Well in the case of reviving/fostering a language, that’s something that the Federal government OR the State of Hawaii could both do, but the Feds can’t order the state to do it. They could potentially fund it, if they could get it on some appropriations bill or convince the rest of Congress that it’s worth doing. I suspect that state-level effort is the place for it.
I think @JRDelirious makes a great point- native Hawaiians are/were a small second-class minority, unlike the Irish in Ireland (or Welsh in Wales, Scots in Scotland, etc…) so there hasn’t been as much community interest in reviving the language, nor was there the same pool of native speakers to keep it going.
That said, I would be willing to bet that minority languages generally do just die out in the face of a dominant language. Look at the experiences of immigrants to the US; how many of them still speak Texas German? Pennsylvania Dutch? Irish? Italian? Cajun French?
Caveat: I have just about zero personal knowledge of anything PD.
A quick look at the wiki’s map of speakers makes it seem like a number of separated enclaves. 300K total broken into e.g. 20 blobs of 15K each has a very different survival profile than does a single blob of all 300K.
Lower down in the article there’s a subsection on “speaker population” Which is very interesting. Substantially all the speakers are Amish or Mennonite. These are socially isolationist communities. Which suggests PD will be unusually resilient and long-lasting in those communities versus what the raw numbers might suggest.
What is missing (from that article at least) is the age profile of PD speakers. e.g. If 250K of the 300K are now over age 60, the headcount will be collapsing rapidly over the next 20 years, despite any efforts to teach the current and upcoming children. When 300K in split-up enclaves turns into 50K in split-up enclaves, the language will be on death’s door.
Something Anabaptists (Amish, etc) and Haredim (so-called “ultra-Orthodox” Jews) have in common is high birth rates. According to what I can find, the average Amish woman has about 7 children in her lifetime, and it’s 6 for Hasidic women in the US. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of Yiddish speakers speakers in the US overall declined 14% but increased by 7% in New York state. The language is thriving in places like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Kiryas Joel upstate. I can’t find good data for population change among Pennsylvania Dutch speakers, since they’re usually wrapped in with other German speakers in the data. I don’t think either language is going to fade away anytime soon.
Which adds the additional factor to answering the OP, in addition to the very much true governmental support vs suppression, and size of population: having majority speaking communities with strong independent cultural identities somewhat separated from the dominant language one.
ETA: which is the reason that the dominant cultures try to suppress minority languages, concern that it furthers that insularity, over sense of being all part of the whole.
Apologies for not reading the whole thread before replying, but after skimming it I suspect no one posting has much knowledge of the history, past and present, of 'Ōlelo Hawai’i (the proper name of the Hawaiian language). Here’s a super-quick summary, though I don’t pretend to be an expert on the topic myself, just a Hawai’i resident who loves language and so pays a bit of attention to language matters here:
PAST: Thanks to yet another example of arrogant colonialism, the language was outlawed in 1896 and people were punished for speaking Hawaiian. @What_Exit is partly right in post #4, but it should be noted that earlier in the nineteenth century there was much more acknowledgment and respect for the language. In fact, the first legal code in Hawai’i was actually written in 'Ōlelo Hawai’i, and it was explicitly stated that in the event of contrasting interpretations between the code in 'Ōlelo Hawai’i and the English translation, the 'Ōlelo Hawai’i version was the one to be followed.
PRESENT: There is indeed a significant, government-supported effort to create a thriving community of native speakers of 'Ōlelo Hawai’i. I’m not sure exactly how long it has been active, but for at least the past couple of decades or so, based on individuals I know personally who attended them, Hawaiian language immersion schools have been a thing.
A great deal of public signage/language is provided bilingually. For example, informational plaques in national and state park areas are in both English and 'Ōlelo Hawai’i. Airport announcements are bilingual. Of course there is a performative aspect to that - no one is going to learn the Hawaiian language from hearing it in the airport - but still, it is a commitment to recognizing and respecting the language.
Hey @Jagraze1 . Our poster @CairoCarol lives there after decades living all over the planet. She’s a real and sympathetic expert on local native cultures and knows whereof she speaks.
As to this, you confuse the government of the US state of Hawaii with some sort of imaginary government of, by, and for only the small minority group in Hawaii called Native Hawaiians. It’s the white settlers’ government mostly. Because it’s now the white settlers’ state mostly.
It’s a travesty it got that way but we need to rewind about 150 years to change the course t prevent that from happening. Or we need to undo 150 years of history in the fairly near future.
Most Old Order Mennonites and Amish speak Pennsylvania Dutch. There are getting to be quite a lot of them, as very large families are common and most remain in some branch of the church.
They also speak English, at least in primarily English-speaking countries, in order to be able to interact with other people. They learn it in school, however; small children generally have only a few words of English, as it’s not what they hear at home.
However, I think Pennsylvania Dutch developed in the USA. Didn’t Cajun do so also? I don’t know about Texas German, but the name seems to imply it.
They’re not isolated from each other – travel and population exchange between physically separated Mennonite communities, at least, seems to be pretty common.
And, while I don’t have the statistics, they have a whole lot of young people. Families of 10 or more are common – they’re eating well, they use most of modern medicine, nearly everybody gets (heterosexually) married, and they don’t use birth control.
I asked an Old Order friend of mine a few years ago what the retention rate is, and she said about 90%. I think that includes people who move to a different Mennonite group – they’re not all Old Order – but I really don’t think the language is in any danger of disappearing for lack of young speakers. And the population of both Amish and Mennonites is growing pretty fast; though I’m having trouble finding clear overall statistics, as opposed to statistics for a specific conference.
You can add your pronouns to your profile if you’re concerned about them.
He’s referring to CairoCarol. To someone more fluent in English it is clear “CairoCarol” was the antecedent to the “she” in that sentence.
And as mentioned by her, who I have no reason to distrust, this is not the current government “hating” on the language, on the contrary the current government is doing things to accommodate the language. But the change in official policy came about only very, very late, after over 80 years of colonial imposition.
If Hawaii was its own country, like other Polynesian nations are, it might have had a better chance of keeping its own language dominant. But it’s not, so it struggles.
Which Polynesian nations still have the indigenous language as the most dominant? It’s usually the European colonial language or some kind of pidgin variant.