Visiting scholar to discuss language issues surrounding migration

An internationally renowned linguistics scholar will give a public lecture at Victoria University of Wellington next week on the problems of maintaining a heritage language after migrating to the city or another country.

Emeritus Professor Bernard Spolsky says migration often leads to a shift in language.

“When Māori moved to the cities, and as Pasifika peoples left their home islands, their heritage languages were endangered or lost. However, there are ways of keeping a language alive,” says Emeritus Professor Spolsky.

“After the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, for example, the Jewish people spent 2000 years without a native homeland, during which time they spoke many different languages. But the institution of a system of education for boys kept Hebrew alive as a sacred and literary language, and permitted its re-establishment as the dominant language of the State of Israel.” 

Prior to his Wellington visit, Emeritus Professor Spolsky will attend the Te Kura Rea Minority Languages and Dialect Conference in Dunedin from 16 to 19 April to discuss what might be learned about the survival of endangered languages from the fate of Jewish languages. He will ask if the regeneration of Māori will lead to regular daily use by speakers as happened with Modern Israeli Hebrew, or whether people will be satisfied with keeping up a number of symbolic uses, a status that linguists have labelled 'post-vernacular', as has happened to most Jewish language varieties. 

Emeritus Professor Spolsky will also visit Auckland from 23 April to 30 April, where he will deliver two public lectures—one at Auckland University on the ideological basis of language management and the other at Auckland University of Technology on the contribution of the late Joshua Fishman, an American linguist, to language activism and the sociology of language.