Volume 2011, Issue 212 - Untrodden Paths in Linguistic Identity Research

The relationship between Afrikaans and Dutch cannot be captured adequately by the construct of pluricentrism. However, to deny a connection of a similar kind would leave aspects of the historical and current relationship unaccounted for. In comparison to typical pluricentric relations, such as those between metropolitan and postcolonial Englishes, Afrikaans shows more differences from Dutch. This is because there were more non-native speakers contributing directly to the formation of the language, and contact between the colony and metropolis was less extensive, being eventually completely severed with the imposition of British rule on the Cape colony. It took longer for a colonial dialect to stabilise, by which time the Dutch normative reference point was removed. When Afrikaans gained linguistic independence in the early 20th century, a nationalistic agenda also militated against substantial reliance on Dutch as a reference point. However, after linguistic independence, a post-pluricentric relationship emerged, where a new appreciation for Dutch as the source of spelling and vocabulary norms assisted the standardization of Afrikaans. Furthermore, externally reciprocal relations still continue to appear in domains such as literature, and even marketing, signalling an underlying symbolic value. At present, signs of renewed approaches are emerging, although these are unlikely to influence language-internal development.

The article deals with the question of how the socioeconomic performance of countries is correlated with the kind and number of languages for official contexts. The study classifies the 197 countries of the world (as acknowledged at the time of gathering the underlying statistical socioeconomic data) into 12 types of language policies for official contexts. It is then analyzed how many times these 12 types occur among the Top Ten countries of 72 selected socioeconomic parameters. A chi-square test reveals that the differences are extremely statistically significant. The policy most clearly correlated with a positive socioeconomic picture is having one or two supraregional/state-wide official languages plus several regional official languages.

Having gone through a colonial history and colonial language policies similar to those of many African countries, Cambodia, the Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam have all chosen a different path when it comes to language policy, opting against retaining a European language (i.e., English or French) and choosing instead Khmer, Lao, Myanma and Vietnamese respectively, as their national and official languages. Taking a closer look at the linguistic situations in these countries, this paper asks whether a national language policy makes a difference when it comes to a multilingual context. In other words, is there a perceptible difference in the language policies of these countries and those of most African countries that can be attributed to the choice of the national and/or official language? More importantly, can a national/official language policy resolve the fundamental issues of development in multilingual contexts?

In the past two decades Bosnia and Herzegovina saw the implementation of the three legal languages of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, which replaced the formerly used Serbo-Croatian. The initially purely terminological changes are now developing into a gradually growing language change along ethnic lines. However, there is a great difference between the level of standardization and actual use of the three languages in question. From this study it became evident that the prescriptive linguistic changes are not spreading equally within each group, but are only affecting the language use and speech of the majorities of certain areas. Compared with current European processes of standardization such as dialect loss and horizontal and vertical leveling, the phenomena found in this region pose a very interesting exception worth examining.

This paper examines the relationship between popular beliefs about language status and corpus, as manifested in focus group discussions on language policy in Ukraine. The main finding pertains to the unequal attention to and evaluation of the quality of the two languages predominantly used in Ukrainian society. While the increased presence of Ukrainian in some language practices where Russian dominated in the Soviet and early post-Soviet years is often scrutinized and criticized, largely because of its supposedly low quality, the continued use of Russian usually remains unnoticed. This remarkable asymmetry is characteristic even of many Ukrainian-speakers who support the prevalence of their language but have internalized some implicit beliefs regarding its inferiority vis-à-vis Russian. This relationship appears to be an important mechanism of reproducing the dominant position of Russian as attempts at elevating the status of Ukrainian are hindered by the widespread perception of its corpus inadequacy for those roles it has not played hitherto.

In a previous paper (Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain, Dialect use and discursive identities of migrants from the west in eastern Germany, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), we posited that attitudes toward language are not merely static thoughts in people's minds, but are constantly constructed in interaction. Following on this work, in this paper we investigate the ways in which German-speaking migrants and their descendants in urban Canada use language attitudes in interaction to construct a specifically German space within Canada. Our focus is on their attitudes toward each of the various languages and language varieties present in the participants' linguascape: German dialects, standard German and English, and code-mixing, and in our analysis, we observe the ways that these migrants negotiate who has authority over these forms, as well as how attitudes can shift when speakers' connection to their country of origin is interrupted through migration. Though the direct focus of the research questions we address in this paper is on what it means to be German in urban Canada, we also address broader issues of how urban minority groups construct and maintain minority identities after migration.

This article presents data that consider the complexity of language interplay involved in minority ethnocultural communities experiencing language shift. A revival of interest in religio-cultural poetry and song, primarily evidenced within the younger generation of Muslim multilinguals of Pakistani-heritage living as part of the South Asian Diaspora in a northern city of the UK, is encouraging an accompanying interest by the same young people in the community's prestigious varieties of Urdu, H-Punjabi, and also in its religious classical, Arabic. What this might mean for reversing language shift is considered together with the extra but associated question of the use of English (Yish) in religio-cultural practices traditionally carried out in community languages. Particular attention is given to the way Web 2.0 platforms are increasingly providing real and virtual networks for these young practitioners in the exploration of the languages of their songs and poems. In the light of these data, tentative and modest modifications to Fishman's Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) are suggested.

This article provides an overview of the young discipline of Queer Linguistics and discusses how it may be fruitfully applied in sociolinguistics as a contribution to critical heteronormativity research. After locating Queer Linguistics historically as a reaction to earlier essentialist approaches in the field of language and sexuality, its theoretical underpinnings are outlined. Queer Linguistics is not to be equalled with a “gay and lesbian” approach to language. It rather transfers ideas from Queer Theory to linguistic research, building on the integration of work by poststructuralist scholars such as Foucault, Butler and Derrida in order to provide a critical investigation of the discursive formation of heteronormativity. Three potential criticisms against Queer Linguistics as a poststructuralist approach are addressed: its supposedly low relevance, issues of political agency, and its alleged lack of empirical applicability. Finally, methodological suggestions are made as to how sociolinguists may proceed from a Queer Linguistic point of view, focusing on ethnographically oriented studies of local identity negotiation, critical approaches to Discourse Analysis and Contrastive Sociolinguistics.

A decade ago innovative efforts were undertaken by a group of native and non-native professionals to safeguard and promote the cultural and linguistic heritage of a number of indigenous groups in Mexico. The initial focus was directed to the Nahua people, dwelling in the Balsas river basin in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. In this region roughly 40 thousand people still speak Mexicano as their native tongue. This article reviews the results and ongoing efforts of that decade-long initiative, in particular the effect of successful popular opposition to the construction of a long-planned hydroelectric dam in the indigenous speakers' region and the effect of developing and commercializing a series of indigenous crafts that reinforce the ethnolinguistic awareness of Balsas Nahuas. Other recent initiatives in different indigenous groups such as the Maya are also touched upon. More briefly discussed, from a critical perspective, are general theoretical, methodological, and political strategies for reversing language shift, especially although not exclusively in Mexico.