LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Damin, Socalled, Indigenous Australians

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Clifford Burgess

Document Summary

Consider language shift: a sudden or gradual move from one language to another. This term may refer to a community of speakers or to an individual: you see this in immigrant families over two or three generations. A large local community of speakers can halt widespread shift. A real commitment to keeping the language alive through schools and special activities can help: marriage within the linguistic community is often a guarantee that the native language won"t erode completely. Language death: again, this refers not to the individual speaker, but rather to the language itself: there are no native speakers left in a situation of language death. But this availed them nothing and the language and culture went into steep decline: despite revitalization efforts in the 1980s maori is an (cid:862)official language(cid:863) of new. Of course we do(cid:374)"t need to look to new zealand for indigenous languages in dire straits .