Language maintenance and language shift as strategies of social reproduction

Abstract

Abstract Strategies of language ‘assimilation and dissimilation’ (Bourdieu, 1991) are inevitably and unavoidably linked to the more general strategies of social reproduction adopted by groups and individuals (i.e. the strategies by which each generation endeavours to transmit to the following generation the advantages it holds). Thus strategies of social mobility that involve, for example, education, changes of occupation, changes of residence or migration, are all likely to have linguistic consequences. The very anticipation of such strategies may, in fact, carry implications for language behaviour in advance of the actual move itself. However, to examine the linguistic consequences of strategies of social reproduction, the strategies themselves have to be ‘situated’ (Giddens, 1984) in space and time, i.e. located with regard to the territorial organisation of the local community and the relationship of this to the wider national and international economy. The territorial organisation of communities incl...