Language Substitution: Causes, Processes, and Strategies
Language Substitution
Substitution Process
In any language, two simultaneous actions affect a linguistic structure, while the other acts on the social body.
1) Linguistic Structure
Throughout history, all the world’s languages have been nourished by linguistic loans. This fact is not always necessarily linked with substitution. However, when the incorporation of loans becomes massive, leading to the impoverishment and weakening of the entire linguistic system, we enter the first stage of a second phase: linguistic replacement. This erosion affects the core of the language: grammar and phonetics.
2) Social Body
A first phase of linguistic replacement necessarily involves the bilingualization of society. At the same time, there is an unequal distribution of linguistic levels and a hierarchical use of each language. The recessive language, the colloquial dominant vehicle of communication, is used in areas with more prestige. Prestige is a subjective issue that affects not only the speakers of the languages. In a second stage of language shift, competition arises, and young people show doubts and hesitation when faced with the recessive language used by younger speakers. Without ensuring future continuity, the language, which is one of the axes around which society is organized, enters the third phase, which leads to linguistic substitution.
Causes of Substitution
1) Physical
The extinction of a language can be linked to the disappearance of all of its speakers due to epidemics, earthquakes, etc. The disappearance of the population has been directly related to colonization processes that started in the sixteenth century. The spread of new diseases and the clash with the conquerors led to the collapse of prosperous empires and the disappearance of many languages. Those that survived entered a state of destruction from which they have not yet recovered.
2) Social
The disappearance of a language is part of a broader process called cultural assimilation. It is a phenomenon characterized by the influence of a dominant culture over another until the most representative features of the latter become blurred.
Strategies
- Consolidation of States: The growth of states has often been accompanied by linguistic imposition. Too often, national unity has been built on linguistic unity through coercive measures exploiting monolingual ideology: legal prohibitions, physical repression, etc.
- Loss of Power: The loss of control is the preamble to any process of cultural assimilation and language shift.
- Demographic Flooding: A dominant community, reinforced by control of power and military superiority, also uses demographic superiority to stifle the social structures of the minority culture.
- Army: The constitution of armies and conscription make minorities quickly assimilate the language of power to survive in a hostile environment.
- Media: Control over the media has been another factor promoting the languages associated with power.
- School: From its generalization, the state had a new and effective instrument of ideological control. In linguistic terms, the school guarantees the learning of the national language.