Assessing 40 years of Group Vitality Research and Future Directions

Type of resource
Authors/collaborators
Title
Assessing 40 years of Group Vitality Research and Future Directions
Abstract
The authors provide key group vitality concepts followed by a selective overview of four decades of research on vitality issues. They describe group vitality as what makes language communities behave as distinctive and active collective entities within multilingual settings. The authors point out that three structural factors combine to foster strong to weak group vitality: demographic factors, institutional support, and status. The objective vitality framework uses available census and sociolinguistic indicators to measure the relative vitality of minority and majority language communities in contact. The authors provide two case studies that show the crucial role of language policies in improving or undermining the vitality of language minorities in Canada. Studies of subjective perceptions of group vitality are reviewed by the authors as they relate to language and communicative outcomes. Key vitality models are noted by the authors, along with future research directions highlighting the need for a theoretical integration of the vitality framework.
Publication
Journal of Language and Social Psychology
Volume
Vol. 38
Issue
no. 4
Pages
409-422
Date
September 2019
Language
en
URL
Citation
Bourhis, Richard Y., Itesh Sachdev, Martin Ehala, and Howard Giles. “Assessing 40 Years of Group Vitality Research and Future Directions.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology Vol. 38, no. 4 (September 2019): 409–422. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335143914_Assessing_40_Years_of_Group_Vitality_Research_and_Future_Directions.
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