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Language shift, also known as language transfer, language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be of higher-status stabilize or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived—even by their own speakers—to have lower status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time of the Roman Empire.
Language assimilation may operate alongside other aspects of cultural assimilation when different cultures meet and merge.
Assimilation is the process whereby a speech-community becomes bilingual and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of the speech-community that speaks the second language more often at home. The data are used to measure the use of a given language in the lifetime of a person, or most often across generations. When a speech-community ceases to use their original language, language death is said to occur.
David Anthony notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through "chain-type folk migrations", but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which are emulated by large groups of people. Anthony explains:
Anthony gives the example of the Luo-speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century, whose language spread rapidly in the 19th century. Anthony notes that "Indo-European languages probably spread in a similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe", carried forward by "Indo-European chiefs" and their "ideology of political clientage". Anthony notes that "elite recruitment" may be a suitable term for this system.
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 development of Flanders took full effect, could Dutch use stem the tide of increasing French use. Now buttressed by immigration from the former French Africa, French remains the city's predominant language, while Dutch is spoken by a minority.
At the current time, language shift is occurring all across China. Many languages of minority ethnic groups are declining, as well as the many regional varieties of Chinese. Generally the shift is in favour of Standard Chinese (Mandarin Chinese), 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 language and Evenki language are also disappearing 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 hard without a dominant language. Cantonese originated from the capital of neighboring Guangzhou 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 people, Hakka Chinese 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 generation does not understand, let alone speak, their ancestral dialects.
Beginning in the late 1990s, since Hong Kong's return 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 first language/dialect. Most Hong Kong residents prefer to communicate in Cantonese in daily life.
Speakers of Mandarin Chinese and of Cantonese cannot mutually understand each other without learning the languages, due to vast differences in pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure 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.
Like in Hong Kong, Cantonese is also the dominant language spoken in Macau after the widespread immigration there in the 1940s. Also, despite being a Portuguese colony for over four centuries, the Portuguese language was never widely spoken in Macau and remained limited to administration and higher education. It was spoken primarily by the Portuguese settlers, Macanese people, and elites and middle-class people of Chinese ethnicity. As a consequence, when Macau was handed back to China in 1999, Portuguese did not have a strong presence like English had in Hong Kong and continued its decline which began when Macau was still under Portuguese rule. Thus, even the Macanese people (Eurasians of mixed Portuguese and Chinese ancestry) switched from Portuguese to Cantonese as their first language, and Eurasian children of various backgrounds switched from Portuguese- to English-medium high school education, particularly as many parents recognised the reducing value of Portuguese schooling. Most Macanese at present learn Portuguese as a foreign language.An example of these is Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes:
Since Macau's return to Chinese sovereignty at the start of the new millennium, Mandarin Chinese has also been more widely implemented in education and many other areas of official society. However, most Macau residents would not regard it as a first language/dialect and choose to speak Cantonese in daily life.
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. It is being replaced by French.Veltman & Denis (1989) Le declin du dialecte alsacien.
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 command of Flemish are older than 60. Therefore, complete extinction of French Flemish can be expected in the coming decades., by Hugo Ryckeboer. University of Ghent.
The French Basque Country has been subject to intense French-language pressure exerted over the Basque-speaking communities. In the late 1800s, the Basque language was both persecuted and excluded from administration and official public use during the takeover of the National Convention, during the War of the Pyrenees, and during the Napoleonic era. 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 establishment of Basque schooling (the ) spearheaded by the network Seaska, as well as the influence of the Basque territories from Spain.
According to Fañch Broudic, Breton language has lost 80% of its speakers in 60 years. Other sources mention 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 Senate rejected the draft law on ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages driving away the assumption of Congress for the adoption of the constitutional reform which would have given value and legitimacy to regional languages such as Breton.
Today, Danish and North Frisian are recognized as minority languages in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein.
The Frisian varieties in Northwest Germany were almost entirely replaced by Low German and later standard German and only remain in a relatively small language island called Saterfrisian. North Frisian varieties fared somewhat better (see above)
Since the times of the Renaissance, a trans-Italian language was developed in central Italy, based on Florence Tuscan dialect; in light of its cultural prestige, it was used for formal, literary and written purposes among the literate classes 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 representative dialect of Italy long before its Risorgimento 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 usually spoken just as much as standard Italian in a Diglossia 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 made 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 percentage 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 gap 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 standard 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 not seem to take anything away from the region's linguistic heritage.
Like the aforementioned case of Northeast Italy, even in Southern Italy and Sicily the local dialects from the Italo-Dalmatian family are widely used in combination with standard Italian, depending upon the social context. More specifically, Italian as the prevalent language spoken among family members is spoken the least in Campania (20.7%), Calabria (25.3%) and Sicily (26.6%), contrary to frequency of use of the local dialects (Basilicata, 69.4%; Calabria 68.6%; Campania, 75.2%; Sicily, 68.8%).
Trentino's Cimbrian, a Germanic language related to Bavarian, was spoken by at least 20,000 people in the 19th century, with 3,762 people in 1921 and fewer than 300 in 2007. The same scenario goes for Mòcheno and Walser German.
Unlike the neighbouring island of CorsicaToso, Fiorenzo. Lo spazio linguistico corso tra insularità e destino di frontiera, Università di Udine (France) and elsewhere in today's Italy, where Italian was the standard language shared by the various local elites since the late Middle Ages, Italian was first officially introduced to Sardinia, to the detriment of both Spanish language and Sardinian (the only surviving Neo-Latin language from the Southern branch), only in 1760 and 1764 by the then-ruling House of Savoy, from Piedmont.Bolognesi, Roberto (1998). The Phonology of Campidanian Sardinian: A Unitary Account of a Self-Organizing Structure. Holland Academic Graphics S'italianu in Sardìnnia , Amos Cardia, IskraBolognesi, Roberto; Heeringa, Wilbert. Sardegna fra tante lingue, pp.25, 2005, Condaghes Because of the promotion and enforcement of the Italian language and culture upon the Sardinians since then, the majority of the locals switched over to such politically dominant language and no longer speak their native ones, which have seen steady decline in use. The language has been in fact severely compromised to the point that only 13% of the children are able to speak it,La Nuova Sardegna, 04/11/10, Per salvare i segni dell'identità – di Paolo Coretti and today is mostly kept as a heritage language. With the exception of a few sparsely populated areas where Sardinian can still be heard for everyday purposes, the island's indigenous languages have by now been therefore largely replaced by Italian; the language contact ultimately resulted in the emergence of a specific variety of Italian, slightly divergent from the standard one.
Paraguayan Guarani has been used throughout Paraguayan history as a symbol of nationalistic pride. Populist dictators such as José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia and Alfredo Stroessner used the language to appeal to common Paraguayans, and upon the advent of Paraguayan democracy in 1992, Guarani was enshrined in the new constitution as a co-equal language along with Spanish. Jopara, the mixture of Spanish and Guarani, is spoken by an estimated 90% of the population of Paraguay. Code-switching between the two languages takes place on a spectrum where more Spanish is used for official and business-related matters, whereas more Guarani is used in art and in everyday life.
Another example would be the gradual death of the Kinaray-a language of Panay as many native speakers especially in the province of Iloilo are switching to Hiligaynon or mixing the two languages together. Kinaray-a was once spoken in the towns outside the vicinity of Iloílo City, while Hiligaynon was limited to only the eastern coasts and the city proper. However, due to media and other factors such as urbanization, many younger speakers have switched from Kinaray-a to Hiligaynon, especially in the towns of Cabatuan, Santa Barbara, Calinog, Miagao, Passi City, Guimbal, Tigbauan, Tubungan, etc. Many towns, especially Janiuay, Lambunao, and San Joaquin still have a sizeable Kinaray-a-speaking population, with the standard accent being similar to that spoken in the predominantly Karay-a language province of Antique. Even in the province of Antique, "Hiligaynonization" is an issue to be confronted as the province, especially the capital town of San José de Buenavista, undergoes urbanisation. Many investors from Iloílo City bring with them Hiligaynon-speaking workers who are reluctant to learn the local language.
One of the problems of Kinaray-a is its written form, as its unique "schwa sound" is difficult to represent in orthography. As time goes by, Kinaray-a has disappeared in many areas it was once spoken especially in the island of Mindoro and only remnants of the past remain in such towns as Pinamalayan, Bansud, Gloria, Bongabong, Roxas, Mansalay, and Bulalacao in Oriental Mindoro and Sablayan, Calintaan, San Jose, and Magsaysay in Occidental Mindoro, as Tagalog language has become the standard and dominantly recognised official language of these areas.
Palawan has 52 local languages and dialects. Due to this diversity, internal migration and mass media, Tagalog has effectively taken over as the lingua franca on the island. Same case what happened to Mindanao, it has many native languages and dialects but due to internal migration which started during Spanish era until to this day from people of Visayas and Visayan languages suddenly became the widely spoken languages in the island and some of the local languages are getting influenced and slowly losing its original form.
In Luzon, the provinces of Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, and Pampanga have seen a shift to Tagalog language, The Language Shift from the Middle and Upper Middle-Class Families in the Kapampangan Speaking Region this is because of proximity of the provinces to the native Tagalog-speaking provinces and migration from those. Other Central Luzon areas experience the same situation, like north Nueva Ecija where the dominant native language is ilocano language shifted to Tagalog (many of those who speak Ilocano speak it as second language) and Zambales, there is a shift from Sambal to Ilocano and/or Tagalog. Similarly, younger generations in Davao City are increasingly shifting from Cebuano language to Tagalog as their primary language. Dreisbach, Jeconiah and Feorillo Demeterio III, Language use and preference in the multilingual context of Davao City, Philippines, De La Salle University, 2021.
Nowadays, there is a persistent drop in percentage of speakers of languages other than Russian.
As Aragonese retreated to the sub-Pyrenean valleys, Arabic vanished by the early 17th century, when forced cultural assimilation of the Moriscos was coupled with expulsion (completed in 1614). The arrival of the Bourbons (1700) intensified the centralization of governmental structures and the imposition of Castilian as the only language for official purposes, replacing in 1716 Catalan as the language of Justice Administration in the relevant territories (Nueva Planta Decrees). Unlike Catalan language, Basque language was never a language written on official documents, but was equally affected. It lost ground to Castilian in all its buffer geographic areas, as well as main institutions as a communication language, after a number of decrees and orders established Castilian as "the national language of the Empire" during Charles III's reign; printing in languages other than Spanish was forbidden (1766), and Castilian was the only language taught in school (1768).
The Peninsular War was followed by the centralization of Spain (Constitutions of 1812, 1837, 1845, 1856, etc.), with only the Basque districts keeping a separate status until 1876. Compulsory education in 1856 made the use of Castilian (Spanish) mandatory, as well as discouraging and forbidding the use of other languages in some social and institutional settings. Francoist Spain imposed Spanish as the only valid language for any formal social interaction (1937). By the early 21st century, Spanish was the overwhelmingly dominant language in Spain, with Basque, Catalan, and Galician surviving and developing in their respective regions with different levels of recognition since 1980. Other minorized languages (Asturian, Aragonese) have also seen some recognition in the early 21st century. Catalan, sharing with Basque a strong link between language and identity (especially in Catalonia), enjoys a fairly sound status, however many Catalan speakers think that their language is still in danger, and this perception has brought about a number of campaigns to promote the use of Catalan, for instance Mantinc el català. Basque competence has risen during the last decades, but daily use has not risen accordingly. The Endangered Languages Project has classified Asturian as being at risk and Aragonese as endangered.
When Taiwan was under Japanese rule, Japanese became the official language, with the Japanese government promoting Japanese language education. It also led to the creation of Yilan Creole Japanese, a mixture of Japanese, Atayal language, and Hokkien in Yilan County. In World War II, under the Japanification, Chinese language was banned in newspapers and school lectures, and the usage of Japanese at home was encouraged, so many urban people turned to using Japanese. In 1941, 57% of Taiwanese could speak Japanese.
After the ROC government established rule over Taiwan in 1945, it forbade the use of Japanese in newspapers and schools, and promoted the Standard Chinese movement (links=no) to popularize Standard Mandarin, often through coercive means. In the primary education system, people using local languages would be fined or forced to wear a dialect card. In the mass media, local languages were also discouraged or banned, and some books on the romanization of local languages (e.g. Bibles, lyrics books, Peh-ōe-jī) were banned. In 1975, The Radio and Television Act (links=no) was adopted, restricting the usage of local languages on the radio or TV., 1975 In 1985, after the draft of the Language and Script Law (links=no) was released by the Ministry of Education, it received considerable opposition because it banned the use of Taiwanese unofficial languages in the public domain. In response, some Hakka groups demonstrated to save their language. After 1987 when martial law was lifted, the Guoyu movement ceased.
The shift towards monolingual Mandarin was more pronounced among Hakka-speaking communities, attributed to Hakka's low social prestige. Before the KMT took over the island from Japan, the Hakka were expected to learn both Hokkien and Japanese. However, the lack of a significant Japanese-speaking base for gaining and then retaining Japanese fluency meant that most Hakka learned only Hokkien. When the KMT fled to Taiwan from mainland China, most mainlanders settled mainly in northern Taiwan, close to Hakka-speaking areas, thus spurring a linguistic shift from Hokkien to Mandarin within the Taipei area. As the bulk of economic activity centered around patronage networks revolving around Mandarin-speaking KMT membership, most of the Hakka became Mandarin monolinguals, due to a shift in social mobility formerly centered around Hokkien. Elsewhere, although the Hokkien speech-community shrank within the population, most Hokkien-speaking households have retained fluency in Hokkien, helped by the liberalization of Taiwanese politics and the end of martial law.
Nevertheless, Taiwanese Mandarin has become the most common language in Taiwan today, and the most common home language of Taiwanese youth. In the population census of 2010, Mandarin is the most common home language in the Taipei metropolitan area, Taoyuan City, Matsu Islands, aboriginal areas, some Hakka-majority areas, as well as some urban areas of Taichung and Kaohsiung. Conversely, the ability of Taiwanese to speak ethnic languages is strikingly on the decline.
During the presidency of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, policy of turkification was heavily promoting thus leading to languages of disappearing.
Gaelic has long suffered from its lack of use in educational and administrative contexts, and was long suppressed by Scottish and then British authorities.See Kenneth MacKinnon (1991) Gaelic: A Past and Future Prospect. Edinburgh: The Saltire Society. The shift from Gaelic to Scots language and Scottish English has been ongoing since about 1200 CE; Gaelic has gone from being the dominant language in almost all areas of present-day Scotland to an endangered language spoken by only about 1% of the population.Ellis, Peter Berresford. 1985. The Celtic Revolution: A Study in Anti-imperialism. Talybont: Y Lolfa.
With the advent of Scottish devolution, however, Scottish Gaelic has begun to receive greater attention, and it achieved official recognition when the Scottish Parliament enacted the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act on 21 April 2005. Gaelic-medium education in Scotland now enrolls more than 2000 students a year. Nevertheless, Scottish Gaelic is a minority language in most of the traditional Gàidhealtachd.
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