Volume 2009, Issue 199

We have been taught and have taught for decades, that language is not set in concrete, that it is not immutable, that it is in constant flux and that it changes over time and space. Yet, when it comes to multilingualism, the focus seems to be solely on the threats to its diversity and maintenance, rather than on its ever-changing dynamics. This article aims to offer an analytical perspective on multilingualism as an evolving process, with new language combinations within individual language repertoires and the language profiles of speech communities and polities across generations and around the world.

Is there a role for language policy in immigration policy? This article examines recent attempts to legislate language in light of historical and contemporary debates about immigration and immigrant assimilation. It chronicles U.S. language politics and policy, and then appraises national language and official English bills recently introduced in Congress in view of data on language usage and preferences, suggesting ways that the current resurgence of a national debate about language could and should impact the larger debate about immigration.

This article examines the ethnic identity of the Polish minority group living in Canada in the last two decades, that is, after 1989 when Poland got rid of the Communist system and Poles were allowed to freely leave the country. On the basis of the survey distributed among representatives of two generations of Poles in Canada, I examine how the participants position themselves with respect to core values of ethnicity — language, religion, and culture (Smolicz, Minority languages as core values of ethnic cultures, John Benjamins, 1992). The results of my study show that respondents themselves break the stereotypical vision of Polish identity in which language matters are central. They explicitly indicate respecting Polish traditions and customs as the most fundamental token of Polish ethnic identity, placing the value of the Polish language — identified by speaking Polish and teaching children Polish — in second and third positions. The ethnocultural orientation which they present can be accounted for in two fundamental ways: 1) the socio-historical past of the community and 2) the specific characteristics of Canada as a country of settlement.

The Canton of Grisons is the fourth of the Cantons that make up the Swiss Confederation. In this canton, five main Romansh languages — standardized by H. Schmid in 1982 — are spoken. Standardization was accepted in its written form by the different speech communities of the Canton. The present article reports the results of a research study on the image the speakers have of the different languages under investigation: Romansh Idioms, German, Italian and Rumantsch Grischun. Given the young age of the participants in the sample, the data may provide an estimate of trends among Romansh speakers in the near future. Our study highlights that German scores the highest with regard to all of the aspects addressed in the research, with the exception of informal and affective communication, for which the Romansh idioms are favored.

This article examines the secret language of Anglophone students in the State universities of Cameroon. To show group solidarity and, incidentally, to render their informal English speech incomprehensible to non-members, these students season it with non-standard lexical items. These items are obtained from a variety of processes such as borrowing (from existing languages and language variants including West African varieties of Englishes and Pidgins, French and Camfranglais), coinage, compounding, meaning change, to name only these few processes. Semantically, these new words fall into the same domains as other common youth slangs i.e. sex, physical look, food, drinks, clothing, money and education.

Codeswitching in its function as a marker of ethnicity within the same speech community has so far mostly been illustrated with case studies involving closely related codes (e.g. dialect/standard) rather than distinct standard languages. The purpose of this article is to show in how far Afrikaans-English codeswitching reflects in its grammatical forms ethnic divisions within the Afrikaans speech community. In order to answer this question, Muysken's threefold taxonomy of insertions, alternations and congruent lexicalization is used to categorize and quantify forms of Afrikaans-English codeswitching in the informal speech of three age cohorts distributed across seven samples of White and Coloured Afrikaans speakers from South Africa and Namibia. The analysis reveals that codeswitching patterns differ across the ethnic divide not only in terms of relative proportions of insertions, alternations and congruent lexicalization, but also in terms of specific grammatical or syntactic characteristics which these codeswitching types may assume. On the basis of some of these specific characteristics the conclusion is drawn that codeswitching practices remain to some degree conditioned by perceptions of ethnic group membership rather than by histories of language contact or typological distance between Afrikaans and English.

In this article new findings are outlined that show a relationship between ability to speak Irish and level of education. The authors' statistical analysis of International Social Survey Programme data from a survey in 2003 on national identity reveals that Irish speakers have been more likely than non Irish speakers to attend university (or equivalent). This likelihood is strongest amongst people who were born in the 1950s and 1960s, and more particularly amongst women rather than men of this age group. This is not the case amongst the youngest age group, perhaps because of developments in the education system and in the economy. The findings are placed in the context of the political use made of both the Irish language and the education system in Ireland historically and more recently. The effect on the Irish language of changes in education, as well as the role of the Irish language as cultural capital and symbolic capital are discussed.