Official Status for Indigenous Minority Languages: Does It Help?
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Abstract
In the 1990s, Inuktitut in Canada, nine non-colonial languages in South Africa, and the Sami languages in Nordic nations received official recognition from their governments. Several decades later, this paper explores what effect official status (OS) has had on revitalizing these languages through a review of the literature. It approaches OS as part of language planning and policy from a historical-structural perspective (McCarty & Warhol, 2011), arguing against what May (2005) terms resigned language realism. It examines these case studies for evidence that the languages’ positions within society have improved since gaining OS. Cooper (2007) and Minogue (2017) show that Inuktitut is declining and has not taken over expected domains of government and education. Evidence from South Africa suggests that giving OS to nine non-colonial indigenous languages was symbolic, as English continues to advance in many domains, despite being the native language of less than 10% of the population (Alexander, 2001). Although Norway, Sweden, and Finland have strengthened protection of Sami, the languages continue to lose domains and speakers (Pietikäinen et al., 2010). The paper concludes that while OS does not seem to provide much protection, culturally appropriate education in the minority language is imperative to maintain and revitalize these languages.
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