second minor language

[Eduardo Blasco Ferrer]

Dear colleagues,

I have been working since 20 years as linguist and psycholinguist with all minority( = lesser used) languages LSU) in the Romance field, particularly with Sardinian (last book 2005: Methods and Techniques with Learning and Teaching Sardinian, Cagliari, Della Torre, dellatorre at tiscali.it ). I can tell you that I still agree with the formulaic sentence of Claude Levi-Strauss: minority languages disappear more rapidly than radioactive particles. If there is no concrete support from administrations (in obligatory learning at school, if possible before 6; in public use etc.), no corpus and status planning (Einar Haugen), no Authority in language (both Milroy), the decay will be unescapable (J. Vendryes: a language does not die by itself, it is a prolonged lost of interest, of passion which leads to its decay). In some recent experiments conducted by a team I lead we have noticed (1) a fairly good competence in the LSL when kids of 4-6 were administered some psycholinguistic tests (auditory verbal learning tests, narrative tests, comprehension and production tests), even when they had not received any direct education from the parents, (2) a tendency to boost performance in metacognitive and metalinguistic tests (for instance in bilingual picture-word selection tasks, or in phoneme discrimination and non-words discrimination) when sardinian and italian were both involved in tasks. We arguably suggest that this "L3 competence" (= neither L1, nor L2 competence) clearly demonstrates that the community acts as a positive substitute of first language acquisition. Hence, we must strive for a gradual improvement of interaction between children without first l. acquisition and networks which within the community still use actively the LSU. This sociolinguistic-anthropologic project may help us to make up for the lack of a clear-cut and deep intervention in language politics, and in the end in the psycholinguistic domain.
Best wishes to all of you for Christmas and New Year
Bonas Pascas de Nadale e Salude e Trigu pro s'Annu Nou 

Eduardo Blasco Ferrer
full-prof Linguistics, Psycho/Neurolinguistics
Univ. Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy
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