In next week’s LX553 lecture I will be talking about language death. Of course, it’s not the language that dies as such; rather, the speakers… It is assumed that about half of the world’s languages are endangered and there are estimations that one language dies every other week.
I bet you are asking why this topic is important to me. German isn’t endangered after all, right? There are two reasons really. My MA dissertation was concerned with the processes that lead to language death but more importantly, I am part of one of these processes.
My late grandfather spoke what is called Low German (LG) and only LG. The status of LG is debatable. Some people argue that it’s a language and others argue that it is a dialect. In our family, whether it was a language or a dialect was unimportant: It was just a part of our life. Since we lived in the same house as my grandparents, my brother and I were constantly exposed to my grandpa speaking in this variety. However, my grandmother, who had fled from Silesia after WWII, did not speak LG but had learned to understand it over the course of time. Therefore, their children, my father and his two brothers, were not raised speaking LG fluently and my dad, who mainly speaks High German, only uses a few LG expressions. My mum, on the other hand, was raised speaking Low German and High German. When she gets together with her brother and her sisters now you hardly hear any High German but they all speak to each other in LG. Because LG was not fashionable and it was seen as language of farmers when I was born, my brother and I then learned High German as first language. At the dinner table my mum would be switching between Low German when speaking to my grandpa and then switching back to High German when talking to us. So we do understand Low German but when we try speaking it, it just sounds silly and therefore we don’t use it.
As far as I understand my mum, it was a conscious decision to raise us with High German. And I can remember a scene in primary school when a teacher laughed at a student and corrected him because he had used Low German. After all, parents want to make the best choices for their children.
This is a fairly normal trajectory of decline, which we find in many endangered languages. So one could think I’m just a data point (considering my love for quantitative sociolinguistics) but this is not (only) the case. Language loss has an effect on the speakers. It took me a long time but in my twenties I realised that Low German is an important part of my identity, which I won’t be able to pass on to my children.