2. RECENT RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE

Abstract

From its beginnings to the present, research in the field of language maintenance and shift has advocated the preservation of ethnic minority and immigrant languages. This review of current published literature, which continues that advocacy, focuses on a narrow time frame (approximately 1998–2002) in order to provide broad, worldwide coverage of different language contact situations. The discussion largely excludes questions of language policy and planning, but includes studies that use traditional as well as newer methodologies to illuminate how educational institutions, the media, ethnic language literacy, family relationships, and friendship networks—to name the more significant factors in maintenance—can be employed to encourage maintenance and language revitalization. After considering recent theoretical and critical works, this review surveys various countries in which research within ethnic and minority language communities illuminates language maintenance, or shift, or revitalization for that group. Current research suggests that use of the ethnic language in the family and friendship networks and its transgenerational transmission are still of crucial importance, as are the conditions in the greater society that provide support for its linguistic viability as a means of communication within and outside the immediate community.