Volume 2015, Issue 231 - Special Issue: New Speakers of Minority Languages: The Challenging Opportunity

This article addresses the concept of the new speaker from both a theoretical/definitional perspective and from the standpoint of a situated, ethnographic analysis. The more general and theoretical focus addresses some of the presuppositions and entailments of the new speaker concept, both as an “on-the-ground” concept that gets operationalized by social actors and as an analytical category used by researchers. In particular, it considers how the new speaker concept elucidates criteria in relation to which minority language-speaking communities of practice are conceptualized and enacted. The ethnographic focus, on Corsican adult language classrooms, explores how new-speakerness is invoked implicitly in Corsica, where the term “new speaker” itself is not in circulation, but is a target of language planning strategies. This ethnographic research reveals complex identity and language ideological issues that are raised about the legitimacy, authority and authenticity of Corsican language learners in a sociolinguistic context in which both formal/institutional and informal/social use of the minority language is quite restricted.

This article draws on sociolinguistic fieldwork among speakers of one of Europe's smallest indigenous language communities, a speaker group which persists after the loss of all of its “traditional speakers” within living memory. The extreme language shift experienced by Manx has not led to loss of the language as a spoken and literary medium due to the efforts of significant numbers of language activists and enthusiasts over several generations, from before the loss of the traditional language community to the present. Their actions have resulted in significant linguistic institutionalisation and a rapidly expanding number of speakers of various abilities, some of whom form a new “speaker community”. It discusses the constructions of linguistic authenticity and alternative models for the revival speaker, showing how core groups of speakers have been bestowed with authenticity by the wider non-speaker population, for whom linguists' interest in language endangerment and language death are not primary concerns. The article shows how speakers appropriate and are accorded forms of authority and legitimacy in the absence of traditional native speakers.

While traditional Irish-speaking communities continue to decline, the number of second-language speakers outside of the Gaeltacht has increased. Of the more than one and half million speakers of Irish just over 66,000 now live in one of the officially designated Gaeltacht areas. While “new speakers” can be seen to play an important role in the future of the language, this role is sometimes undermined by discourses which idealise the notion of the traditional Gaeltacht speaker. Such discourses can be used to deny them “authenticity” as “real” or “legitimate” speakers, sometimes leading to struggles over language ownership. Concerns about linguistic purity are often voiced in both academic and public discourse, with the more hybridized forms of Irish developed amongst “new speakers” often criticised. This article looks at the extent to which such discourses are being internalised by new speakers of Irish and whether or not they are constructing an identity as a distinct social and linguistic group based on what it means to be an Irish speaker in the twenty first century.

The increase in Basque speakers in the last 30 years has been due in large part to ‘new speakers’ or euskaldunberri , a term that will be used here to refer to those who have learned the language by means other than family transmission. While very significant in numbers, to date this group has not been the object of much study. Little is known about their attitudes and motivations, how they perceive themselves as Basque speakers, or their language use and transmission patterns. Acquiring answers to these questions is of strategic importance for developing an effective evidence-based language policy for the future. This article presents the results of a qualitative study of new speakers. Drawing on data from focus groups and interviews, the central goal of the article is to examine how new speakers of differing profiles perceive and locate themselves with respect to the popularly used labels for “new” and “native” Basque speakers and the ideologies of authenticity and legitimacy that seem to shape these perceptions. The analysis shows that learning the language alone, even to a high degree of competence, does not guarantee a view of themselves as true and genuine speakers of Basque.

This article analyzes the tensions and dynamics which exist between “new” speakers and other speakers, such as traditional or native speakers of minority languages (MLs), in an attempt to discover just how much of a barrier to communication are the (perceived) differences which are purported to exist between them. The dynamics between “new” and native speakers seem to be complex and nuanced, and “(in)authenticity” can be indexed through accent, the lexicon and grammatical structures, both by local users and more widely by researchers and other interested third parties, reflecting a wide range of ideo-logical stances. Using a critical sociolinguistic framework, these differences are examined from the perspective of the power differentials among and between various ML speakers/users in two situations of language endangerment, Breton and Yiddish. The reproduction of “symbolic violence”, as described by Bourdieu (1991), which results from such differentials can hinder language revitalization projects and can run counter to the interests of the language community in question. Both settings appear to share a commonality of experience that is wider than just the two language communities under scrutiny here and possible ways of reconciling such differences are examined toward the end of the article.

This article looks at the “new speaker” concept and the questions it raises in terms of legitimacy from the point of view of several types of social actors, namely language advocates, academics and school pupils (that is to say, “new speakers” themselves). The aim of this article is to show that this notion is not a purely descriptive one, but also carries a strong prescriptive loading – which in turns requires that minority language learners negotiate their participation in linguistic markets. Based on fieldwork in Provence, I look at how “new speakers” are often construed as speakers of “new languages”, “standard” or “artificial” languages that tend to index youth, urbanity, modernity and middle class membership – all qualities which may be seen as undesirable in parts of minority language movements. I then turn to pupils of an Occitan bilingual primary school in Provence and analyse how they reframe the new speaker debate in order for themselves to fit in the broader picture of Occitan speakers. All the viewpoints I analyse tend to emphasise the weight that the traditional, monolingual speaker still holds among speakers of minority languages in southern France.

In this article we use Moscovici's (1976) notion of active minorities as a framework to explain the linguistic practices and motivations behind linguistic change amongst new speakers of Galician. Revitalization policies since the 1980s brought about changes in the symbolic and economic value of Galician on the linguistic market. However, this has not been significant enough to change the rules of social mobility and Spanish has continued to be the language of prestige. Despite this, neofalantes ‘new speakers of Galician’ have opted for linguistic change and engage in the process of majority language displacement. We argue that this displacement can at least in part be explained by a move away from functionalist models of language contact and shift and towards an understanding of these processes from a language conflict perspective. This allows us to explain the practices of neofalantes as not simply deviations from the sociolinguistic “status quo” but as reactions to it and as proponents of social change. To explore the behavioural styles and practices of neofalantes as an active minority, we analyse the discourses which emerge from discussion groups involving twelve new speakers of Galician about their sociolinguistic practices.

New speakers of Catalan have come to represent, from a demolinguistic perspective, a substantial part of the community of speakers. Of those who presently speak Catalan as an “habitual language”, 41.6 percent are native speakers of Spanish. In this article, we shall follow up the various ways in which native Castilian speakers incorporate Catalan into their lives. This happens, as we will show, in specific biographical junctures that we call mudes , a Catalan term referring to (often reversible) variations in social performance. Our analysis is based on a qualitative study that included 24 interviews and 15 focus groups covering a total of 105 people of different sexes and linguistic, educational, social and residential backgrounds. We shall give a general overview of these mudes as we typified them: when subjects entered primary school, secondary school, the university, the job market, when creating a new family and when they had children (if they did). The study of linguistic mudes provides, in our view, a new and productive perspective on how people develop their linguistic repertoire, their attachment to specific languages and the significance of these aspects for social identity. It facilitates a processual, time-sensitive analysis that allows to contextualise and critique ethnonationalist discourses that have often saturated our understanding of language use.