Language shift
[6][7] Michael Witzel refers to Ehret's model[note 1] "which stresses the osmosis, or a "billiard ball," or Mallory's Kulturkugel, effect of cultural transmission.
"[6] 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.
[14] 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.
[16] 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.
The language shift began in the 18th century and accelerated as Belgium became independent and Brussels expanded out past its original city boundaries.
[21] 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.
Cantonese originated from the capital of neighboring Canton province, and it became the dominant language by extension, and other similar dialects started to vanish from use in Hong Kong.
Speakers of Mandarin Chinese and of Cantonese cannot mutually understand each other without learning the languages, due to vast differences in pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure and terminology.
[citation needed] In Ethiopia, various populations of Nilotic origin have shifted languages over the centuries, adopting the idioms of their Afro-Asiatic-speaking neighbors in the northern areas.
The linguistic situation did not change dramatically until the French Revolution in 1789, and Dutch continued to fulfill the main functions of a cultural language throughout the 18th century.
In the late 1800s, the Basque language was both persecuted and excluded from administration and official public use during the takeover of the National Convention, during the War of the Pyrenees, and during the Napoleonic period.
The compulsory national education system imposed early on a French-only approach (mid-19th century), marginalizing Basque, and by the 1960s family transmission was grinding to a halt in many areas at the feet of the Pyrenees.
Thus, literary Florentine was established as the most representative dialect of Italy long before its political unification in 1861, Tuscan having been officially adopted by the preunitarian states.
A visible generational gap has also been noted, since the students and young people under the age of 25 are the social group where the use of dialect fell below the threshold of absolute majority (respectively 43 and 41%).
In Lithuania Minor, where Lithuanian culture began to decline after The Great Plague between 1708 and 1711, Kristijonas Donelaitis' poem – The Seasons addressed this issue.
In Northern Poland during the Middle Ages, the territory of Lithuanian language was reaching vicinities of Łomża, Tykocin and Białystok, but shrank to the north – to the rural outskirts of Sejny, Punsk and Wiżajny before the 1900s as a consequence of acculturation.
[citation needed] A trend among the younger generations is to mix English and Italian vocabulary patterns, in making new Maltese words.
[citation needed] Urdu, the lingua franca of South Asian Muslims and the official and national language of Pakistan since its independence, is spoken by most educated Pakistanis.
Code-switching between the two languages takes place on a spectrum where more Spanish is used for official and business-related matters, whereas more Guarani is used in art and in everyday life.
[63] In the Philippines, Spanish-speaking families have gradually switched over to Tagalog or English since the end of World War II, so Spanish has ceased to be a practical everyday language in the country and is on the verge of extinction.
However, due to media and other factors such as urbanization, many younger speakers have switched from Kinaray-a to Hiligaynon, especially in the towns of Cabatuan, Santa Barbara, Calinog, Miagao, Passi City, Guimbal, Tigbauan, Tubungan, etc.
Many towns, especially Janiuay, Lambunao, and San Joaquin still have a sizeable Kinaray-a-speaking population, with the standard accent being similar to that spoken in the predominantly Karay-a province of Antique.
The progressive dominion exerted by the Kingdom of Castile over Spain in as much as it gained political power throughout centuries, contributed to the expansion of its language at the expenses of the rest.
Nebrija's Gramatica castellana (1492), sponsored by the new Spanish monarch Ferdinand II of Aragon, was meant to help expand Castilian, "the companion of the Empire".
As Aragonese retreated to the sub-Pyrenean valleys, Arabic vanished by the early 17th century, when forced cultural assimilation of the Moriscos was coupled with expulsion (completed in 1614).
By the early 21st century, Spanish was the overwhelmingly dominant language in Spain, with Basque, Catalan, and Galician surviving and developing in their respective regions with different levels of recognition since 1980.
[70][74][75] After the ROC government established rule over Taiwan in 1945, it forbade the use of Japanese in newspapers and schools,[76] and promoted the Guoyu movement (Chinese: 國語運動) to popularize Standard Mandarin, often through coercive means.
[70] Studies have suggested an elite cultural dominance-driven linguistic replacement model to explain the adoption of Turkish by Anatolian indigenous inhabitants.
The island of Great Britain, located on the western fringes of Northwestern Europe, has experienced a series of successive language changes and developments in the course of several invasions.
French was once the main language in Louisiana, Missouri, and areas along the border with Quebec, but the speaking has dwindled after new waves of migration and the rise of English as a lingua franca.
