Representative case studies

We will look at cases in which three main factors, group size, institutional support, and generational differences as well as related factors, seem to count in maintenance and shift.

4.6.1 Where numbers and related factors may make a difference Are we referring to large groups of speakers or only a handful? Are we speak-ing of an indigenous group or immigrant peoples? Does it matter if the group lives closely together? How important are these factors in the hierarchy of all important factors?

4.6.1.1 Hungarians as a minority group in Slovakia

Size of group seems to mean more for an indigenous minority group in a nation with a different official language than it means for an immigrant group in a nation new to them. For example, consider the minority group of Hungarians living in Slovakia where Slovak is the official language. For these Hungarians, a combination of group size and a linguistic culture that equates language with ethnicity and even with nation are perhaps the two most im-portant factors that figure in the maintenance-or-shift equation.

At least according to the 1991 census, more than 10% of the population in Slovakia listed Hungarian as their mother tongue. Furthermore, the Hungar-ian population is grouped in a compact area on the Slovak-HungarHungar-ian border.

This is a rural area of small villages; in more than 400 villages, the Hungarian population is more than 50% and in more than 200 it is 80% (Lanstyák and Szabómihály, 1995).

Schooling in Hungarian and access to standard Hungarian via the mass media are both available. Still, in 1995 the Slovak majority tried to implement a program to increase the teaching of Slovak in minority schools. This move was rejected by the Hungarian minority and the issue has not been resolved.

They see their ethnolinguistic vitality tied to full functionality in their lan-guage, and this includes education in the language (Langman, 2002). Given all these facts, but especially the size and distribution of the Hungarian commun-ity in Slovakia, as well as the proximcommun-ity and psychological support of Hungary, it seems very likely that Hungarians in Slovakia will retain their L1 – even while they are bilingual in Slovak.

4.6.1.2 Hungarians as a minority group in Austria

These Hungarians in Slovakia contrast in their L1 maintenance with those around the town of Oberwart in Austria (Gal, 1979). There, the Hungarian minority also is near a border with Hungary, but it is surrounded by German-speaking villages and the number of Hungarian speakers is declining. The

small size of the community may make the difference here, as well as the norm to speak German in the town when German monolinguals are present.

All the Hungarians are bilingual in German, the only official language in Austria. Further, German is the language associated with socio-economic mobility and jobs in the town. At least at the time of Gal’s study, a change for these individuals from Hungarian as their main language to German was in progress.

4.6.1.3 Vietnamese as an immigrant language

Evidence that a large number of speakers is not enough to guarantee that an L1 be maintained comes from the Vietnamese community in California.

In the California schools, Vietnamese is the second-largest language group (not counting English), following Spanish (Young and Tran, 1999). But the fact that the Vietnamese are an immigrant community in the United States, where monolingualism in English is the pattern for many, seems to be an impetus pushing immigrants in general to shift to English.

A survey of 106 Vietnamese parents showed that although they claim Viet-namese is the sole language in almost 85% of the homes, children speak a good deal of English. A third of the children said they speak both Vietnamese and English among themselves, but almost 22% said they speak only English with peers and siblings. Clearly, the children are on their way to shifting to English.

In addition to the large numbers in this immigrant group, there are other factors that would make you think the L1 would be maintained better than it is. They live closely together; they celebrate Vietnamese cultural events;

there are churches, temples and even a Vietnamese Parent–Teacher Associ-ation to reinforce Vietnamese. But the shift to English seems very rapid. The only factor that correlated with more Vietnamese use was a short length of stay. The longer the length of stay, the more shift to English, even though – ironically – the longer the stay, the more the parent encouraged the child to speak Vietnamese.

4.6.2 Shift or not in long-term immigrant groups

Another study, this time of a long-term immigrant group in Jordan, the Armenians, shows a shift that is not surprising, given the length of stay, although other factors might have predicted more maintenance than exists.

The Armenian refugee community (forced to flee from their homeland in Turkish Armenia) has been in Jordan since the 1910s. Most of them are well integrated into Jordanian society; however, they do not frequently inter-marry with other Jordanians and they are Christians in an Islamic society. For the 110 subjects studied, Arabic is their main language and is used in a wide range of domains (Al-Khatib, 2001). Even at home with parents, only 22%

reported they used only Armenian while 49% said they used only Arabic.

The Armenians contrast with a Chechen immigrant community in Jordan.

First, the Armenians are much fewer (about 4,000 compared with about 8,000 Chechens). Second, the Chechens live in tightly knit communities. The Chechens also have more institutional support, with their own cultural associations and magazines, dating back to the Caucasian Club, established in 1932 (Dweik, 2000).

They also hold better jobs than the Armenians, jobs that involve more contact with other Jordanians. When asked, “Which language is more useful to you?”

just over half of both male and female Armenians said Arabic and about 28%

said both Arabic and Armenian. In contrast, in response to the same question, 30% of Chechens said Arabic was more useful and 58% said both Arabic and Chechen. High percentages of both groups of subjects said it was important to them to speak Arabic. But while half of the Armenian men said “yes” to the question “Is Armenian dying in your home?”, only 5% of the Chechens answered “yes” to this same question about their language.

Most of the Armenians studied still identify as Armenians and believe as long as their names remain Armenian their culture will survive. But this attitude is weaker in the third and fourth generation and a few of them have Arabic given names. Even while Armenians say Armenian is “better”, they clearly have an instrumental attachment to Arabic. That is, they see it as a valuable means of communication and more useful than Armenian. How do the Chechens differ? Clearly, they also find Arabic very useful at the societal level. But perhaps because they are more numerous and they live together and because their networks must show strong ties (for example, through their cultural associations), they also find Chechen useful at the group level.

4.6.3 In-migrants to the city: transitory or not

Finally, consider a case that is halfway between that of an indigenous minority and an immigrant group, the Nupe people who live in the large Nigerian city of Ibadan. Strictly speaking, the Nupes are not immigrants because they are an indigenous people to the north of Ibadan. But they are immigrants from the perspective that Ibadan was originally a city peopled by the large and power-ful Yoruba ethnic group. Even though today Ibadan is multi-ethnic, the Yoruba predominate and the Yoruba language is the main lingua franca. Details re-ported here come from field work conducted in 1986 (Oyetade, 1995). At that time, there were about 1,000 Nupe in Ibadan, but the numbers varied because of the movement of individuals back and forth to the Nupe home area. Oyetade studied a sample of 45 who were all bilingual in Nupe and Yoruba, with 84%

reporting they learned Yoruba after coming to Ibadan.

4.6.3.1 Learning other languages, but maintaining the L1

The Nupe case is a good example of the effects of vertical multilingualism.

That is, even though they tend to live in one urban area (with the Hausa,

fellow northerners), which has its own market where products from the north are sold, the degree of ethnic mixing in Ibadan is great. Oyetade lists eight major ethnic groups (including Nupe) in the city in addition to the Yoruba.

Many of the adult Nupes are traders or hold unskilled jobs in factories or the various institutions in the city; some of the women are market sellers. Almost half of the subjects (44%) were school-age children attending school; not sur-prisingly they were very proficient in Yoruba because it is the medium of instruction.

The result is that nearly every Nupe person who has contacts outside the home is bi- or trilingual. In a spatial organization and psychological outlook such as one finds in a city like Ibadan, the only way one can avoid becoming bilingual in the urban lingua franca is to stay home. And, in fact, many of the women do just that (the Nupe are Moslems) and so show much less profi-ciency in Yoruba than the men. (Only 12% of the women were considered very proficient in Yoruba compared with 53% of the men.)

4.6.3.2 Saliency of ethnicity counts

However, under vertical multilingualism, the interesting point is that the mother tongue is not necessarily threatened. Rather, what you find is an allo-cation of the L1 to some in-group functions and the L2 to some out-group functions, and both languages to those functions that are in between (neighbors and friends). Two pictures emerge: (1) Nupe is the definite choice in some situations. All the men said they used only Nupe in the home, except for one man with a Yoruba wife who used both Nupe and Yoruba with her. Also, in a sub-sample of adolescents and young adults (N=25 in the 8 to 21 age range), self-reports indicated that they used Nupe almost exclusively with parents and even with other children. The self-reports of parents corrobor-ated these findings. (2) But when it comes to talk outside the home, then Yoruba takes on prominence. Adults use mainly Yoruba in their work. Chil-dren speak mainly Yoruba at school, and also some English, but no Nupe at all, not even when talking during class breaks. (The choice at breaks is Yoruba for 95%.)

When talking to neighbors, 55% of parents (N=20) reported using both Yoruba and Nupe, but 25% reported using only Yoruba. With friends, parents reported no Yoruba alone, but 65% said they used both languages. The adoles-cents and young adults reported more Yoruba with both neighbors and friends, with 40% reporting Yoruba on its own. A higher percentage reported both Yoruba and Nupe (48% with neighbors and 44% with friends).

At least on the basis of this study, it looks like the Nupe will continue to use Yoruba, the main local lingua franca, extensively outside of the home. Given the fact that English is the main official language in Nigeria (along with Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa), it is also likely that the more educated young Nupes may also use a fair amount of English and probably also Nigerian Pidgin English.

But the point is that it also looks likely that they will continue to speak Nupe in the family.

How representative is this picture? Elsewhere, if the main place the L1 is used extensively is the family domain, that is not enough to mean main-tenance for the L1 in succeeding generations. But it is possible that African attachments to the mother tongue are stronger than they are elsewhere, at least if we are talking about an indigenous group’s mother tongue (not a true immigrant population).

There are three reasons why ethnicity may be more salient in African cities than it is among either the Vietnamese in California or the Armenians in Jordan. By extension, the same reasons can apply elsewhere. First, one prac-tical reason: Even though they may live in a large city, indigenous in-migrants from other areas in an African context are typically not far from their ethnic homeland, so there is a good deal of traffic back and forth. Second, one very instrumental reason: Africans (and possibly others elsewhere) rely on fellow ethnic group members in helping them locate jobs. True, members of one’s own ethnic group may be helpful, but possibly nowhere is speaking your group’s language the ethnic password that it is in Africa. Third, a psycholo-gical reason: Speaking several languages is something most Africans have always done, even in the rural areas.

One might say it is part of the ideology of Nupes in Ibadan to be multilin-gual. And in cities, this expectation of becoming bilingual is simply magnified by the presence of many ethnic groups in close quarters. Learning a lingua franca makes communication across groups easy. Further, in the city, one ethnic group can see that their neighbors are all doing the same thing: Each group maintains its L1 while learning at least the main urban lingua franca, if not even more other languages.

4.6.4 French in Canada beyond Québec

Once French Canadians move beyond Québec (obviously the main strong-hold of French in Canada), maintenance of French becomes problematic. This is even the case when francophones don’t move far. Raymond Mougeon and Edouard Beniak (1989) document French maintenance and shift to English in Welland, a city close to the Niagara Falls and in Ontario Province, which has the largest francophone minority outside of Québec. In the 1996 census, 23%

of the Canadian population said their L1 was French and 17% of the entire population said they were bilingual in French and English.

But in Welland, neither the Catholic Church nor the school system, tradi-tionally crucial institutions in language maintenance, have been able to stem the move to English among French-Canadian families. Even when Mougeon and Beniak gathered their data in the 1980s, they reported that the current French Catholic parish priest had to take on a bilingual assistant to handle the

various requests for religious ceremonies in English or in both languages (funerals, baptisms, weddings, masses, etc.). Already at that time, young French people could receive their entire education in French, but Mougeon and Beniak report that “the students overwhelmingly use English for peer-group com-munication on the school premises . . . They will even try to use English with school personnel if they can get away with it” (pp. 290–1).

The strongest evidence of a shift to English is that the Mougeon and Beniak study shows that 54% of francophone adults who are of the prime child-rearing age (25–44) use English as their home language. It is no surprise, then, that “significant proportions” of the groups aged 24 and less do not speak French at home. True, there is much bilingualism and 75% of the older bilinguals (55+) say they are French-dominant. But 52% of the younger adults (20–34) are English-dominant bilinguals. Therefore, they are more likely to give up using French, their weaker language, at home.

Finally, another factor promoting shift in the Welland area is the rising incidence of linguistically mixed marriages. By the period 1973–5, the rate of such marriages was already over 50%. In these marriages, English typically becomes the home language for two reasons. First, English has more instru-mental value in the area (on the job, memos are written in English, foremen typically give instructions in English, etc.). Second, Mougeon and Beniak state that Welland anglophones are “massively unilingual” (i.e. they speak only English). An earlier survey by Mougeon in the 1970s showed that almost half of linguistically mixed couples chose to send their children to French-language schools. This finding and other studies imply the conclusion that for the chil-dren of these parents, any French they learn is learned at school and used mostly in that setting.

Whether French will survive in Welland is hard to judge; certainly, it is not a robust language there compared with English. At the very least, bilingual-ism will dominate among the francophones. Even at the time of the Mougeon and Beniak study, 90% of the age group 5–14 was bilingual. Other students of language maintenance and shift claim that bilingualism does not necessarily entail shift, and we have cited studies that show this. But becoming bilingual mainly (or exclusively) by learning and using the minority language in the school system means that children will be unlikely to have complete mastery of the grammar of that language. And what school learners often miss learn-ing are the styles more associated with informal situations. Given these con-siderations, francophones in Welland are unlikely to pass French on to their children.

Mougeon and Beniak point out that the home language on any survey is often too gross to be a reliable measure of shift. If the survey has only a single question about language use in the home, it does not differentiate between language use among parents and between parent and child; nor do census questions generally take account of the type of situation, such as whether conversation is one-on-one with a child or when the child is also talking to

siblings. With a finer-grained questionnaire, Mougeon and Beniak suggest that the reported rate of shift to English might be even higher than indicated.

4.6.5 Where institutional support matters: Singapore

At the same time as L1 maintenance without any official support works in Africa (as long as the speakers are bilingual), it does not work everywhere. In general, institutional support can make a big difference in whether speakers will retain their L1. An excellent example is what is happening in Singapore.

What has been a multilingual nation is gradually becoming a three-language nation.

When the British Sir Stamford Raffles landed in 1819 at Singapore, a small island at the tip of the Malayan peninsula, it was a fishing village with only a little over 100 Malays and a handful of Chinese living there. It became a British colony, and today the island republic is one of the major economies in Southeast Asia, with a population of more than three and a half million. The sharpest increase has been in the number of Chinese. But there also have been many in-migrants from the other places in Southeast Asia and from India.

Many people think of Singapore today in terms of these three groups, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, but there are many different sub-groups, each originally with its own L1. The Chinese immigrants came from different areas and spoke varieties of southern Chinese dialects that are largely very different from each other. Hokkien and Cantonese are examples. The majority of the Malays spoke Malay, but some spoke other languages, such as Javanese from Indonesia.

Some Indians spoke languages from the north of India, such as Punjabi and Hindustani, but more spoke South Indian languages in the Dravidian family,

Some Indians spoke languages from the north of India, such as Punjabi and Hindustani, but more spoke South Indian languages in the Dravidian family,