Language maintenance and language shift as strategies of social reproduction

Abstract

Strategies of language ‘assimilation and dissimilation’ (Bourdieu, 1991) are inevitably and unavoidably linked to the more general strategies of social reproduction adopted by groups and individuals (i.e. the strategies by which each generation endeavours to transmit to the following generation the advantages it holds). Thus strategies of social mobility that involve, for example, education, changes of occupation, changes of residence or migration, are all likely to have linguistic consequences. The very anticipation of such strategies may, in fact, carry implications for language behaviour in advance of the actual move itself. However, to examine the linguistic consequences of strategies of social reproduction, the strategies themselves have to be ‘situated’ (Giddens, 1984) in space and time, i.e. located with regard to the territorial organisation of the local community and the relationship of this to the wider national and international economy. The territorial organisation of communities includes not only the daily patterns of social interaction as members of the community move between home, workplace, school, shop, church and other services but also more extensive movements of people and capital, including all forms of migration and tourism. These patterns of interaction are, of course, subject to change as the area responds to the opportunities and pressures of its external environment. From the viewpoint of language maintenance in a bilingual context, a crucial question concerns the way changes in strategies of reproduction affect network boundaries, or in more formal sociological terms, the degree to which the social networks of a language community are open or closed. Depending on the language allegiances, the relative number and social characteristics of the participants entering or leaving social networks, these processes can have a cumulative effect on language patterns. Current theories of language maintenance and language shift—in particular, those drawing on network concepts are assessed from this perspective and reference is made to a recently completed study of change in an Irish‐speaking community in south‐west Ireland.

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