2nd language attrition - Shades of gray and other matters

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Stan:

You ask: "What communities today have all been bilingual for hundreds of
years?"

Try India, for starters. There are many examples of small (by European
standards) language groups, such as the Tulus, a Dravidian language based
around Mangalore in Karnataka State, who use Kannada for literacy, and
have for a very long time, without giving up Tulu as a home language.
I'm not sure what the population figures for Tulu are, but the last I saw
statistics, it was something like 1 million and that was in the 1961
Census. After that census, India stopped looking at "small" languages
and/or listing the figures for these, so the figure has certainly
increased since then.

India in general is tolerant of multilingualism that is long-term and
traditional, and especially if there is specialization of labor, such that
a particular group  (e.g. weavers) doesn't intrude on the economic turf of
another group. But more recent (im)migration e.g. into cities of groups
that were not present earlier gets less tolerance, especially if they
compete for jobs thought to be the domain of older groups.

Hal Schiffman



On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Stan-Sandy Anonby wrote:

> Hi Aurolyn,
>
> There are many examples of bilingual communities enduring a few decades.
> I wouldn't call them anomalies, nor call them stable. But what I'd
> really like to see is people who use their L1 in the home and the L2
> with outsiders for many generations. What communities today have all
> been bilingual for hundreds of years?
>
> Stan
>
> On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:01:00 -0700 (PDT)
>  Aurolyn Luykx <aurolynluykx at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Hi al,
> >
> > Stan wrote:
> >  >From my perspective in Brazil, I think economics
> > > has much more to do with L1 loss than politics does.
> >
> >
> > That's pretty much what I meant -- politic-economic
> > reasons. My point to Hamo was just that it DOESN'T
> > happen for reasons inherent to language learning per
> > se.
> >
> > > It is possible for individuals to retain two
> > > languages, but this usually doesn't last more than a
> > > few decades. Most communities don't feel it's worth
> > > their effort for everyone to speak both languages.
> >
> > I don't think "communities" (or even individuals) make
> > their language choices on that sort of conscious,
> > cost-benefit basis. If people are socialized to learn
> > two languages, and have contexts in which their two
> > languages are used, they'll use them. This describes a
> > lot of communities in which people learn one language
> > at home for "domestic" use, but learn another as a lg.
> > of wider communication. Such situations may not
> > constitute a majority, world-wide, but there are
> > certainly enough of them (and enough that endure for
> > more than a few decades) that they can't be dismissed
> > as mere anomalies.
> > Aurolyn
> >
> >
> >
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