FOS: Fwd: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium - Maya Ravindranath Abtahian 12/11

[Suzanne Evans Wagner]

FOS,

We're looking forward to welcoming Maya Ravindranath Abtahian for a
Linguistics Colloquium this Friday. Dr Abtahian will give a talk about
language shift and language policy in Belize and Indonesia. This talk will
be of wide interest beyond those of us in the Linguistics program.

Please do circulate the announcement below to friends and colleagues in
relevant departments/colleges/programs, such as Education, Anthropology,
Second Language Studies, English, the Asian Studies Center and any others
I've missed.

Best,
Suzanne


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Cara Feldscher <feldsch3 at msu.edu>
Date: Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 10:23 AM
Subject: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium -
Maya Ravindranath Abtahian 12/11
To: lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu


Good morning,

This is a reminder from the MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee that our
final colloquium talk for the semester will be this *Friday, December 11th* at
*2:00pm* in *Wells B243*. Our speaker is Professor Maya Ravindranath
Abtahian from the University of Rochester, and her talk is titled
"Sociolinguistics and language shift: approaches to the study of language
endangerment" (abstract below).

We hope you have all had a wonderful semester, and we look forward to
seeing you at this talk, and next semester! As always, please do not
hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Cara and Ni-La
MSU Linguistics Colloquium Co-Chairs
feldsch3 at msu.edu, lenila at msu.edu


------------

*Sociolinguistics and language shift: approaches to the study of language
endangerment*
Professor Maya Ravindranath Abtahian (University of Rochester)

The rate of language endangerment worldwide is rapid, with linguists
currently estimating that 50 – 90% of the world’s languages will be lost in
the coming decades (Crystal 2000, Krauss 1992). Moreover, we know that the
majority of the world’s population speaks a minority of the world’s
languages, with 94% of the world’s languages being spoken by only 6% of the
world’s people (Lewis, Simons and Fennig 2013). Correspondingly, the
language endangerment literature to date has mostly focused on small
language communities, where the language is already clearly moribund with
few children speakers, and the investigations are generally
locally-oriented, qualitative rather than quantitative, and ethnographic,
with a primary focus on the documentation of languages that may shortly be
lost. In this paper I examine two language communities that fall into
neither of these categories. In one (Garifuna, Belize), the speaker
population is small but the language still has many fluent speakers, and in
the other (Indonesia) the language communities I focus on have speaker
populations in the tens of millions. In both cases I argue that these
languages are potentially endangered, and that these are the types of
communities that we should be investigating in order to better understand
the process of language shift.

I will discuss and compare two approaches to the study of language shift
and endangerment – a ‘big data’ approach, and an ethnographic approach that
uses participant observation at the speech community level. Both approaches
treat language choice as a sociolinguistic variable, following Gal (1978),
and the goal of both approaches is to examine the social factors that
correlate with a breakdown in intergenerational transmission of the
heritage language – the single most important parameter in the process of
language shift (Fishman 1991). Leaving aside the fact that certain aspects
of language choice may be age-graded and that this may be closely related
to institutional pressures at the level of national language policy, a big
data approach to language shift allows us to see that language shift can be
a communal change that happens in less than a generation. From this
perspective we gain insight into the demographic factors that correlate
with shift toward the dominant language, including gender, class, and
education. At the root of community-level decisions about language choice,
however, are the choices that individuals and families make over the course
of their own lives, and most notably the choices that parents make when
talking to their children (the central problem of intergenerational
transmission). From this perspective language shift is a generational
change, and from this perspective we gain insight into the characteristics
of the pivot generation of speakers who push the shift forward. Using these
approaches in tandem allows us to “examine what may result from
combinations of…how individuals change or do not change during their lives
[and] how communities change or do not change over time (Labov 1994:83).

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