The ecology of pressures: Towards a tool to analyze the complex process of language shift and maintenance

Abstract

We assume that every human action is caused by some pressure. Thus the notion of pressure is central to our model. Different pressure levels occur in the interplay of the interests of individuals and the immediate environment, which we call state of the world. The state of the world influences pressure and is modified by action. We aim to expand the model to use it for the analysis of communication in multilingual everyday multilingual situations. To obtain a tool of analysis for linguistic actions in multilingual situations it is necessary to classify pressures. The first level comprises pressures that mainly depend on the interest of someone who is carrying out a speech act, pressures that are more state of the world dependant. A second level involves identifying some of the interests' origins. Finally, we focus on communication tools. The concept of competence is criticized and a more suitable concept is proposed: common routine and utmost common routine, which triggers the use of a given code in a specific conversation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.