Conservative attitudes toward loanwords and toward change in grammar often hamper efforts to revitalize endangered languages (Tiwi, Australia); and incompatible conservatisms can separate educated revitalizers, interested in historicity, from remaining speakers interested in locally authentic idiomaticity (Irish). Native-speaker conservatism is likely to constitute a barrier to coinage (Gaelic, Scotland), and unrealistically severe older-speaker purism can discourage younger speakers where education in a minority language is unavailable (Nahuatl, Mexico). Even in the case of a once entirely extinct language, rival authenticities can prove a severe problem (the Cornish revival movement in Britain). Evidence from obsolescent Arvanitika (Greece), from Pennsylvania German (US), and from Irish in Northern Ireland (the successful Shaw's Road community in Belfast) suggests that structural compromise may enhance survival chances; and the case of English in the post-Norman period indicates that restructuring by intense language contact can leave a language both viable and versatile, with full potential for future expansion. (Revival, purism, attitudes, norms, endangered languages, minority languages, contact)

Using data from four sets of alternating forms in a moribund Dutch-lexicon creole, this article addresses the characteristics of variation in moribund languages, and “the usefulness of variationist approaches in the description and analysis” of them (Drechsel 1990:552–53). The analysis shows how variable phonological rules continue to exist in a dying language, even after large numbers of words have been bled from the rules' inputs, thereby providing support for Dressler's hypothesis of lexical fading (1972). A three-stage scenario of rule loss is proposed to account for the fact that, in the Negerhollands case, there is substantially greater phonological variation at the level of the community than at the level of the individual. (Obsolescence, phonological variation, phonological change, creole languages, Virgin Islands, Negerhollands)

This article deals with the use of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) as a written language in a literary or poetic function. It is argued that HCE's lack of what Kloss 1967 calls Abstand ‘autonomy, distance’ presents certain technical problems for writers, and acts as a barrier to further Ausbau (also Kloss's term, ‘elaboration’) in the literary domain, particularly in the novel. Because it has no writing system of its own, HCE is represented as if it were a deviant or non-standard variety of English. In other words, HCE is forced to be a literary dialect rather than a literary language. Some practical problems connected with the elaboration process are examined, such as standardization and related theoretical issues associated with narrative technique. The article concludes by considering the likelihood of successful resolution of these problems within the current political situation in the Hawaiian Islands. (Hawai'i, pidgin, creole, minority language, standardization, Abstand, Ausbau, orthography, literature, narrative, genre)

The article examines the fact that the push for democracy and the end of Communist rule in Central Europe was phrased in terms of traditional European notions of freedom and democracy, in spite of longlived Communist attempts to redefine these and related terms in order to make them a Communist reality. Communist language usage was forcefully brought home to the West by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially in his notion of “doublethink”. We use the semantic theory of David Kronenfeld, along with Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and Jean Piaget's views of how children's cognitive systems develop (including natural language), to derive a theoretical explanation for the failure of the Orwellian prediction and of the Communist linguistic efforts on which it was predicated. The explanation involves Ferdinand de Saussure's central idea that language is an interlinked system which is crucially social, and points to the critical role of childre's early language learning (in mundane, everyday contexts) on the development and structuring of their adult system. (Extensionist semantics, politics and language, cognitive dissonance, Central Europe, Poland, George Orwell, propaganda, language change)