Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Maintenance and Loss of Minority Languages

This book is the second of two volumes following from the Third International Conference on Maintenance and Loss of Minority Languages, which was held in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, in 1998.

The papers in this volume describe a wide variety of language contact settings in which one or more languages are in a process of shift or loss. The papers investigate these processes from sociological, linguistic, historical, political, and psychological perspectives and combinations of these. The languages concerned are Alsace, American-Hebrew, American-Lithuanian, Australian-Turkish, Basque, Canadian-German, Finnish, Dutch-Italian, Dutch-Turkish, Gascon, German-French, Iowa-Dutch, Italian-German, Istro-Romance and Istro-Rumene, New Zealand-Dutch, Pomattertitsch, Punjabi/Urdu, Springbokdeutsch, Tujia, and Yiddish.

Contributions by Jeroen Aarssen, Peter Broeder & Guus Extra; Sally Boyd; Silvia Dal Negro; Elizabeth De Kadt; Agurtzane Elordui; Thomas Field; Penelope Gardner-Chloros; Sue Harris Russell; Madeleine Hulsen, Kees de Bot & Bert Weltens; Jens-Eberhard Jahn; Dorit Kaufman; Jetske Klatter-Folmer & Piet Van Avermaet; Barbara Köpke & Jean-Luc Nespoulous; Jolanta Macevichius; Mike Reynolds & Mohammed Akram; Monika S. Schmid; Carole A. Shaw & Itesh Sachdev; Caroline Smits; Kutlay Yagmur; and Minglang Zhou.

The first volume resulting from the conference is titled Theories on maintenance and loss of minority languages. Towards a more integrated explanatory framework.