Endangered languages

[Patrick, Peter L]

Several sorts of confusion here... This is not so much to argue with
Claire as to be provocative, to make us think a little harder about the
Q.

If Canada is (as I suspect) still in N America, there is stable
multilingualism in the continent on a national/ official level. (So, I
believe, is Mexico, but let that pass for now!)

"Stable" cannot usefully mean "undergoing no change at all", but has to
mean something loosely like healthy, able to persist, not rapidly
disappearing in the next century (after all, over 1000 years, almost
nothing is stable!). But since French/English bilingualism is very
localised, I'll bet the percent of speakers in Canada does not rise to
CB's unstated level.

Secondly, nations are not generally "communities" in any useful sense,
and even more rarely speech communities. To generalise about
multilingualism at a national level is very different than at a (speech)
community level. There are certainly multilingual speech communities
within the US, some of them old and stable by the definition below. 
	Thirdly, as speech communities are not necessarily political
units, and language census problems are well-known, it's difficult to
see how one can apply population ratios (though it has been tried) in a
simple and straightforward way. An exercise better-known to me was Derek
Bickerton's attempt to specify a population ratio requirement for
creolization to take place (e.g. 1984 in BBS), which failed miserably as
it was too simplistic. 
	For that matter, what is "the proportion of the US who are
multilingual"? One could make a start by browsing at
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/lang_use.html 
In 2000, 18 percent of the total population aged 5 and over (47.0
million people) reported they spoke a language other than English at
home, and 92.7% of these said they spoke English to some degree. This
gives roughly 43.5 million people in the US (16.7%) who report being
able to speak at least two languages (one of which is English - that's
the Census's bias). Obviously the total number must be larger, incl.
those multilingual in two-plus languages other than English.
	Of course, this is all self-report data, so likely to be
erroneous in all possible directions, and a poor predictor of stable
bilingualism - but it addresses CB's two criteria (domain: use English
at home, proportion: but what is her desired proportion? Greater or less
than 17%?) in minimal fashion, and exposes that things are very much
more complicated than suggested...
	In my view, the main reason that the US is not commonly seen as
multilingual is ideological. This drives both the facts and changes of
societal language choice, and colors linguists' beliefs. For millions of
people - not a negligible number - daily life in the US is multilingual
in ways that are probably not transient. Perhaps Claire is opposing
herself to the prevailing monolingual ideology, rather than to this
common fact...
 
Peter L. Patrick
Dept. of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ, U.K.
patrickp at essex.ac.uk
(+44) 1206  872088
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu
[mailto:owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu] On Behalf Of Claire Bowern
Sent: 04 October 2006 17:15
To: linganth at cc.rochester.edu
Subject: Re: [Linganth] Endangered languages

A quick comment re multilingualism and stability: Pretty much all the 
stable multilingual communities in the world have a couple of 
characteristics. There has to be a certain proportion of the population 
who are multilingual, and it's always much higher than the proportion of

the US who are multilingual. Secondly, there have to be established 
domains for each language. The US has neither at a national level 
(although plenty of examples of both at the local level).
Claire

> "unstable?" Who is to say that North America won't become like other
> parts of the world with long histories of stable multilingualism?
>