By Anonymous (EW)
There was an interesting article by Ravindranath (2015) about language contact that we read this semester. According to this article (which is backed up by research of course), languages in contact don’t always necessarily change each other. Languages also evolve internally over time, and if contact does cause a change in the languages, it may be hard to tell if it is because of the amount of time the languages have been in contact or the similarities between them. The article examined many social and linguistic factors to examine to determine whether a change is due to internal evolution or contact with other languages. It ends with a discussion of how globalization is both creating new multilingualisms and at the same time resulting in massive language extinction which has implications for culture and society at large.
This was a good article to preclude the other reading that was assigned for that week about Facebook as a platform for Mayan language revitalization in Mexico by Cru (2015). Youth are using Facebook as a platform for a grassroots movement for the advocacy, destigmatization, and promotion of their ancestral languages while developing multilingual literacy skills that draw on their full repertoire of linguistic resources. It is a resource that adolescents perceive as cool during a critical period of personal language choice, it has the potential to create an ideological shift by reaching a wide audience via the worldwide web, and it is part of the young people’s process of social identity formation. I found this article fascinating, because I have been interested in Indigenous language revitalization since the start of my master’s program at McGill, and because I love the internet… almost too much. The amount of time I spend on it is a bit alarming, even to myself, and YouTube is my greatest weakness.
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