Language Shift in Small Communities. an Analysis of Bilingual Language Usage in Family

Languages of minority groups are decreasing all over the world. Successful language maintenance has to be long-term language planning in the community where minority languages are spoken.

For the most adequate actions in language planning we have to know how to evaluate the sociolinguistic situation in the relevant bilingual community. In a former presentation we presented a way based on the framework of “ecology of pressures” (Terborg, 2006) to analyze and explain language shift in small communities of minority groups in a given area considering language knowledge in actual speakers. We support our examples on several researches of language shift of indigenous languages in Mexico. The framework includes the concept “utmost common routine” that may be partly calculated by a quantitative corpus obtained by a questionnaire applied to a representative population. The data of the indigenous language have been compared with the data of Spanish, the official language spoken in Mexico, to determinate which language is the strongest one among a given age group of the population. Now we want to extend our analysis on bilingual language usage in bilingual families.

Terborg, R. (2006) La 'ecología de presiones' en el desplazamiento de las lenguas indígenas por el español. Presentación de un modelo en Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line journal], 7 (4), Art. 39. Disponible en: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/4-06/06-4-39-s.htm