INTRODUCTION

Ethnolinguistic vitality ‘is that which makes a group likely to behave as a distinctive and active collective entity in intergroup situations’ (Giles et al. 1977: 308). It was suggested that groups that have little vitality are likely to cease to exist as distinctive collectives, while those that have high vitality are likely to survive. Traditionally, ethnolinguistic vitality is divided into objective and subjective vitality (Bourhis et al. 1981). Objective vitality is determined by three structural variables: demography, institutional support and status (Giles et al. 1977); while subjective vitality is understood as ‘group members' subjective assessment of in-group/out-group vitality’, which ‘may be as important in determining sociolinguistic and interethnic behaviour as the group's objective vitality’ (Harwood et al. 1994: 175). In this chapter, ethnolinguistic vitality is understood as a perception of ‘groupness’, together with emotional attachment to this group and readiness to act collectively as a group (see Ehala 2008a, 2010b); thus our approach is social psychological in nature and close to traditional subjective vitality studies, although the framework is considerably extended.

As a social psychological phenomenon, vitality is tightly connected to ethnic/linguistic identity. According to Omoniyi and White ‘the sociolinguistics of identity focuses on the ways in which people position or construct themselves and are positioned or constructed by others in socio-cultural situations through the instrumentality of language and with reference to all the variables that comprise identity markers for each community’ (2006: 1).