Cultural Shift and Language Shift

Cultural shift, understood as the change in one or several cultural or social traits undergone by a human population, is present throughout human history. Indeed, we can find examples of cultural shift from the development and spread of tool construction techniques in prehistoric times, to the present time adoption of smartphones in our everyday lives.

The span of this definition of cultural shift comprises from technical changes (such as the examples above), to changes in religious beliefs or the adoption of a new language by a society. It comprises global changes with crucial impact on the evolution of human history—such as the Neolithic transition, which besides the technical changes directly related to the adoption of agriculture, entailed as well changes in housing organization, social structures and belief systems that may be the initial seed of the present sociocultural organization (Smith 1995). But cultural shift can happen at any level, always playing a role in shaping today's and the future cultural characteristics and diversity of our societies.

Here we will focus on a specific kind of cultural shift: language shift. And in particular, below we present a model devised to be applied to processes of language shift where the dominant language in an area is replaced by a foreigner language (usually from a neighbouring area), that for some reason is seen by the locals as being more advantageous to the population (Isern and Fort 2014).

As with the broader concept of cultural shift, there have been ongoing processes of language shift since the emergence of the first spoken languages. This is clearly evidenced by the amount of dead languages from which we have written testimony (Ancient Greek, Goth, Hittite, Tocharian, etc.), and the probably much larger

N. Isern (s) · J. Fort

ICREA/Complex Systems Lab and Physics Department, University of Girona,

C/M“ Aurelia Capmany 61, 17071 Girona, Catalonia, Spain

e-mail: neus.isern@udg.edu

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 219

J.A.

However, linguistic change does happen, and in the following section we will detail the most important processes that yield the replacement of the dominant language in an area, before discussing several models and presenting a language shift model that can be applied to predict the temporal and spatial evolution in processes of language displacement (Isern and Fort 2014).

7.2