Societal Multilingualism

Speech communities are composed of bilingual and multilingual speakers. In a social

group, these two are deemed as the most obvious and salient cases of variation to observe.
Learning two or more languages has become a culture of people for different purposes.
Nowadays, monolingual speech communities are a rarity to find; monolingual countries are even
rarer. Most countries have more than one language that is spoken by a significant portion of the
population, and most of these languages have significant numbers of speakers in more than one
country.
Multilingualism is confronted with certain issues in society such as the status and roles of
the languages, attitudes toward languages, determinants of language choice, the symbolic and
practical uses of the languages, and the correlations between language use and social factors.
These factors include ethnicity, religion, and class.
Multilingual communities evolve through migration, involuntary migration, conquest and
incorporation of speakers of different languages in one single political unity and colonial policies.
Certainly, one factor affecting the spread of multilingualism is migration. It refers to the
movements of people speaking one language into the territory of people speaking another.
Migration can be categorized into two: voluntary migration and involuntary migration. Voluntary
migration is when the migrant has a choice to migrate or not. On the contrary, when the migrant
is force to migrate to another place or country, an involuntary migration takes place.

Another factor that helps spread multilingualism is by conquest and incorporation of

speakers of different languages into one single political unit. This was prevalent during historic
times wherein the spread of English power over the British Isles, for instance, produced
multilingualism and led to the loss of some Celtic languages. Indigenous languages were also
replaced by Moslem Empire with Arabic and language mixes led to the great variation in the
spoken Arabic dialects.
There are other reasons that paved the way for the spread of multilingualism. As pointed
out by Edwards (2007), these are through trade, religion, multilingual federations, and political
union. With these diverse historical circumstances that contributed to produce different kinds of
multilingual mixes, language conflict starts to exist and adds pressure to speakers of one language
to adopt other languages.
On a macro-level view of multilingualism, domains of communication are taken into
consideration: the setting, topic, goal and mode/medium of interaction. There would be instances,
as cited by researchers, that one language will be preferred over another depending on the
respective domain. When a speaker uses the dominant language, competent skills must be
acquired in order to participate in public life.

Language Loyalty and Language Shift

It has been a noticeable and alarming concern that there are languages in danger of dying.
Endangered languages refer to languages that are no longer being passed on to children as native
languages. This could be due to language loyalty and language shift. Language loyalty refers to
the ability or the lack thereof of speakers of a language to stand up to the pressure of more
powerful languages. As for language shift, it refers to the gradual displacement of one language
by another whereby a speech community shifts to a different language over an extended span of
time.
Two of the greatest recorded resistance to language shift were cases of isolationist
Menmonite Christian groups and the ultra-orthodox Hassidic Jews, both of whom rejected not
just the language but also the dress and social conduct of their new country. Those groups who
were able to maintain their languages were segregated and isolated by outside society.
Language and Ethnic Identity
Certainly, languages and their varieties have symbolic functions. A person’s identity can
be unraveled through his/her use of a language. With languages, people are able to organize
thoughts and establish social relationships with others. The role of language in establishing social
identity adds an additional, non-material dimension to the language conflict.
Language and ethnicity have a close interrelationship with each other. The connection
between the two depends on many factors. The ethnic pattern refers more generally to the
characteristic use of language influenced by the ethnic background of a speaker. Through time, a
particular language develops simultaneously and culture, habits, and customs can have a great
impact to it.

With the application of specific structural features, a speaker’s linguistic variety can be
used to express his/her distinct ethnic identity. These applied features include the grammatical,
syntactical, morphological, and phonological differences from the standard variety of a language.
These distinctions in an ethnic variety enable social groups (ethnic minorities, for instance) to
distinguish themselves linguistically and socially from the majority of society and its language
varieties.

A sample research study generated by Nurani (2015) on societal transformation among

the Javanese People in Yogyakarta, Indonesia examined the relationship between the
phenomenon of changing language loyalty and the Javanese identity. It also looked into the
national language planning and policy and its impacts toward the maintenance of Javanese
language and toward language ideology of the Javanese speakers. The 6-month ethnographic
study was participated by 17 people, divided into primary and supporting participants. After the
observations and in-depth interviews conducted, the study revealed that Javanese language shift
occurred because of strong support from the government toward Indonesian by emphasizing its
role as a symbol to unify all ethnic groups in Indonesia into one nation. Furthermore, the
Javanese people perceived English as an avenue to achieve academic and professional success as
well as higher social status. Altogether, this study showed that shifting language loyalty among
the Javanese people was an indication of societal transformation.
 Therefore, languages in varied speech communities become enriched and expanded
through certain factors that contribute to the spread of multilingualism. Some stay loyal to their
languages, while some shift to a different one. Migration and historic circumstances can cause
languages to either remain dominant or become short-lived. Language loyalty and language
shifting indeed take part in the current status of language in a speech community, leading to
societal transformation. The mixing of language codes creates a distinct color to a language
variety that would become a reflection of a social group’s ethnic identity. One can truly see the
dynamism of language and how its evolution does not simply happen meaninglessly.