Rural-urban and south-north migrations and language maintenance and shift

Abstract

Studies into language and migrations have traditionally focused on transnational migrations, with a view to determining what Borland (2006) has termed facilitating and motivating factors for language maintenance or shift in the destination country. Facilitating factors are aspects of the socio-political context that allow for language maintenance, among them, supportive government policies and frequent contacts with the migrants' homeland. Motivating factors refer to a conscious individual decision and commitment to maintain and transmit the home language to the next generation. Indeed, language and migration studies have shed considerable light on language use and shift in transnational immigrant communities; however, they have hardly paid attention to language use in rural-urban migration contexts, let alone explore the similarities and differences between language maintenance or shift in rural-urban and south-north migrations to determine why language shift seems to be the norm in the latter context but not in the former. This article explores this issue as well as language shift and maintenance in African immigrant communities in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area, with a focus on language use narratives by two families. It argues that the absence of facilitating and motivating factors in south-north migrations, coupled with utility-maximization (i.e., greatest benefit of language shift) (Tuominen 1999) and colingualism (Schell 2008) – the tendency by bilinguals to communicate in a shared L2 even if they share a common L1 – accelerates language shift rather than maintenance in transnational migrations. Conversely, the presence of facilitating factors, especially frequent contacts with the rural communities, together with lower educational levels, reduces the possibility for language shift in rural-urban migrations.