A Diachronic View of FLP

Abstract

This chapter provides an overall picture of how language use and FLP have changed in the Campbell family over time. The chapter details each speaker’s social and linguistic backgrounds and demonstrates how the creation and subsequent unravelling of the current Gaelic-centred FLP (the FLP involving David, Maggie, and Jacob) is the result of different FLPs (the FLPs that the children’s caregivers experienced when they were younger) and how these FLPs have converged and changed over time. The chapter underscores several observations about diachronic language use over three generations: first, that language shift is occurring along the generational dimension; secondly, language shift appears also to occur within generations in terms of age; and finally that the overall use of Gaelic has decreased over the two corpora.