**** language death and decreolization as social processes

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Kathryn Woolard's Gramsciian perspective on language death as a social process places it within the frame of resistance and capitulation to the culture of the dominant language. Her focus is on the speaker as the locus of agency. She critiques the use of "languages" as agents. In one of the most interesting sections of her essay, she compares the processes of of dialect/language loss to decreolization, hypothesizing that if enough structural similarity can be obtained or created between the superstrate and substrate then decreolization/death will proceed if the substrate speakers can be convinced that theirs is merely a corrupt variant of the standard. She claims that structural shift is not enough to cause language death and decreolization, but it provides the material base for decisions regarding resistance or capitulation to be made.

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Kathryn A. Woolard. "Language Convergence and Language Death as Social Processes; in Dorian, Nancy C., ed. _Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death_. Cambridge University Press, 1989; 355-367.