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Nationalism, Native Language Maintenance and the Spread of English: Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines
Abstract
An analysis of language shift factors and the presence of nationalist groups to defend the native language in Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines: 1898-1993
... In the Philippines, though an etymologicallyengineered (Clampitt-Dunlap, 1995) Filipino is the national official language and each region has its own lingua franca (official auxiliary), English is the official medium of instruction (Lewis, 2009; Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines, 1987). McFarland (1993) identified about 120 to 175 languages contingent to the means of classification. ...
... Policies that espouse one language over another do not produce biliteracy. On the contrary researchers claim that using such methods cause resistance to the dominant language and illiteracy in the heritage language (Clampitt-Dunlap, 1995;Freire, 1987;Giroux, 1983). ...
For the generation of CHamorus who grew up without CHamoru language fluency, what the language means for their CHamoru identity is not entirely clear as there has not been a comprehensive study of their ethnolinguistic identity. This chapter explores how young CHamorus articulate their CHamoru identity in relation to the CHamoru language based on interviews with fourteen young CHamorus. The study provides a theoretical model, the CHamoru Identity Language Articulation Model (CHILAM), which identifies decision pathways and processes to explain why some young CHamorus actively learn the language while others do not. The model maps out the various motivating and inhibiting factors that influence participants' learning of the CHamoru language, which provides relevant information for CHamoru language advocates, policymakers, and teachers.
In this chapter from her book Language Change, Professor Jean Aitchison of the London School of Economics asserts that language change is “natural, inevitable and continuous, and involves interwoven sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors which cannot easily be disentangled from one another.” It is not, she points out, in any sense “wrong for human language to change.” In view of these facts, Professor Aitchison raises three questions: “First, is it still relevant to speak of [language] progress or decay? Secondly, irrespective of whether the move is a forwards or backwards one, are human languages evolving in any detectable direction? Thirdly, even though language change is not wrong in the moral sense, is it socially undesirable, and, if so, can we control it?” In the following pages, she describes the difficulties of answering these questions and suggests some reasonable answers: (1) language is constantly changing, but it is neither progressing nor decaying; (2) languages are slowly changing (not “evolving” in the usual sense of the word) in different—indeed, sometimes opposite—directions; (3) language change is not wrong, but it may sometimes lead to situations in which speakers of different dialects of the same language have difficulty understanding one another; and (4) although it is impossible to halt such change by passing laws or establishing monitoring “academies,” careful language planning can often help.
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