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Chapter 34 - Minority Germanic Languages

from Part V - Language Contact and Nonstandard Varieties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2020

By
Mark L. Louden
Edited by
Michael T. Putnam  and
B. Richard Page
Michael T. Putnam
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
B. Richard Page
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

This chapter centers on the sociolinguistic situation of Germanic languages spoken in minority communities around the world. Following a descriptive typology formulated by a geographer (White 1987) and a social psychologist (Edwards 1992, 2004), 21 Germanic minority languages are analyzed with an eye to understanding which external factors promote their maintenance or lead to a shift to a majority language. Special attention is paid to the most successful cases of minority language maintenance, which are found in highly traditional Anabaptist Christian and orthodox Jewish communities. The Germanic heritage languages of these groups are not only surviving, they are growing at rates not matched by any other language, large or small, in the world.

Keywords

Anabaptist groupsHaredi/Hasidic Jewslanguages and dialectsdifferences betweenlanguage endangerment and vitalitylanguage maintenancelanguage shiftminority languages
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics , pp. 807 - 832
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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