Does Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory Account for the Actual Vitality of Ethnic groups? A Critical Evaluation by Yamgur (2011)

Yamgur, K. (2011). Does ethnolinguistic vitality theory account for the actual vitality of ethnic groups? A critical evaluation. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 32, 111-120. doi:10.1080/01434632.2010.541914

            Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory (EVT) and its accompanying questionnaire was retested and critically accounted for in this paper by Yamgur. He took the Turkish community in diaspora with focus on four countries, namely Germany, Netherlands, France and Australia.

            Calling on the article by Elhala, Yamgur supported and cited several weaknesses of the instrument in question. He noticed that SEVQ, EVT’s instrumentation, failed to produce consistency of results in determining Demographic, Institutional Control, and Status factors (pp. 118-9), as in this study. He went on to discover that SEVQ couldn’t reconcile mainstream versus immigrant vitalities (p. 116). He cited it as an instrumentation that is contextually difficult when administered across geographies under the same ethnic communities (pp. 116, 117-118).  Also, building on Fishman, he emphasized that language should be intertwined with the ethnic core values to achieve language maintenance (p. 118), which the instrumentation had not incorporated. He then suggested reconstructing the concepts under EVT and producing a more inclusive instrumentation.

            Yamgur, however, did not discredit some important insights gained from the EVT, such as the revealed importance of generational considerations (p. 113), social network (p. 117) and media portrayal of Turkish in diaspora in language maintenance. It is accepted that instrumentations have vulnerable areas for improvement and Yamgur had successfully pinpointed these areas of consideration under the EVT.