Protecting Vernacular Communities in Minority Language Revitalisation: A social dynamic analysis

This paper sets out an approach to ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) that aims to generate mutual benefits for L1 speaker communities, L2 networks and L2 learners in a reinforcing cycle for language group sustainability. This new conceptualisation of EV builds on the comprehensive reality-based framework, which we call Language Dynamics in Society (LanDS: Ó Giollagáin et al. 2025) for understanding how languages live in societies, or for describing ethnolinguistic sustainability and the sociolinguistic crisis threatening global language diversity. Academic and official approaches in recent decades to language promotion have been an obstacle to minority-language vernacular community protection. Much of contemporary language policy and planning simply ignores or is in denial about the ubiquitous societal decline of minority vernacular communities. In response to their demise, this paper sets out: a) a new theoretical framework by which we can interpret the minority-language societal condition and, b) to inform strategic approaches to minority-language promotion with sufficient vernacular community protection, i.e. to develop socially meaningful language revitalisation. This new conceptualisation of EV reassesses minority-language sustainability from an interactional social dynamic framework. EV from this perspective entails four foundational developmental stages: 1) primary socialisation; 2) secondary socialisation; 3) civic reinforcement; and 4) coherent ethnicisation, i.e. socio-political processes leading to coherence in perceptions of collective identity. Progression individually and collectively through these stages is key to a language community’s capacity to develop and bolster its societal sustainability. Successful language policy is dependent, therefore, on the cultural, political and institutional ability of a language group to align strategies with pressures of societal change, interactional processes, and social dynamics which are foundational to a language g roup’s E V.