Ethnovitality in Language Maintenance
Nia Kurnia Sofiah, M.AppLing
Abstract
Ethnovitality is connected to the language maintenance because there are competitions between the majority or dominant and minority language with the sample cases are local/regional language versus Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia versus English in Australia and Malay language versus English in Malaysia. The aspects involved will be domain (house), parent role, the environment and the topics. Home as an important domain for maintaining a language, parental role (mother and father), school and friends are the main factors. The bilingualism may arise as the result of the language contact.
Keyword: Bilingualism, domain, ethnovitality, language contact, language maintenance.
Theories
The vitality of an ethnolinguistic group was defined as that which makes a group likely to behave as distinctive and active collective entity in intergroup situations (Giles, Bourhis & Taylor, 1977). The vitality of ethnolinguistic groups can be assessed by considering three classes of factors: status, demography and institutional support factors. (Giles, Bourhis & Taylor, 1977).The status variables are those which pertain to a speech community’s economic wealth, its social status, its socio-historical prestige and the status of the language used by its speaker. Then the more status a linguistic community is recognized, the more vitality it could be said to possess as a collective entity (Bourhis, Giles & Rosenthal, 1981:146). The demographic variables are those related to the sheer number of members included in the speech community and their distribution throughout a particular to the numeric concentration of group members in various part of territory and their proportion relative to outgroup members and whether or not the group still occupies its traditional or national territory. The number factors refer to the community’s absolute group numbers, their birth rate and their pattern of immigration and emigration (Bourhis, Giles & Rosenthal, 1981:146). The institutional support factors refer to the extent to which a language group enjoys formal and informal representation in the various institutions of a community, region or nation; and the vitality of a speech community was related to the degree its speakers could use their own language in various institutions such as the home, the school system, local government, church, business, etcetera (Bourhis, Giles & Rosenthal, 1981: 146).
The discussions about various institutions are also suggested by Fishman (1972) who called them as domain. The definition of domains regardless of their numbers is terms of institutional contexts or socio-ecological co-occurrences and they designate the major clusters of interaction situations that occur in particular multilingual setting (Fishman, 1972:19). The language choice and topic can also be understood through domains although they may be for analyses of individual behavior at the level of face to face verbal encounters that are related to widespread socio-cultural norms and expectation (Fishman, 1972:19).It becomes possible to contrast the language of topics for individual, or particular sub-populations, with the language of domains for a larger part, if not the whole part, of the population by recognizing the existence of domains (Fishman, 1972:19). Thus, Domain is also defined as a socio-cultural construct abstracted from topics of communication, relationships between communicators, and locales of communication in accord with the institutions of a society and the spheres of activity of a speech community, in such a way that individual behaviour and social patterns can be distinguished from each other and yet related to each other (Fishman, 1972:20).Therefore, the domain can be said as a higher-order abstraction or summarization which is arrived at from a detailed study of the face-to-face interactions in which language choice is embedded (Fishman, 1972:20).
Greenfield (1968), cited in Fishman (1972:22-23) suggested that there are five domains could be generalized from the innumerable situations. The labels for these five domains are family, friendship, religion, education and employment (Fishman, 1972:22). He also determined whether a typical situation could be presented for each domain as a means of collecting self report data on language choice (Fishman, 1972:22).
The language choice plays a big role especially when there are more than one language occurs in the community. Therefore, there will be at least a minority language and a majority one. There are many factors why a particular minority group maintains its language while another group shifts over to the majority language. These factors affecting language maintenance and language shift are listed by Grosjean (1982:107). He divided the factors into five which are
1. Social aspects: size of group, birthrate of group, time of immigration, continued immigration, permanent immigration, geographic concentration, urbanization, isolation from other minority groups, isolation from home country, intermarriage, social configuration of group, social mobility, religion, activism (political, cultural, linguistic), mobility within the family, occupations, educational policy of the group
2. Attitudes: of the minority group, toward their language, toward their majority language, toward cultural pluralism, toward bilingualism, toward linguistic “purity”, of the majority group and toward the minority group
3. Use of languages: where used (domain), for what (function, topic), with whom (interlocutor)
4. Government policy: laws pertaining to languages, educational policies
5. Other factors: periods of nationalism, assimilative power of majority group, cultural support by foreign state.
The role of the mother and father in maintaining and passing on a minority language is also addressed. This question is to find out whether the common belief that it is the mother (female) who can give better chance for maintaining the language since the mother has more time with the children than the father (Boyd, 2001:33). The studies (Dopke: 1990, Clyne: 1991) have proved that different community reveals different situations. Dopke (1990) founded that in the families of German-English in Australia, the quality of fathers’ input may actually be superior in transmitting a language compared to mothers while Clyne (1991) found that Serbo-Croatian was maintained better in families where it was the language of the mother than that of the father. Clyne (1991:33) also mentioned a study by Bennet (1990) which indicates that females of Dutch descent are more likely than males to maintain the language and to pass it on to the next generation. Another situation connected to the language maintenance is whether the language is transmitted to the following generations. If the language is not passed on to the children or the language shift process occurs in the family, the language may die in only three generations (Fishman (1991) in Diane Nelson, 2007: 201).
The social networks are also important in language maintenance and shift. The closeknit social networks consisting mainly of strong ties are more likely to maintain the local conventions and norms including the linguistic norms (Milroy and Wei, 1995: 139). The analysis of networks can offer the understanding of the social mechanism that underlie the process of language maintenance and shift since the network analysis can illuminate the social dynamics involved in the inter-group difference (Milroy and Wei, 1995:139).
The language maintenance and shift can happen to groups of minority community where there are at least two languages involved and these conditions may lead to bilingualism. Bilingualism has varied set of patterns as mentioned by Grosjean (1982:2) citing the study by Mackey (1968). In the border areas at least between two language groups, economic and commercial factors lead many people to use both languages on a regular basis. This situation happens to Indonesian community in Australia (both Indonesian and English), Indonesian local people in urban areas in Indonesia (both Indonesian and local languages) and in Malaysia (both Malay and English). The most common situations for them are the existing of code-mixing where some words from different languages may be spoken when the people is talking in a particular language. For proofing this hypothesis, I have researched connected to these three situations.
The factors addressed for this paper are home for domain, language choices, use of the language connected to whether topic and interlocutor matter, the exposure to the language and the social network.
The Research
1. Indonesian ( Bahasa Indonesia) versus English in Melbourne, Australia
The participants in this study consisted of 46 Indonesian speakers. They all lived in Melbourne, Victoria for 1 to 29 years as permanent or temporary residents. There were 31 females and 15 males with age ranges from 27 to 51 years old.
The questionnaire is used to gather data from the participants. The questionnaire consisted of the 17 questions about the age, gender, length of living in Australia, residential status, the child age, the participants’ first language, the language use including the motivations and topics, participants’ opinion about the networks and their strategies in retaining the language.
* For domains: in both domains (at home and outside home) the usage of the both languages is dominant with more than 80%
* For topics: almost for all the topics, the combination of Indonesian and English is dominant with percentages are more than 50% but for when talking about teachers, the dominant language is English with 50% while the combination between Indonesian and English has 43.2%.
* For the social networks, 80% of the participants are actively joining the Indonesian community.
* For the language choice, the use of both languages for most aspects such as education and work are very dominant since those languages are considered important.
* For the gender, there is no strong indication about which gender (mother or father) acting as the language maintainer for Bahasa Indonesia since both gender talk in both languages to their children.
The results suggest that the bilingual condition exists in the Indonesian community in Melbourne, Australia.
2. Bahasa Indonesia versus ethnic languages.
The participants are chosen with the consideration is that they live in urban areas such as Depok, Jakarta and the surrounding where they are migrants and the language contact between the ethnic and Bahasa Indonesia exists. Most of the participants are females and university students. There are 46 participants (Four persons have children and Forty two do not have children).
There are two groups for this research. The First group consists of the participants whose parents are from the same ethnic group while the second one consists of the participants whose parents are from different ethnic groups. This separation is for finding out which group will maintain the ethnic group better. The hypothesis for this is the second group will shift to Bahasa Indonesia while the first one will maintain the ethnic language.
The questioners are employed for this research. The questioners have two parts. One part is only for the participants whose parents are from the same ethnic group while the second part is for the participants whose parents are from different ethnic groups. Different sets are employed to find out the patterns of language maintenance or shift in those two groups.
A. The First Group (Participants whose parents are from the same ethnic group)
There are 23 persons: 19 with no children with the age range from 19 to 42, and 4 with children with the age range is 31-49. The gender composition is 18 females and 5 males.
1. For the social network or community from the ethnic group almost 50% of the participants never participate in an organization or community based on the ethnic.
2. For the language use: 87% of the participants claim that when they are talking in Bahasa Indonesia they sometimes insert the ethnic language in the conversation; 83% sometimes insert the Bahasa Indonesia in the conversation when they are talking in the ethnic language. These situation show a bilingual condition exists.
3. For the factors that elevate the code switching: the interlocutor plays an important role with almost 70% of participants choose this factor as the main factor while the location and the topic become the second and the third.
4. For the exposure of the ethnic language through media connected to the reading, writing, listening and watching skills, almost 60% of the participants receive non regular basis input for all the skills.
5. For the home as the central domain: the language use is dominated by the use of Bahasa Indonesia, and both (Bahasa Indonesia and the ethnic language) with almost 35% for each situations when the participants talking to the parents. The shift to Bahasa Indonesia is more striking in talking to neighbors and friends with the compositions are more than 65%.
6. For the language choice for expressing feelings, most participants use Bahasa Indonesia only especially when they are in danger and arguing with the percentages are 96% and 87%. The ethnic language is chosen with very low percentage (around 13%) mostly for expressing being tired, stress and angry.
7. For choosing more important language between the ethnic language and Bahasa Indonesia for specific situations, more than 85% participants decide that Bahasa Indonesia is more important for education, work, earning money, rising children, accepted by the community, traveling and trading while the ethnic language is chosen as more important only when talking with friends from the same ethnic group (around 15 %)
8. For participants who have children, most of them use both languages for talking to their children. Only one person use Bahasa Indonesia only with the children.
The results suggest that the bilingual situation exists while the participants are talking and there is an indication of the language shift to Bahasa Indonesia. It means that the first hypothesis is not proven.
B. The Second Group (Participants whose parents are from different ethnic groups)
There are 23 persons: 22 with no children with the age range from 18-23, and 1 with children whose age is 50. The gender composition is 17 females and 6 males.
1. For the social network or community from the ethnic groups almost 82% of the participants never participate in an organization or community based on the ethnics of their parents.
2. For the language use: 65% of the participants claim that when they are talking in Bahasa Indonesia they sometimes insert the ethnic languages in the conversation; The similar situation for the ethnic languages with Bahasa Indonesia sometimes come up in the conversation when they are talking. These situation show a bilingual condition exists.
3. For the factors that elevate the code switching: the interlocutor plays an important role with 78% of participants choose this factor as the main factor while the location and the topic receive the same percentage (65%).