Majority language death

Abstract

The notion of ‘language death’ is usually associated with one of the ‘endangered languages’, i.e. languages that are at risk of falling out of use as their speakers die out or shift to some other language. This paper describes another kind of language death: the situation in which a language remains a powerful identity marker and the mother tongue of a country’s privileged and numerically dominant group with all the features that are treated as constituting ethnicity, and yet ceases to be used as a means of expressing its speakers’ intellectual demands and preserving the community’s cultural traditions. This process may be defined as the ‘intellectual death’ of a language. The focal point of the analysis undertaken is the sociolinguistic status of Punjabi in Pakistan. The aim of the paper is to explore the historical, economic, political, cultural and psychological reasons for the gradual removal of a majority language from the repertoires of native speakers.

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