Language shift, also known as language transfer, language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be of higher-status stabilize or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived—even by their own speakers—to have lower status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time of the Roman Empire.
Language assimilation may operate alongside other aspects of cultural assimilation when different cultures meet and merge.
Mechanisms Prehistory For prehistory, Forster et al. (2004) and Forster and Renfrew (2011) observe that there is a correlation of language shift with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not necessarily with intrusive female mtDNA. They conclude that technological innovation (the transition from hunting-gathering to farming, or from stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in the abduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland) causes immigration of at least some men, who are perceived to be of higher status than local men. Then, in mixed-language marriages, children would speak the "higher-status" language, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today.
Assimilation is the process whereby a speech-community becomes bilingual and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of the speech-community that speaks the second language more often at home. The data are used to measure the use of a given language in the lifetime of a person, or most often across generations. When a speech-community ceases to use their original language, language death is said to occur.
Indo-European migrations
In the context of the Indo-European migrations, it has been noted that small groups can change a larger cultural area. Michael Witzel refers to Ehret's model "which stresses the osmosis, or a "billiard ball", or Mallory's Kulturkugel, effect of cultural transmission." According to Ehret, ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies, due to the cultural, economic and military choices made by the local population in question. The group bringing new traits may initially be small, contributing features that can be fewer in number than those of the already local culture. The emerging combined group may then initiate a recurrent, expansionist process of ethnic and language shift.
David Anthony notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through "chain-type folk migrations", but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which are emulated by large groups of people. Anthony explains:
Anthony gives the example of the Luo-speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century, whose language spread rapidly in the 19th century. Anthony notes that "Indo-European languages probably spread in a similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe", carried forward by "Indo-European chiefs" and their "ideology of political clientage". Anthony notes that "elite recruitment" may be a suitable term for this system.
Modern society In urban settings, language change occurs due to the combination of three factors: the diversity of languages spoken, the high population density, and the need for communication. Urban vernaculars, urban contact varieties, and multiethnolects emerge in many cities around the world as a result of language change in urban settings. These factors lead to phenomena such as dialect levelling, koineization, and/or language shift toward a dominant language.
Examples Liturgical language Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations.
Austria Until the mid-19th century, southern Carinthia in Austria had an overwhelming Slovene-speaking majority: in the 1820s, around 97% of the inhabitants south of the line Villach-Klagenfurt-Diex spoke Slovene as their native language.Thomas M. Barker, The Slovene Minority of Carinthia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). In the course of the 19th century, this number fell significantly. By 1920, a third of the population of the area had already shifted to German as their main language of communication. After the Carinthian Plebiscite in the 1920s, and especially after World War II, most of the population shifted from Slovene to German. In the same region, today only some 13% of the people speak Slovene, while more than 85% of the population speak German. The figures for the whole region are equally telling: in 1818, around 35% of the population of Carinthia spoke Slovene; by 1910, this number had fallen to 15.6% and by 2001 to 2.3%.Matjaž Klemenčič and Vladimir Klemenčič, The Endeavors of Carinthian Slovenes for their Ethnic Survival with/against Austrian Governments after World War II (Klagenfurt-Ljubljana-Vienna: Mohorjeva založba/Hermagoras Verlag, 2008). These changes were almost entirely the result of a language shift in the population, with emigration and genocide (by the Nazis during World War II) playing only a minor role.
Belarus Despite the withdrawal of Belarus from the USSR proclaimed in 1991, use of the Belarusian language is declining. According to the 2009 Belarusian population census, 72% of Belarusians speak Russian at home, and Belarusian is used by only 11.9% of Belarusians. 52.5% of Belarusians can speak and read Belarusian. Only 29.4% can speak, read and write it. One in ten Belarusians do not understand the Belarusian language.
Belgium
In the last two centuries, Brussels has transformed from an exclusively Dutch-speaking city to a bilingual city with French as the majority language and lingua franca. The language shift began in the 18th century and accelerated as Belgium became independent and Brussels expanded out past its original city boundaries."Wallonie - Bruxelles", Le Service de la langue française, 19/05/1997 From 1880 on, more and more Dutch-speaking people became bilingual, resulting in a rise of monolingual French-speakers after 1910.
Halfway through the 20th century, the number of monolingual French-speakers began to predominate over the (mostly) bilingual Flemish inhabitants. Only since the 1960s, after the establishment of the Belgian language border and the socio-economic development of Flanders took full effect, could Dutch use stem the tide of increasing French use. Now buttressed by immigration from the former French Africa, French remains the city's predominant language, while Dutch is spoken by a minority.
Canada
China
Historically, one of the most important language shifts in China has been the near disappearance of the Manchu language. When China was ruled by the Qing dynasty, whose Emperors were Manchu, Chinese and Manchu had co-official status, and the Emperor heavily subsidized and promoted education in Manchu, but because most of the Manchu Eight Banners lived in garrisons with Mandarin-speaking Han Bannermen located across Han Chinese civilian populated cities, most Manchus spoke the Beijing dialect of Mandarin by the 19th century and the only Manchu speakers were garrisons left in their homeland of Heilongjiang. Today there are fewer than 100 native speakers of Manchu.
At the current time, language shift is occurring all across China. Many languages of minority ethnic groups (such as Tujia and Evenki) and regional varieties of Chinese are declining in favour of Standard Mandarin.
Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, Cantonese has become the dominant language spoken in society since widespread immigration to Hong Kong began in the 1940s. With immigrants of differing mother tongues, communication was hard without a dominant language. Cantonese originated from Guangzhou, the capital of neighboring Guangdong province, and it became the dominant language by extension, leading to other similar dialects vanishing from use in Hong Kong. Original residents of Hong Kong used their own languages including Tanka, Weitou dialect, and Hakka dialects, but with a majority of Hong Kong's population being immigrants by the 1940s and 50s, these dialects rapidly vanished. Most of Hong Kong's younger generation does not understand, let alone speak, their ancestral dialects.
Beginning in the late 1990s, since Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty, Standard Mandarin has been more widely implemented in education and many other areas of official society. Though Mandarin has been quickly adopted into society, most Hong Kong residents would not regard it as a first language. Most Hong Kong residents prefer to communicate in Cantonese in daily life.
Speakers of Mandarin and of Cantonese cannot mutually understand each other without learning the languages, due to vast differences in pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure and terminology. Furthermore, cultural differences between Hong Kong and China result in variations between the Cantonese used in Hong Kong and that in Guangdong.
Macau
Like in Hong Kong, Cantonese is also the dominant language spoken in Macau after the widespread immigration there in the 1940s. Also, despite being a Portuguese colony for over four centuries, the Portuguese language was never widely spoken in Macau and remained limited to administration and higher education. It was spoken primarily by the Portuguese settlers, Macanese people, and elites and middle-class people of Chinese ethnicity. As a consequence, when Macau was handed back to China in 1999, Portuguese did not have a strong presence like English had in Hong Kong and continued its decline which began when Macau was still under Portuguese rule. Thus, even the Macanese people (Eurasians of mixed Portuguese and Chinese ancestry) switched from Portuguese to Cantonese as their first language, and Eurasian children of various backgrounds switched from Portuguese- to English-medium high school education, particularly as many parents recognised the reducing value of Portuguese schooling. Most Macanese at present learn Portuguese as a foreign language.An example of these is Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes: Since Macau's return to Chinese sovereignty at the start of the new millennium, Mandarin Chinese has also been more widely implemented in education and many other areas of official society. However, most Macau residents would not regard it as a first language/dialect and choose to speak Cantonese in daily life.
Egypt In Egypt, the Coptic language, a descendant of the Afro-Asiatic Egyptian language, has been in decline in usage since the time of the Arab conquest in the 7th century. By the 17th century, it was eventually supplanted as a spoken language by Egyptian Arabic. Coptic is today mainly used by the Coptic Church as a liturgical language. In the Siwa Oasis, a local variety of Berber is also used alongside Arabic. There are attempts at language revival for the Coptic language based in part on Coptic identity, Egyptian nationalism and in some cases pharaonism.
Ethiopia