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What is the role of schools in the loss of indigenous languages? A study 25 years ago of prospects for the survival of Navajo placed most of the blame for the spread of English on increasing access to schools. Reconsidering that evidence and recent developments, the central role of the introduction of Western schooling is seen still to be highly relevant. But other factors have worked through the school, the major effect of which has been the ideological acceptance of English. Vernacular literacy, traditional or introduced religion, and political structure all have failed to establish a counterforce. Economic changes also led to new living patterns that, together with improved communication, broke down isolation and supported the threat to the survival of language. This study confirms the importance of seeing language and education in the full social, cultural, religious, and political context recognized by educational anthropology.
Introduction
Schooling and language are inextricably related. Schools have been expected to keep sacred or classical languages alive long after people stop speaking them, or to replace disfavored varieties of language by "richer" and higher-status varieties. The role of schools in language shift and maintenance is therefore central. As Hinton and Ahlers (1999:57) put it, "For some endangered languages for which the educational system was once the tool of language destruction, it has now become the tool for language revitalization." Of course Hinton and Ahlers agree fully with Fishman that "schools of small languages and small language communities are ineffectual" (1999:118) if they are expected to carry the weight of language revival alone.
Fishman (1964) was the first to proclaim language loss as an important field of study for sociolinguistics, and his study (Fishman 1966) of the state of language loyalty in the United States was an. early effort to sketch a theoretical model. In that volume, Kloss (1966) reviewed the factors in a contact situation and found that most were ambivalent in their effect on maintenance. Only social and cultural isolation, internal (as among the Amish or the Hassidim) or external (as with Native Americans), appeared to assure maintenance. Fishman characterized the upward social mobility of a minority speech community as the most probable cause of language loss. A large number of studies have appeared in the last...