Blackwell Reference Online

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Demography is the science of populations. Like most sciences, it may be defined narrowly or broadly. “The narrowest sense is that of formal demography … concerned with size, distribution, structure, and change of populations. The components of change are births, deaths, and migrations” (Shryock et al., 1973: 2). In a broader sense, demography is concerned with gathering information of various kinds about population groups, including their mother tongues. It is in this broader sense that demography will be used here to stress the problems related to the collection of language data by censuses and surveys. We leave to specialized demographers the calculation of the degree as well as the mechanisms of the renewal and/or the disappearance of linguistic groups, which will be mentioned in section 5.No language census exists for a great majority of countries. And where these censuses do exist, many are unreliable because of a lack of good enumeration techniques. Nevertheless, the European Union has recently constituted the Equipe Euromosaic to undertake a language usage survey in eight selected language groups. Moreover, the Eurobarometer number 28 included a question on conversational ability in the nine EU working languages, with a space for recording knowledge of other (e.g., regional, lesser used) tongues.Public data on language characteristics usually take on three different forms:Mother ... log in or subscribe to read full text