Words and phrases to remember

Factors promoting bilingualism = factors encouraging people to add lan­guages to their linguistic repertoir

Proxrnity = such aspects as where people live, what kind of work they do, and whether there are speakers of second languages in their family circle.

Displacement = either physical movement or a change in one's psycho­logical outlook.

Reciprocal language learning = a process when two individuals or groups of people lcam each other's languages

Minority group = less powerful or outnumbered part of population

Socio-economic mobility = an advantage, in many cases closely con­nected with being bilingual, that enables a person to receive instrumental re­wards and psychological values

Group activity

Illustrate each condition of both close proximity and displacement with a real or fictional situation. Write each situation on a separate sheet of paper, and when in class, distribute the papers among your classmates. Try to come out with a "linguistic diagnosis", stating which factor promoting bilingualism has taken place in each given situation.

Questions and Tasks

1. Analyze factors promoting bilingualism in present-day Russia.

2. What are the factors that promote your bilingualism? What are the fac­tors that make your language learning a slower and more difficult process?

6. Language maintenance and shift

Researchers introduce terms language maintenance and language shift to

refer to possible outcomes when speakers become bilingual. Actually, there are three main possible outcomes when speakers are exposed to a second language:

1. speakers simply retain their own LI and do not learn the L2;

2. speakers learn-the L2 as an additional language and retain both their LI and the L2;

3. speakers leam the L2 as an additional language, but it replaces their LI as the main (and generally only) language. In some cases, this third option hap­pens within the lifetime of one person.

Scientists have singled out a following general linguistic pattern for minority groups and immigrants:

First generation: Speak only their LI

Second generation: Speak both their LI and an L2

Third generation: Speak only the L2

In case after case, when a younger generation is exposed to a more domi­nant language in the nation than the LI (through schooling and school peers), it is hard to stop a shift to that second language by the next generation. That is, es­pecially in immigrant communities, shift by the third generation is almost a foregone conclusion which makes bilingualism by the second generation with the dominant and/or official language in the nation state a typical pattern.

Some factors of human social organization favor monolingualism and some favor bilingualism. The difference depends on not just one factor, but a set of fac­tors and - this is especially important - how factors are prioritized. There have been many published studies and analyses of the conditions that promote mainte­nance and its counterpart, shift. But what researchers have found is that there is no "magic set" that predicts what will happen in a given community.

7. Three models of community organization

The Tiodel of horizontal or vertical multilingualism proposes that there are two types of multilingualism if speakers are viewed in terms of how they are organized in space. Mansour (1993) employed this model to explain patterns of multilingualism in West Africa, but the division applies elsewhere, too. Speak­ers who live under horizontal multilingualism live in their own geographic spaces and are often monolingual. The idea is that multilingualism may be pre­sent at a higher level of society, but separate groups are not particularly inte­grated into this larger society with each doing its living in its own space. Man-sour describes horizontal multilingualism as a patchwork quilt (with many monolingual squares). Another spatial arrangement, under which people are in direct contact with others because of how they live and their daily activities, is called vertical multilingualism. When this type of spacing prevails, people work, live, go to iichool, and shop in communities with speakers of other languages.

The second model, social network analysis, tries to explain social behav­ior by examining who is connected to whom in a community along a social rela­tion, such as friendship or a shared workplace (Wasserman and Faust, 1994). True social network analysis measures patterns of relationships among a group of speakers. Thus, a key contribution of this approach is to consider the connections among those people to whom a speaker is connected. Also, under social network analysis, each relationship is treated differently so that all are not thought of as just one general relationship. And we will see how different relations affect out­comes in LI maintenance; that is, "speaks LI at home" is different from "speaks LI at work". Networks are measured along a number of dimensions, but the di­mensions most important to us are density and strength of ties.

A model of ethnolinguistic vitality was proposed initially by Giles, Bourhis and Taylor (1977), but since then others have contributed to its devel­opment (e.g., Allard and Landry, 1992). In the original formulation, the basis for considering a group's vitality included sociological variables, such as status of the group, numbers of speakers, and any official institutional support of the group's language. The idea is that the more positive a group is in regard to such features, the more likely its language will survive.

Part of our communicative competence is recognizing (probably uncon­sciously) that most members of our community do not speak the same way in all of their daily interactions. Fishman uses the term domain in order to generalize beyond jus: referring to individual social situations and how language use varies from one situation to the next. But domains are more than simply situations; as Fishman notes, they represent clusters of certain values, too. The major domains that Fishman identified are family, friendship, religion, education, and employ­ment. Our discussion makes clear that minority languages, whether of indigenous or immigrant populations, rarely can survive in all the domains where the domi­nant language in the relevant nation rules. Yet, it is possible for two languages to

survive if each language has its own domains. As Laponce (1993) concludes, "they [two languages] can coexist harmoniously within the same population and maintain a relatively stable balance within the same geographic niche."

The same factors generally are in place when a group shifts away from its LI, but no one factor or set of factors always predicts language maintenance or shift; it depends on the specific hierarchy among factors in a specific community.