Abstract
Abstract In Reversing Language Shift, Fishman (1991) is critical of the ‘rather gross and undifferentiated’ distinctions made in the literature between the various kinds of counter-trend or what he calls ‘reverse language shift (RLS)’ policies. While Fishman’s general strictures about the unhelpful distinctions often made between different types of language policies are valid, his eight-stage reverse language shift model has more than a passing similarity to the well-known five-stage model of economic growth proposed by Rostow (1960) thirty years earlier. In place of Rostow’s goal of self-sustaining economic growth, Fishman offers the goal of ‘self-priming intergenerational transmission’ of the target language. Furthermore, the three critical stages of Rostow’s economic growth model, ‘the preconditions for take-off’, ‘take-off’, and ‘the drive towards maturity’, have clear and obvious parallels with the more important of Fishman’s stages of reverse language shift. This exposes the model to the kind of criticisms to which Rostow’s theory and, indeed, most kinds of evolutionary models of development have been subjected (Bernstein 1971, Mouzelis 1988). It is not easy to distinguish either the analytical or prescriptive logic of many ‘stages’, their essential characteristics, or the mechanisms which might be seen to link them to each other. Furthermore, many minority language groups are so heterogeneous in their structure that fitting them into Fishman’s eight-stage model is difficult.
Published Version
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