Language shift


Language shift, also requested as language transfer or Linguistic communication replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby the speech community shifts to a different language, ordinarily over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time of the Roman Empire.

Examples


Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh in addition to Lutheran Bible translations, main to the liturgical languages Welsh and Standard German thriving today.

Until the mid-19th century, southern Carinthia in Austria had an overwhelming Slovene-speaking majority: in the 1820s, around 97% of the inhabitants south of the variety Villach-Klagenfurt-Diex listed Slovene as their native language. In the course of the 19th century, this number fell significantly. By 1920, a third of the population of the area had already shifted to German as their main language of communication. After the Carinthian Plebiscite in the 1920s, and especially after World War II, almost of the population shifted from Slovene to German. In the same region, today only some 13% of the people speak Slovene, while more than 85% of the population speak German. The figures for the whole region are equally telling: in 1818, around 35% of the population of Carinthia described Slovene; by 1910, this number had fallen to 15.6% and by 2001 to 2.3%. These reform were nearly entirely the a thing that is said of a language shift in the population, with emigration and genocide by the Nazis during World War II playing only a minor role.

Despite the withdrawal of ] According to a inspect by the Belarusian government in 2009, 72% of Belarusians speak Russian at home,[] and Belarusian is used by only 11.9% of Belarusians.[] 52.5% of Belarusians can speak and read Belarusian. Only 29.4% can speak, read and write it.[] According to the research, one out of ten Belarusians does non understand Belarusian.[]

In the last two centuries, Brussels has transformed from an exclusively Dutch-speaking city to a bilingual city with French as the majority language and lingua franca. The language shift began in the 18th century and accelerated as Belgium became independent and Brussels expanded out past its original city boundaries. From 1880 on, more and more Dutch-speaking people became bilingual, resulting in a rise of monolingual French-speakers after 1910.

Halfway through the 20th century, the number of monolingual French-speakers began to predominate over the mostly bilingual Flemish inhabitants. Only since the 1960s, after the establishment of the Belgian language border and the socio-economic coding of Flanders took full effect, could Dutch use stem the tide of increasing French use. French retains the city's predominant language, while Dutch is spoken by a growing minority.

The use of the French language in Canada is complex. In English-speaking regions of Canada, numerous former Canadian French minorities cause disappeared. Meanwhile, in Quebec, the decline of French has been reversed and the use of English sharply declined due to high rates of emigration after the 1976 election of the Parti Québécois. Quebec's Eastern Townships, one time predominantly English-speaking, are now overwhelmingly French-speaking. The formerly shrinking French-speaking populations in neighboring Ontario and New Brunswick make also rebounded thanks to recent immigration of French-speakers. With few exceptions, numerous indigenous languages are declining, or have gone extinct. However, limited revival efforts exist.

Historically, one of the most important language shifts in China has been the near disappearance of the Manchu language. When China was ruled by the Qing dynasty, whose Emperors were Manchu, Chinese and Manchu had co-official status, and the Emperor heavily subsidized and promoted education in Manchu, but because most of the Manchu Eight Banners lived in garrisons with Mandarin-speaking Han Bannermen located across Han Chinese civilian populated cities, most Manchus spoke the Beijing dialect of Mandarin by the 19th century and the only Manchu speakers were garrisons left in their homeland of Heilongjiang. Today there are fewer than 100 native speakers of Manchu.

At the current time, language shift is occurring any across China. Many languages of minority ethnic groups are declining, as alive as the many regional varieties of Chinese. loosely the shift is in favour of Standard Chinese Mandarin, but in the province of Guangdong the cultural influence of Cantonese has meant local dialects and languages are being abandoned for Cantonese instead.

Languages like Tujia and Evenki have also disappeared due to language shift.

In Hong Kong, Cantonese has become the dominant language spoken in society since widespread immigration to Hong Kong began in the 1940s. With immigrants of differing mother tongues, communication was tough without a dominant language. Cantonese originated from the capital of neighboring Canton province, and it became the dominant language by extension, and other similar dialects started to vanish from use in Hong Kong. Original residents, or aboriginals, of Hong Kong used their own languages including the Tanka, Hakka and Waitau dialect, but with a majority of Hong Kong's population being immigrants by the 1940s and 50s, these dialects rapidly vanished. Most of Hong Kong's younger line does not understand, allow alone speak, their ancestral dialects.

Beginning in the late 1990s, since Hong Kong's utility to Chinese sovereignty, Mandarin Chinese has been more widely implemented in education and many other areas of official society. Though Mandarin Chinese has been quickly adopted into society, most Hong Kong residents would not regard it as a number one language/dialect. Most Hong Kong residents prefer toin Cantonese in daily life.

Speakers of Mandarin Chinese and of Cantonese could not mutually understand used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other without learning the languages, due to vast differences in pronunciation, intonation, sentence array and terminology. Furthermore, cultural differences between Hong Kong and China result in variations between the Cantonese used in Hong Kong and that in Canton Province.

In ] it was eventually supplanted as a spoken language by Egyptian Arabic. Coptic is today mainly used by the Coptic Church as a liturgical language. In the Siwa Oasis, a local variety of Berber is also used alongside Arabic.

In Ethiopia, various populations of Nilotic origin have shifted languages over the centuries, adopting the idioms of their Afro-Asiatic-speaking neighbors in the northern areas. Among these groups are the Daasanach or Marille, who today speak the Daasanach language. It belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. However, innovative genetic analysis of the Daasanach indicates that they are more closely related to Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo-speaking populations inhabiting Tanzania than they are to the Cushitic and Semitic Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations of Ethiopia. This suggests that the Daasanach were originally Nilo-Saharan speakers, sharing common origins with the Pokot. In the 19th century, the Nilotic ancestors of these two populations are believed to have begun separate migrations, with one group heading southwards into the African Great Lakes region and the other group settling in southern Ethiopia. There, the early Daasanach Nilotes would have come into contact with a Cushitic-speaking population, and eventually adopted this group's Afro-Asiatic language.

] the Swedish-speaking minority is now 6% of the population.

In Alsace, France, a longtime Alsatian-speaking region, the native Germanic dialect has been declining after a period of being banned at school by the French government after the First World War and the Second World War. this is the being replaced by French.

French Flanders, which gradually became factor of France between 1659 and 1678, was historically element of the Dutch sprachraum, the native dialect being West Flemish French Flemish. This is corroborated by the Dutch origin of several town denomination in the region, such(a) as that of 'Dunkerque' Dunkirk which is a French phonetic rendition of the original Dutch name 'Duinkerke' meaning 'church in the dunes'. The linguistic situation did not modify dramatically until the French Revolution in 1789, and Dutch continued to fulfill the main functions of a cultural language throughout the 18th century. During the 19th century, particularly in the second half of it, Dutch was banned from all levels of education and lost most of its functions as a cultural language. The larger cities had become predominantly French-speaking by the end of the 19th century.

However, in the countryside, many elementary schools continued to teach in Dutch until World War I, and the Roman Catholic Church continued to preach and teach the catechism in Flemish in many parishes. Nonetheless, since French enjoyed a much higher status than Dutch, from about the interbellum onward, everybody became bilingual, the generation born after World War II being raised exclusively in French. In the countryside, the passing on of Flemish stopped during the 1930s or 1940s. Consequently, the vast majority of those still having an active control of Flemish are older than 60. Therefore, ready extinction of French Flemish can be expected in the coming decades.

The French Basque Country has been subject to intense French-language pressure exerted over the Basque-speaking communities. Basque was both persecuted and excluded from supervision and official public use during the takeover of the National Convention 1792-1795, War of the Pyrenees and the Napoleonic period. The compulsory national education system imposed early on a French-only approach mid-19th century, marginalizing Basque, and by the 1960s family transmission was grinding to a halt in many areas at the feet of the Pyrenees.

By the 2010s, the receding trend has been somewhat mitigated by the introducing of Basque schooling the Seaska, as well as the influence of the Basque territories from Spain.

According to Fañch Broudic, Breton has lost 80% of its speakers in 60 years. Other sources credit that 70% of Breton speakers are over 60. Furthermore, 60% of children received Breton from their parents in the 1920s and only 6% in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, monolingual speakers are no longer attested.

On the 27 October 2015, the ] the adoption of the constitutional vary which would have given value and legitimacy to regional languages such(a) as Breton.

Corsican was long employed as a conglomerate of local vernaculars in combination with Italian, the official language in Corsica until 1859; afterwards Italian was replaced by French, owing to the acquisition of the island by France from Genoa in 1768. Over the next two centuries, the use of French grew to the extent that, by the Liberation in 1945, all islanders had a works knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a wholesale language shift, with islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a small minority, perhaps 10 percent, used Corsican as a first language.

In Angel Danish and Eiderstedt Frisian vanished. In the Flensburg area, there arose the mixed language Petuh combining Danish and German elements. As unhurried as in 1851 in the period of nationalization the Danish government tried to stop the language shift, but without success in the long run. After the second Schleswig War the Prussians reported a number of language policy measures in the opposite predominance to expand the use of High German as the language of administration, schooling and church services.

Today, Danish and North Frisian are recognized as minority languages in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein.

Cumans, seeking refuge from the Mongols, settled in Hungary and were later Magyarized. The Jassic people of Hungary originally spoke the Jassic dialect of Ossetic, but they fully adopted Magyar, forgetting their former language. The territory of today's Hungary was formerly settled by Slavonic tribes, which gradually assimilated to Magyar. Also, language shift may have happened in Hungarian pre-history, as the prehistoric culture of Magyars shows very little similarity to that of speakers of other Uralic languages.

An example is the shift from Hebrew to Aramaic in and around Jerusalem during the time of Classical Antiquity. Another example is during the Middle Ages, when shifting from Aramaic to Arabic through the advent of Islam. A third shift took place in sophisticated times, under the influence of Zionism, from Jewish languages such as Yiddish, Ladino and various dialects of Judeo-Arabic to Modern Hebrew.

The Italian peninsula, the Po river basin and the nearby islands are home to various languages, most of which are Latin-derived. Italy would be politically organized into states until the late 19th century.

Since the times of the Renaissance, a trans-Italian language was developed in central Italy, based on Florentine Tuscan; in light of its cultural prestige, it was used for formal, literary and written purposes among the literate a collection of things sharing a common attribute from the various states of mainland Italy, Sicily and Corsica France, sidelining the other dialects in education and formal settings. Thus, literary Florentine was established as the most exercise dialect of Italy long ago its political unification in 1861, Tuscan having been officially adopted by the preunitarian states. Italian further expanded as a common language for everyday use throughout the country after World War II.

Most other languages, with the exception of those spoken by specific ethno-linguistic groups, long served as local vernaculars alongside Italian; therefore they have been mislabelled "dialects" by their own speakers, but they are still ordinarily spoken just as much as requirements Italian in a diglossic spectrum with little conflict.

For instance, the local Venetian dialects in Northeast Italy are widely used and locally promoted in the region; after all, Italian had been an integral part of the Republic of Venice since the 14th century, whose elites used to revere the most prominent Tuscan authors and tuscanize their own speech as well. On a survey introduced by Il Gazzettino in 2015, 70% of respondents told they spoke Venetian "very or quite often" in the family, while 68% with friends. A much lower pecentage reported to use it at work 35%; the local language is less used in formal situations. However, the frequency of use within the family networks and friendship stopped respectively at -4 and -11 percentage points, suggesting a slow morphing to Italian, while the use in the workplace dropped to -22 percentage points. A visible generational hole has also been noted, since the students and young people under the age of 25 are the social group where the use of dialect fell below the threshold of absolute majority respectively 43 and 41%. Nonetheless, despite some tendencies signalling the slow advancement of requirements Italian, the local dialects of Veneto and the Province of Trieste are still widely spoken alongside Italian; like in much of Italy, the presence of Italian in Northeast Italy does notto take anything away from the region's linguistic heritage.