Three Generations, Two Countries of Origin, One Speech Community: Australian-Macedonians and their Language(s), Australian Journal of Linguistics, Book Review

The discipline of language policy and planning (LPP) emerged in the early 1960s and gained
momentum in the 1970s due to de-colonization and state-building. Previously, colonized
nations engaged in the process of creating new nation-states, which involved displacing colonial
languages and selecting ones that reflected statehood, nationalism and identity. This also
meant grappling with serious language problems, as the path to officialization and standardization
is often fraught with logistical, political and educational quagmires. Language maintenance
and shift have become a major preoccupation within LPP. Scholars have attempted to
examine forces that promote or derail language maintenance and to develop theoretical
models for language vitality. Fishman’s eight-stage Graded Intergenerational Dislocation
Scale (see e.g. Fishman 2013) – a framework that accentuates the importance of linguistic
domains – is one of the most prominent of these models. It argues that family-home transmission
is the most crucial factor in language maintenance. In the absence of intergenerational
transmission, a minority language will gradually atrophy and eventually perish.
Against this backdrop, Three Generations, Two Countries of Origin, One Speech