basic word list

[Jess]

 There's been a fair bit of work done on analysing the structural
characteristics of language shift, although it's tricky to report on a
language's structure alone as evidence of language shift. You might find the
following useful:

Anderson, R. W. (1982). Determining the linguistic attributes of language
attrition. In R. D. Lambert & B. F. Freed (Eds.), *The loss of language
skills* (pp. 83-118).  MA: Newbury House.

Dorian, N. (Ed). (1989). Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language
Contraction and Death. Cambridge: CUP.

I'd argue that, if you want to determine what sort of lexical loss can be
considered language attrition, you'd best start with investigating what sort
of value different elements of the language (and different semantic
domains) have for the community that speaks it.

Jessica Boynton

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Carl Edlund Anderson <
cea.unisabana at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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