Volume 2018, Issue 254 - Singles Issue: Domains, hierarchies and ideologies of language use, Issue Editor: Florian Coulmas

Costa Rica officially became a multi-ethnic, pluricultural nation in 2015. Representatives from the principal minorities, in particular Afro-Costa Ricans and indigenous peoples, played an important role in contesting the erstwhile dominant narrative of Costa Rican’s white European settler heritage. One of the intended consequences of the constitutional amendment was to ensure greater salience of ethnic minorities in public policy and social life. This study investigates the public display of linguistic and cultural diversity on commercial and community signage in six urban centres of Limón, the most ethnically diverse province. Undertaken in the same year as the constitutional amendment, the study examines the inclusion of languages and cultural references attributable to three main minority groups (Afro-Caribbean, Chinese and indigenous), and more recent migrant settlers, in public space. Greater salience was found in locations appearing to target a local readership; references to indigenous cultures were almost completely absent, however. Changes in the public narrative on Costa Rican identity may gradually encourage greater salience of official minority groups on public signage. An immediate challenge entails the effects of the expanding tourism sector, as this appears to favour a proliferation of decontextualized international cultural references rather than an appreciation of locality and historical rootedness.

This article addresses how English language practices were performed, conducted and interpreted by six inhabitants of Alter do Chão village, a popular tourist destination for locals and with increasing numbers of tourists, located in the Amazon region, in the north of Brazil. Developed through an ethnographic perspective and based on the data analysis resulted from interviews and fieldwork, this article advocates, mainly, that people are creative in their linguistic encounters and that languages find their places in social practice. The article also sheds light on the spread of the English language and the encounters among languages and cultures that the technology and the recent mobility of people have facilitated. The results show that English language practices performed by the six participants in Alter do Chão village, often highlighted through hybrid language practices, are constituted by locally situated attitudes, related to their creative performances.

This article discusses language ideologies in relation to political ideologies in the Cuban diaspora in the United States. The findings of three longitudinal attitude studies, two conducted using the methods of perceptual dialectology, and a third with the matched-guise method, indicated that the diaspora’s political beliefs have a robust effect on its beliefs about Cuban Spanish in the diaspora and in the homeland. The perceptions studies showed that the national variety has a high degree of prestige in the diaspora, and that it has very low prestige in Cuba. The results of the matched-guise test showed that participants were unable to differentiate voices recorded in the 1960s and the 1990s, and that social information about residence in Cuba or the diaspora was more important to judgments of correctness than the presence of nonstandard variants. It is argued that the diaspora’s language ideology is maintained through erasure and essentialization: social and linguistic facts are erased, and the homeland is racially essentialized. It is suggested that through its language ideology, the Cuban diaspora claims authenticity and legitimacy vis-à-vis the homeland.

European Schools provide a multilingual international education for children of EU employees. However, despite the multilingual context of these schools, little research has been done regarding students’ multilingualism. Employing domain theory and a dynamic perspective on multilingualism, this sociolinguistic study investigates language use and language choice of secondary school students attending a European School in Belgium. The study comprises 56 participants and three different sources of data, i.e. questionnaire, self-recordings, and interviews, during a period of 3½ years. Nexus analysis is used as an analytical tool. The results suggest that the situations of language choice which the participants constantly face appear to be influenced by a taken-for-granted, rational multilingual context, manifested in the principles of inclusion and “the least common denominator”. These principles imply that students choose language based on a combination of their own, and their interlocutors’ preferences. The principles are discussed in the light of the multilingual environment of the European Schools. In addition, the results show a discrepancy between the reported results from the questionnaire and the face-to-face interaction in the self-recordings. The home domain is more multilingual than reported, and interaction with peers more monolingual. These results help to elucidate the heterogeneity of the students’ multilingualism, while discussing and problematizing domain theory.

In this article, I focus on the position of Bergamasco, the Italo-romance variety spoken in the Province of Bergamo (Northern Italy), in the linguistic repertoire of the local Ghanaian immigrant community. I argue that Ghanaian immigrants do not speak Bergamasco since the local people refrain from speaking Bergamasco to them. Bergamasco can be regarded as a we-code (Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) of the indigenous community, whereas Italian – in most cases, a simplified variety of standard Italian – is the default choice when communicating with immigrants. The lack of input in combination with negative attitudes and a lack of motivation to acquire the dialect triggers a self-reinforcing dynamic, making the incorporation of Bergamasco into the linguistic repertoire of Ghanaian immigrants unlikely. Excerpts from a sample of face-to-face interactions and semi-structured interviews involving a group of first-generation Ghanaian immigrants reveal that Bergamasco tends to be perceived as a sort of “secret language” deliberately used by local people to exclude immigrants and other outsiders. This stereotype originates from and is reinforced by lack of competence on the part of the migrants, but is devoid of any foundation.

Linguistic purism can play an especially political role in legitimising and authenticating indigenous identities. For languages now undergoing revitalisation after histories of colonial conquest, purism that precludes foreign influences in language corpora and behaviour can be seen as reversing the impacts of language contact and reasserting indigeneity. This is indeed the case for te reo Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand, that was suppressed and essentially outlawed by the British but is now undergoing revitalisation. How indigenous New Zealanders feel about such purism, however, has been subject to minimal inquiry. This article analyses the attitudes of around 200 Māori youth, solicited through an online survey, to purism in Māori vocabulary development and to a recurring purist discourse, commonly reproduced by indigenous elders, that criticises errors when speaking te reo Māori. The article reveals a tension between supporting purism for the linguistic self-determination of the indigenous collective, and rejecting purism on the basis this inhibits the linguistic emancipation of individuals. On balance, it appears these Māori youth may hold significantly less purist attitudes than current language policy and locally pervasive ideology.

In a globalised sociolinguistics “[d]ifferent types of societies must give rise to different types of sociolinguistic study”, as Dick Smakman and Patrick Heinrich argue in the concluding remarks of their (Smakman, Dick. 2015. The westernising mechanisms in sociolinguistics. In Dick Smakman & Patrick Heinrich (eds.), Globalising sociolinguistics. Challenging and expanding theory , 16–35. London: Routledge) book Globalising sociolinguistics. Challenging and expanding theory . To this end, a basic condition must be met: both target languages and societies must be well known. This is not the case in much of Central and West Africa: with only few exceptions, here local languages and societies are generally under-researched and sociolinguistic studies have focused mainly on urban contexts, in most cases targeting the interaction between local and colonial languages. With regard to individual multilingualism, this urban-centered perspective risks to limit scholarly attention on processes that, while valid in cities, may not apply everywhere. For one thing, there might still be areas where one can find instances of endogenous multilingualism, where speakers’ language repertoires and ideologies are largely localised. The case in point is offered by the sociolinguistic situation found in Lower Fungom, a rural, marginal, and linguistically highly diverse area of North West Cameroon. The analyses proposed, stemming from a strongly ethnographic approach, lead to reconsider basic notions in mainstream sociolinguistics – such as that of the target of an index – crucially adding spiritual anxieties among the factors conditioning the development of individual multilingual repertoires in local languages.

The United Arab Emirates’ economic and population growth within the past 30 years has led to a vibrant country where linguistic, cultural and religious diversity is the norm. Nevertheless, as Arabic-speaking Emiratis comprise approximately 10–15% of the country’s residents, academics and Emiratis themselves have questioned the level to which Arabic is threatened in the country. Given the use of English in many domains outside of the home, coupled with its global prestige, such uncertainty regarding the future of Arabic are warranted, yet there is currently no baseline data on how Emiratis are using language in their daily lives. This article examines language threat within this context and uses survey data completed by 248 Emirati participants regarding their reported use of Arabic and other languages. Findings suggest that although Arabic plays a major role in the daily lives of majority of Emiratis, English often co-exists in a variety of different domains and adds to the context’s multilingualism. The authors argue that Emiratis live in a multilingual country where Arabic and English co-exist together in relative harmony. Nevertheless, given the rapidly changing demographics and educational policies in the country, further research is essential.

This conceptual article applies a theoretical-linguistic analysis for examining the socio-cultural-historical networks that gave rise to two distinct forms of out-of-school education. One form is practiced in western English speaking cultures and termed “informal education”. The other form is practiced in Israel and termed “complementary education”. The process of examination applies the theoretical lens of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) to analyse how social- historical-cultural-political processes have interacted to produce “complementary education” in Israel. This is followed by analysis of the bi-lingual translation processes that take place at the contact-zone (Pratt, M. L. 1991. Arts of the contact zone. Profession, ofession , 33–40. Modern Language Association Publishers.) between the two languages. The ANT analysis revealed a network consisting of a unique educational model that closely aligns with Ivan (Illich, I. 1971. Deschooling society . New York, USA: Harper and Row.) model presented in his seminal book Deschooling society . The examination also revealed that over time, the Anglophone term “informal education” displaced the Hebrew term “complementary education”, yet the network itself with its unique model continues to thrive. Examination of the contact zone between English and Hebrew found a strong Anglophone dominance, which permits only unidirectional translation from English to Hebrew. The discussion argues for developing post-monolingual research which provides opportunities for bi-directional translation processes to take place, thus eliminating losses of valuable knowledge at both sides of the contact zone.