Introduction: Ausbau is everywhere!
-
Mauro Tosco
1. A (rather longish) introduction to the introduction
An Ausbau language, to repeat Kloss's (1967: 30) original definition, is a language that has “deliberately been reshaped so as to become a vehicle of variegated literary expression.” It is a language because “it has been made” such. Its opposite is an Abstand language, a language that is there, so to speak, “by nature,” and that would be recognized as such “no matter what” by virtue of its inherent distinctiveness. With his dichotomy Kloss brought to the fore and highlighted, to use Fishman's words (this issue), “the importance of organized human intervention into the natural language-change processes.” Still, between the two terms of his dichotomic opposition, it is Ausbau that has received the greatest attention, and it is to the concept of Ausbau that Heinz Kloss owes his place among the great linguists of the past century. The reason is easily spelled out: as Fishman (this issue; here and below emphasis in the original) again notes, “Ausbau and Abstand are not really on one and the same dimension,” and “the latter term, Abstand, is entirely unneeded in any language planning typology because it lacks any reference to human agency.”
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Ausbau is everywhere!
- Rethinking the Ausbau–Abstand dichotomy into a continuous and multivariate system
- On “unified Serbo-Croatian” and its “new successor languages”: a case study of scholarly treatment
- The Ausbau issue in the Dravidian languages: the case of Tamil and the problem of purism
- Competing scripts: the introduction of the Roman alphabet in Africa
- “Ex Uno Plura”: the uneasy road of Ethiopian languages toward standardization
- Kun-dangwok: “clan lects” and Ausbau in western Arnhem Land
- Book reviews
- Community collaborations: best practices for North American indigenous language documentation
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Ausbau is everywhere!
- Rethinking the Ausbau–Abstand dichotomy into a continuous and multivariate system
- On “unified Serbo-Croatian” and its “new successor languages”: a case study of scholarly treatment
- The Ausbau issue in the Dravidian languages: the case of Tamil and the problem of purism
- Competing scripts: the introduction of the Roman alphabet in Africa
- “Ex Uno Plura”: the uneasy road of Ethiopian languages toward standardization
- Kun-dangwok: “clan lects” and Ausbau in western Arnhem Land
- Book reviews
- Community collaborations: best practices for North American indigenous language documentation
