basic word list

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

I would agree with Don that everyday communicative competency is possibly a better measure than "absolute native vocabulary" (since, as pointed out, languages can replace large quantities of vocabulary over time as part of their natural processes of evolution and change).  After all, although many people think of minority languages as some sort of museum pieces that need to be preserved in some sort of arbitrarily identified state, they need to keep living naturally if they are to survive -- and naturally living languages do change over time.

But, on a related note, I think it would be very difficult to get a good picture of a language's relative health from a single "snapshot"; I think one would want to evaluate communicative competences of its speakers over time (if possible).  I've recently begun a few few projects on endangered indigenous languages here in Colombia with the Ministry of Culture, and one of their initiatives has been to get indigenous communities to perform self-assessment surveys on the states of their language, precisely to figure out how many members speak a language well, how many speak it with difficulty, how many can understand it but not speak it, etc.  The first round of such surveys (now complete) does give one some idea of what is going on with a language (for example, it may be reasonable to assume that if there are many more people who can't speak a language, or who can understand but not speak, than who can speak well, then that language is in trouble), but only subsequent rounds of surveys will give us the opportunity to track changes in these populations.

Cheers,
Carl

On 25 May 2010, at 02:48 , Don Killian wrote:

> If your primary objective is to see whether a language is in decline, then at least personally I'd feel it's more important to examine communicative competency than lexical borrowing. How well are the speakers able to describe something monolingually?  Assuming they're still in their native environment, are they capable of discussing day to day situations (in which they normally would use their language) without code switching?

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
carl.anderson at unisabana.edu.co
OR cea.unisabana at gmail.com
http://unisabana.academia.edu/CarlAnderson
Department of Foreign Languages & Cultures
UNIVERSITY OF THE SABANA
Chía Campus Universitario, Puente del Común
Bogotá, Colombia