few decades of the twentieth century researchers were intent on describing a language in the most intact form available and avoided working with speakers who controlled an ancestral language imperfectly. But insights from the study of language acquisition, pidginization, and speech disorders suggested that language obsolescence, as another arena in which structural shortfall appeared, might make a similarly useful contribution to a growing body of knowledge about the nature of human language capacities. Interest grew, therefore, in exploring such questions as whether grammatical features acquired late would also be lost early, whether morphological complexity would be any more sustainable in obsolescence than it was in pidginization, whether obsolescent-language features without parallel in the language to which speakers were shifting would be maintained, and so forth.

2.1 Focus On Reduction And Loss

Because rising interest in obsolescence stemmed from questions such as these, early research focused strongly on reduction and loss in obsolescent forms of a given language. Dressler (1972) looked at phonological rule loss in Breton, Hill (1973) at decreasing subordinate clause density in Luiseno and Cupeno, Dorian (1973) at loss and merger in nominal case and passive voice in Scottish Gaelic, and Dorian (1978) at decreasing morphological complexity in plural and gerund formation in Scottish Gaelic. The first two larger-scale studies of obsolescent languages were similar in focus. Dorian (1981) reported weakening and loss of grammatical gender in pronoun replacements, weakening of case in the noun phrase, progressive loss in verbal inflection, reduction of allomorphy in the formation of noun plural and gerund, and substitution of analytical constructions for synthetic ones among imperfect speakers of an obsolescent variety of Scottish Gaelic. Schmidt (1985), investigating obsolescent Dyirbal in Queensland, Australia, noted similarity of reductive and replacive phenomena on the morphological and syntactic levels: replacement of ergative structure by nominative accusative structure; allomorphic reduction in the nominal case system; loss of a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession; generalization of a single case affix over various case functions; English prepositions used in place of certain suffixes, or marking simply lost; substitution of freestanding words for tense-marking verbal affixes; regularization of an irregular verb inflection and of certain complex noun-marker paradigms; breakdown in agreement rules in the noun phrase and verb complex; rigidification of word order; and simplification of the noun classification system.

In these and subsequent accounts of the structural phenomena that accompany increased language contact and ongoing language shift (e.g., Silva Corvalan 1994, Holloway 1997), certain processes are conspicuous by their recurrence, e.g., outright loss of certain morphological markers, allomorphic reduction, paradigmatic and syntactic regularization, substitution of analytic structures for synthetic structures, and convergence with the phonological and grammatical structure of an expanding language in the contact setting. These are changes long familiar from the study of language history, including cases in which obsolescence was not at issue. In consequence, obsolescence researchers have generally favored the position that the changes characteristic of obsolescence are well recognized historical processes appearing with higher incidence in conditions of obsolescence and advancing more rapidly (Dorian 1981, Schmidt 1985, Silva Corvalan 1994).

2.2 Focus On Retention Of Complexity

Early research on language obsolescence brought to light anticipated reduction and loss but produced at the same time considerable evidence of retained complexity. Despite increased favoring of a single suffix in imperfect Scottish Gaelic speakers’ plural and gerund formations, for example, suffixation did not become the sole formation process and allomorphy remained diverse. Despite reductions in inflectional morphology among young Dyirbal speakers, the same speakers preserved notable complexity in derivational morphology. Particularly contrary to expectations was the finding that grammatical structures without parallel in the expanding language could survive in the usage of speakers toward the lower end of the proficiency continuum. With no reinforcement of grammatical gender available from English, for example, and despite the disappearance of gender-differentiated pronoun replacement in their Gaelic, gender differentiation in high-frequency diminutive formation remained relatively strong among imperfect English-dominant Gaelic speakers in East Sutherland. Young Dyirbal speakers maintained two verb conjugations surprisingly well in some structures, even though English has only one productive verb conjugation.

These findings have been important in establishing the structural phenomena of language obsolescence as distinct from those of pidginization or creolization and from those of first-language acquisition. Imperfect adult speakers of obsolescent languages are by definition bilingual at least. They have the cognitive equipment of adulthood as well as extensive experience with at least one other language to draw on at communicative need. Borrowing and code-switching are available to them, of course, and they have the inventive capacity of adults to extend in potentially novel ways the structural or semantic reach of whatever ancestral-language elements they have available. A weak semispeaker proved for example to have developed her own system for keeping grammatical genders distinct to some extent, in the nominal case system of East Sutherland Gaelic, despite the fact that she lacked one of the central morphophonemic devices used for that purpose by fully fluent speakers (Dorian 1986).

3. Evidence Of Linguistic Creativity In Obsolescence

Apart from such individual cases of creativity as this last, more generalized instances have been noted. Imperfect younger speakers from a Hungarian population in a predominantly German-speaking region of Austria demonstrated the ability to use a structural property of Hungarian, expression of one grammatical or derivational category per morpheme in concatenative word-formation, to create grammatically regular constructions that substituted intelligibly for irregular formations which they lacked (Gal 1989). More strikingly, recent research has demonstrated that obsolescence is not a barrier to the development of new grammatical structures, even for speakers whose proficiency in an expanding language exceeds their proficiency in the recessive language. Ongoing potential for grammatical elaboration therefore joins retention of grammatical complexity in establishing that the phenomena associated with language obsolescence are not solely those of progressive reduction and loss.

3.1. Development Of New Grammatical Structures In Obsolescent Languages

When certain grammatical distinctions cease to be made by speakers of an obsolescent language, grammatical elements (particles, nominal or verbal affixes, functionally distinct forms of adverbs, etc.) may be emptied of their original grammatical content, after which they become subject to loss or to reinterpretation. While loss is certainly commonplace and reinterpretation sometimes amounts to no more than the development of variant forms, reinterpretation can also give rise to novel grammatical structures. Morphemes which formerly served as nominal case markers have emerged as focus-markers in Jingulu, for example; prominent now in this obsolescent Australian language, the focus-markers can be shown to have developed during the past four decades (Pensalfini 1999). New verbal morphology has similarly appeared in obsolescent Tariana, via grammaticalization of elements derived from compounded verbal roots and serial verb constructions (Aikhenvald 2000). Speakers of an obsolescent Walser German dialect in northern Italy have developed a complete set of verbal inflections for person via the familiar process of reanalysis of postverbal clitic pronouns as personal endings (Dal Negro 1998). As these instances demonstrate, the linguistic processes involved are once again not unique to obsolescent languages.

4. Methodological Problems In The Study Of Obsolescence

4.1 Inherent Difficulties In Assessing Imperfect Speakers’ Linguistic Competence

Some of the difficulty in establishing parameters of obsolescence stems from methodological obstacles to assessing low-proficiency speakers’ competence. Even where the least proficient speakers willingly undertake assessment exercises such as translating set sentences or supplying a story-line to accompany a series of pictures, their performances may be affected by psychological or cultural factors: degree of acquaintance and compatibility with the researcher, anxiety about the adequacy of ancestral-language knowledge, uncongeniality of question-and-answer interactions, and so forth. Since failure to produce particular material on request can by no means be equated with inability to produce it, this remains a serious methodological shortcoming. Certain types of social encounter can evoke previously unavailable evidence of imperfect-speaker skills, as a chance encounter with a lonely Gaelic-dominant hospital patient did in the case of an East Sutherland Gaelic semispeaker; but by their very nature such encounters can seldom be staged or recorded. In Gapun village the attractiveness of Kulick’s recording machinery allowed him to coax from a young child who routinely used Tok Pisin for extended speech an unexpectedly intact short narrative in Taiap (Kulick 1992). Receptive bilingualism in near-passive bilinguals uncomfortable with testing can sometimes be evaluated via macaronic interviews, with the researcher speaking only the receding language and the interviewee responding in the expanding language (Dorian 1999).

4.2 Cultural Differences As Obstacles To Assessing Imperfect Speakers’ Linguistic Competence

In some settings the cultural norms for transmission of knowledge disfavor the question-and-answer approaches researchers have often used to isolate the individual elements of complex grammatical systems. Speakers may resist answering strings of questions, preferring to offer instruction by companionable activity or by story-telling. Recording narratives from speakers willing to go over them in detail with the researcher subsequently is a more successful and productive technique for phonological and grammatical analysis in some settings (Dixon 1984), although it may preclude direct comparison across the proficiency continuum unless a number of different speakers can offer versions of the same narrative.

There appear also to be differences in the degree to which imperfect speakers in late-stage obsolescence settings are willing to make spontaneous use of what active skills they have. In some Arvanitika-speaking districts of Greece, extremely low-proficiency individuals willingly produce this Albanian speech variety at a structural level that one researcher characterizes as ‘pathologically’ malformed (Sasse 1992). Spontaneous speech at this low a proficiency level, independently confirmed for Arvanitika (Tsitsipis 1989), would be highly unusual in some settings and therefore unavailable for study; Arvanitika currently stands as an extreme case for spontaneous low-proficiency speech production in an obsolescent language.

5. Lacunae In Obsolescence Studies To Date

In an important attempt to distinguish the effects of language obsolescence from those of language contact more generally, Sasse (1992) has pointed to acquisition by exposure alone (hearing the language spoken in one’s vicinity) rather than by active transmission (being addressed in the language and expected to reply in it) as the crucial factor in giving rise to the lowproficiency producers of ‘pathological’ Arvanitika. One well-studied individual who had an exposure-only acquisition history for East Sutherland Gaelic produces far less malformed spontaneous speech than do the weakest Arvanitika semispeakers (Dorian 1999), but the effect of acquisition history merits closer study, especially in incipient obsolescence settings where families differ in the extent to which they use the ancestral language with their children. Studies of whole communities which share an ancestral language, but differ in degree of contact with a particular expanding language, and hence in the degree of shift, are needed for what they may reveal of progressive stages in convergence, reduction, and loss of specific structural features. Again to illuminate the effects of contact, studies of a single language in contact with a variety of expanding languages would be useful.

Bibliography:

1. Aikhenvald A Y 1996 Areal diffusion in Northwest Amazonia: The case of Tariana. Anthropological Linguistics 38: 73–116
2. Aikhenvald A Y 2000 Areal typology and grammaticalization: the emergence of new verbal morphology in an obsolescent language. In: Gildea S (ed.) Reconstructive Grammar: Comparative Linguistics and Grammaticalization. Benjamins, Amsterdam
3. Campbell L, Muntzel M C 1989 The structural consequences of language death. In: Dorian N C (ed.) In estigating Obsolescence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
4. Dal Negro S 1998 Spracherhaltung in der Beiz—Das Uberleben der Walsersprache im Pomatt Formazza. Wir Walser 36: 13–16
5. Dixon R M W 1984 Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Fieldworker. University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Australia
6. Dorian N C 1973 Grammatical change in a dying dialect. Language 49: 413–38
7. Dorian N C 1978 The fate of morphological complexity in Scottish Gaelic language death: evidence from East Sutherland Gaelic. Language 54: 590–609
8. Dorian N C 1981 Language Death. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA
9. Dorian N C 1986 Making do with less: some surprises along the language death proficiency continuum. Applied Psycholinguistics 7: 257–75
10. Dorian N C (ed.) 1989 Investigating Obsolescence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
11. Dorian N C 1999 The study of language obsolescence: stages, surprises, and challenges. Langues et Linguistique 3: 99–22
12. Dressler W U 1972 On the phonology of language death. In: Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago
13. Gal S 1989 Lexical innovation and loss: the use and value of restricted Hungarian. In: Dorian N C (ed.) Investigating Obsolescence. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, UK
14. Gumperz J J, Wilson R 1971 Convergence and creolization: a case from the Indo-Dravidian border. In: Hymes D (ed.) Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
15. Hill J H 1973 Subordinate clause density and language function. In: Corum C, Smith-Stark T C, Weiser A (eds.) You Take the High Node and I’ll Take the Low Node: Papers from the Comparative Syntax Festi al. Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago
16. Holloway C 1997 Dialect Death: The Case of Brule Spanish. Benjamins, Amsterdam
17. Kulick D 1992 Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
18. Pensalfini R 1999 Case suffixes as discourse markers in Jingulu—a case of innovation in an obsolescent language. Australian Journal of Linguistics 19: 225–40
19. Sasse H-J 1992 Language decay and contact-induced change: similarities and diff In: Brenzinger M (ed.) Language Death. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
20. Schmidt A 1985 Young People’s Dyirbal. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
21. Silva Corvalan C 1994 Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford University Press, Oxford
22. Tsitsipis L D 1989 Skewed performance and full performance in language obsolescence: the case of an Albanian variety. In: Dorian N C (ed.) Investigating Obsolescence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK