Diasporic ethnolinguistic subjectivities: Patagonia, North America, and Wales
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Peter Garrett
Abstract
A total of 956 informants with links to Wales — from Patagonia, North America, and Wales itself — completed a questionnaire investigating their Welsh identities and affiliation, their images of Wales, their engagement with Welsh cultural practices, and their perceptions of the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Welsh language and of domain priorities for the use of Welsh. These three groups produced systematic variation across many of the issues in this study. Overall, for example, the North Americans oriented their Welshness to Wales itself, and in particular in the history and heritage of Wales, while the Patagonians and the Welsh anchored their Welsh identity within their own contexts, and with less focus on the history and heritage of Wales. The results offer insights into the complexity of “home” and “diaspora” relationships, historical and geo-cultural differences, and their impact on Welsh cultural authenticity and ethnolinguistic subjectivities.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- In memoriam: Alan Richard Thomas
- Introduction: a critical approach to the revitalisation of Welsh
- Code switching and the future of the Welsh language
- Bilingual literacy in and for working lives on the land: case studies of young Welsh speakers in North Wales
- Language attitudes and identity in a North Wales town: “something different about Caernarfon”?
- Accommodating “new” speakers? An attitudinal investigation of L2 speakers of Welsh in south-east Wales
- Issues of gender and parents' language values in the minority language socialisation of young children in Wales
- How green is their valley? Subjective vitality of Welsh language and culture in the Chubut Province, Argentina
- Diasporic ethnolinguistic subjectivities: Patagonia, North America, and Wales
- Commentary: the primacy of renewal
- The straw that broke the language's back: language shift in the Upper Necaxa Valley of Mexico
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- In memoriam: Alan Richard Thomas
- Introduction: a critical approach to the revitalisation of Welsh
- Code switching and the future of the Welsh language
- Bilingual literacy in and for working lives on the land: case studies of young Welsh speakers in North Wales
- Language attitudes and identity in a North Wales town: “something different about Caernarfon”?
- Accommodating “new” speakers? An attitudinal investigation of L2 speakers of Welsh in south-east Wales
- Issues of gender and parents' language values in the minority language socialisation of young children in Wales
- How green is their valley? Subjective vitality of Welsh language and culture in the Chubut Province, Argentina
- Diasporic ethnolinguistic subjectivities: Patagonia, North America, and Wales
- Commentary: the primacy of renewal
- The straw that broke the language's back: language shift in the Upper Necaxa Valley of Mexico
