Global Journal of Human Social Science, G: Linguistics and Education, Volume 23 Issue 3

Fig. 5: L2 of the student If we want to give a generational 15 treatment to the data collected from the survey applied to students at the ESPB (Graph 1), we would divide it in the following way: 1st generation (Grandparents) - over 60 years old; 2nd generation (parents) - between 30 and 60 years old; 3rd generation (children) - between 0 and 30 years old. Crossing the age of the respondents to the duration of the generations show that 132 individuals belong to the 3rd generation. There are no 1 st generation students in our sample. From the information gathered, one can deduce that the Umbundu language is in disuse, because each subsequent generation uses it less and less. Figure 6 below distributes the results obtained by age and the respective percentages: Fig. 6: Percentage of ESPB students by generation. From the data above, one can foresee that in the transition from the 3rd to the 4th generation, there will be a further weakening of the Umbundu language, which will change from L1 to L0, ceasing to be a language of communication for the younger generations. Table 3 gives details of the language status of the students surveyed. The abbreviations indicate the order of the languages, i.e., PU - indicates Portuguese as L1 and Umbundu as L2; UP - indicates Umbundu as L1 and Portuguese as L2; P - indicates that the speaker only speaks Portuguese; OP - suggests that the speaker has another language as L1 and Portuguese is their L2. 15 Despite the debate around it and according to Comte (1998), Dilthey (1989) and Mannheim (1993), a generation can be understood as a group of people that is born in the same historical period that possess a shared identity, or people that succeed their parents. In this strict sense, a generation can be a period of 25 to 30 years (Comte, 1998). In this study we consider the first generation individuals between 50 and 75 years old, the second generation individuals between 25 and 50, and the third generation individuals between 0 and 25 years. 2 nd Generation 6 = 4,4% 3 rd Generation 126 = 93,3% Portuguese L1 102= 80,9 % Portuguese L2 24 = 80,04% Volume XXIII Issue III Version I 66 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 G © 2023 Global Journals Preserving the Umbundu Language