ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2010
Language shift, bilingualism and the future of Britain's Celtic languages.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bayesian parametric estimation shows the effects of social prestige and bilingualism on reshaping language competition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Projected speaker numbers and dormancy risks of Canada's Indigenous languages.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- When dialects collide: how socioeconomic mixing affects language use.EPJ data science · 2025Article
- Linguistic diversity in a new agenda for equity in science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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- The Role of Language in Structuring Social Networks Following Market Integration in a Yucatec Maya Population.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Exact Solutions of a Mathematical Model Describing Competition and Co-Existence of Different Language Speakers.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Kia kaua te reo e rite ki te moa, ka ngaro: do not let the language suffer the same fate as the moa.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Language as a marker of ethnic identity among the Yucatec Maya.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Field evidence for two paths to cross-cultural competence: implications for cultural dynamics.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Urbanity and the dynamics of language shift in Galicia.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Modeling language shift.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Social media enhances languages differentiation: a mathematical description.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Quantifying the driving factors for language shift in a bilingual region.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Multilevel processes and cultural adaptation: Examples from past and present small-scale societies.Ecology and society : a journal of integrative science for resilience and sustainability · 2016Article
- Language extinction and linguistic fronts.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2014Article
- Evolutionary approaches to cultural and linguistic diversity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2010Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
'Language shift' is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100-120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the 'natural wastage' as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission.
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