Language Maintenance and Revival

Language Maintenance and Revival

There is no doubt regarding the language extinction of the minority language spoken by the few numbers of communities. It is a great loss to those minority communities because their identities, culture and way of living were directly influenced by the language their elder generations had used. So, we have to preserve our language and some ways of language maintenance discussed under this topic are as follows:

① Families from a minority group living together can maintain their language by gathering each other frequently and using their language as the major means of communication of each other. For e.g. the use of Panjabi and Gujerati language in the shops between Indians and Pakistanis at their shops in United Kingdom.

② Frequently visiting the homeland can be useful to protect their language.

③ Discouraging the marriage between totally different communities because marriage to a majority group member is the quickest way of language shift to the majority group language for the children.

④ The group of people must be able to use their language at school, home, places of worship which may increase the chances of language maintenance. For e.g. Heritage language programmes in Canada use Canadian Ukrainians and Canadians Germans at schools in order to maintain the language groups.

⑤ Use of the language in media like Newspaper, Television. Use of language in law and administration can also play a vital role in language maintenance.

Language Revival is saving a language that is dead or endangered. In the book different examples are given to describe language revival. For e.g. attempts made in Ireland, Wales and Scotland to preserve the indigenous languages. The steps taken by New Zealand Government to revitalize Maori. The rise in feelings of patriotism in Israel has revived Hebrew which was dead for about 1700 years.

In my opinion all the languages must be preserved and protected from the disappearance. All of them are equally importance in our society to understand each other cultures in this century of globalization and all the languages have their own historical importance.