Bilingualism key to the survival languages like Welsh Physicists Claim

Physicists in Spain are challenging the idea that two languages cannot continue to exist side-by-side within a bi-lingual society. But while the findings may spell good news for the Welsh Language, it still leaves doubts over the long-term survival of more isolated languages such as Quechua…

 

Jorge Mira Pérez, who led the research, became interested in the issue of language survival because of the situation in his own region of Galicia in north-west Spain where the population contains speakers of both Spanish and the local language, Galician, a situation that has strong and resonant echos with both Welsh and English being spoken in Wales, particularly Llanelli.  Mira Perez and his colleagues then constructed a complex mathematical model to investigate how languages could coexist in the future.

 

Bilingualism

Their study builds upon earlier research in which speakers of the language are free to switch between language groups in response to economic stimulai, sadly these earlier studies found that one language always dies out.  These older studies however failed to take into account the impact of bilingualism and tended to see the problem in terms of an ‘either or’ analysis in which one tongue dominates the other out of existence.  The new study led by Mira Perez enhanced the existing mathematical models to take into account the effects of bilingualism and the impact this could have on the stability of each language and the ‘status’ of each language which was a parameter that had not been considered before.  The languages status took into account the social and economic advantages of each language.

 

The team then tested their new model against know real world situations such as the historical data for Spanish and Galician spanning the 19th century to 1975, finding their results to be broadly consistent with the recorded findinsg of history. After varying the parameters with more than 400 different values designed to cover all the possible combinations of status and similarity, they concluded that it is possible for two languages to coexist indefinitely.  This is good news for the Welsh language as indicated below.

The key to survival

The key to survival is that two languages must be spoken by enough people to begin with and they must be sufficiently similar. “If the statuses of both languages were well balanced, a similarity of around 40% might be enough for the two languages to coexist,” says Mira Pérez . “If they were not balanced, a higher degree of similarity – above 75%, depending on the values of status – would be necessary for the weaker tongue to persist.”

 

The findings are good news for languages such as Galician and Catalan, spoken in autonomous communities in Spain, which have relatively steady numbers of speakers and share many similarities with Spanish, the dominant national language.  There are wide parallels between both the Welsh and Catalan socio-economic positions so it seems that Welsh may be here to stay, at least on the face of it.

 

The other findings painted not so hopeful a picture for more distinctive languages such as Quechua in South America, which is very different from Spanish and also deeply marginalised to rural communities.

 

Mira Pérez acknowledges that his model is based on a number of ideals. It does not take into account of many other factors that could influence the balance between languages, including migration and the unpredictability of social dynamics.

Political factors

This is a view shared by David Crystal, a linguistics expert at Bangor University and author of the book Language Death. “They seem to be using a crude notion of lexicostatistics to define similarity, which is not a measure everyone respects, and they haven’t taken important social variables into account,” he says. Crystal also points out that political factors can also determine the fate of a language, as in the case of Welsh, which has seen a resurgence in recent years fuelled by two Language Acts and significant activism.

 

Source: Physicsworld.com : http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/45323