New Speakers in the City

GIDS is a Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale framework developed by Joshua Fishman (1991). The framework includes eight stages 1-8, which should be read from the bottom up, assuming that stage 1 is the ideal be strived for and that revitalization of an endangered language usually starts at one of the lower stages:  1. Education, work sphere, mass media and government operations at higher and national levels; 2. Local/regional mass media and governance; 3. Local/regional work sphere; 4. Public schooling; 5. Schools for literacy acquisition, not in the public schooling system (incl. courses for adults); 6. Home-family-neighbourhood language use and transmission; 7. Cultural interaction in the given language involving primarily the older generations; 8. Language reconstruction and adult acquisition.  Except for a handful of committed language activists, Lower Sorbian does not have a closely-knit speech community. Young people, even if they learn it at school, can rarely hold a spon