Band 2012, Heft 218 - Language Identification Reconsidered

This paper seeks to determine the correlation between the occurrences of postvocalic- r , intrusive- r and linking- r in Singapore English (SgE) and the users’ education levels and socioeconomic status. This paper will also investigate the attitudes that SgE speakers hold toward the use of postvocalic- r and intrusive- r in the language. The results show that there is a direct correlation between the education level and socioeconomic status of the speaker and the production of postvocalic- r and intrusive- r in SgE. Speakers of higher education levels and socioeconomic status have a tendency to produce the postvocalic- r ; speakers of low education levels and socioeconomic status have a tendency to produce the intrusive- r . The attitudes test also shows that users of postvocalic- r are viewed more positively as compared to users of intrusive- r . The results suggest that postvocalic- r and intrusive- r are not simply concrete, categorical phonological processes, but that their uses are motivated by social factors.

The definition of the standard language seems more elusive than that of the dialect. Dictionary definitions of “standard (language)” are limited while linguists apply wildly different approaches when describing this language variety. Lay views seem highly relevant in this definition, but these in particular have not been researched enough. To find agreement on the lay definition of “standard”, an international survey was performed in which 1,014 non-linguists from seven countries (England, Flanders, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland and the United States) were asked to define the standard language in their own country. The only quality that arose across participants from all countries was “lingua francaness”. And while newsreaders were widely associated with standard speech, this association has turned out not to be universal. The strong association of standard languages with a specific city or region may also be less widespread than is often assumed. The common association of standard languages with non-regionality may only be true for old standard languages. Two parallel standard languages appear: the socially distinctive one (the “exclusive” standard language) and the socially cohesive one (the “inclusive” standard language). These two views of the standard language are argued to be complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

There is no universally accepted working linguistic definition of a language; the distinction between a dialect and a language is a political question. On the basis of a discussion of this problem, the article proposes that the ISO 639 family of standards, issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), amounts to the backbone of an emerging global regime of language recognition. This regime is being rapidly coaxed into being by the booming IT industry and by the Internet, both of which require clear-cut and uniform standards on languages and their scripts in order to function efficiently and profitably. A potentially undesirable and divisive foundation of the regulatory regime, stemming from and meeting the distinctive sectoral purposes of the world of Evangelicalism and Bible translation, is a hurdle to be overcome in achieving a universally accepted system of language standards. Despite efforts by other actors, there is no viable secular alternative in prospect, because the religiously-grounded system has an established and substantial “first mover” advantage in the field.

Currently, there is a debate about the potential language shift among speakers of African languages towards English. Scholars hold conflicting views about this issue and the debates are complicated because of the widespread multilingualism in the South African society. The main aim of this article is to revisit current claims of language shift among speakers of African languages by analyzing relevant data from a larger scale survey of the language repertoires of an identified population. The research method involved the adaptation of language history or experience questionnaires designed by bilingualism researchers to describe the language repertoires of a large population of multilingual students. The main findings of the study are: (a) multilingualism is flourishing among the participants; (b) the multilingual repertoires of the participants are expanding because of the addition of African languages to the repertoires; and (c) the position of English is confined to specific functions. A pattern of flourishing functional multilingualism emerges. The value of adding larger scale quantitative studies to complement smaller, qualitative studies in discussions of language shift and maintenance is confirmed by this study.

This paper examines how religious institutions exploit available linguistic resources to perform their rites. The Espérance parish of the Union des Eglises Baptistes au Cameroun [Union of Baptist Churches in Cameroon] offers two church services on Sundays i.e. the Fulfulde service and the French-Duala service. These church services were observed for a number of weeks and the information obtained from pastors, church elders and choir leaders were used to design a questionnaire, which was later filled by 20 regular members of this church. The data thus collected were analyzed, following the model devised by Kouega (2008a). Sketchily, it is a structural-functional model which consists in segmenting a religious service into its constituent parts and checking what language is used in what part and for what reason. The analysis revealed that many languages are used in this parish as well as other parishes of this religious group. In the Fulfulde service, Fulfulde (a major lingua franca dominant in the three northern provinces of Cameroon and spoken in the area stretching from Senegal through Cameroon to Sudan) is used for all church activities (e.g. Invocation, Confession of Sins, Sermon etc) except Scripture Reading where French, the country’s official language, comes in. In the French-Duala church service, Duala (a minor lingua franca used in the littoral area of the country) and French alternate, with the substance of the message expressed in French repeated in Duala. In both services, songs are performed in these languages as well as several other heritage languages including Banen, Giziga, Mofu, Nyokon, Tupuri etc. The reasons underlying the choice of these languages include, among others, the historical background of this church group in the country, the involvement of a given ethnic group in the running of the church, the numerical weight of a given ethnic group in the parish, and the availability of religious materials in a given language.

This paper argues for a new perspective on the study of language endangerment dynamics where diversity serves not only as a yardstick for assessing equality, but represents the very basis of equality. To this end, we propose a unified framework accounting for the ecology of languages and language diversity loss. Different ways of economically organizing communities result in power differentials. In cases of contact between them, the language ecologies of the less powerful communities are disrupted through language shift and attrition processes. While these processes have taken place in all competitive language ecologies across time and space, two major waves of language diversity loss can be attested. The first wave began 11,000 years ago following the Neolithic revolution when agrarian societies expanded into the territories of hunter-gatherer communities. The second wave was initiated by the French Revolution when dynastic realms transformed into modern states. The promotion of linguistic nationalism and social mobility in societies imagined to be linguistically homogenous undermined the value and utility of minority languages. Two basic possibilities exist for maintaining linguistic diversity: one is limiting contact to dominating communities; another is finding ways of regulating inter-community relations by mechanisms that do not rely on power alone. Ongoing processes in glocalizing societies suggest that a combination of both options may become a viable way to halt language diversity loss.

This paper offers an analysis of why the Hawaiian model of language revitalization, while quite successful so far in Hawaii, has not extended well to the mainland US and Native America, despite extensive contact between the two communities and assistance from Hawaiians. After a brief summary of the Hawaiian model, it first offers an analysis of socio-economic and demographic factors that make the extension difficult. It then suggests more profound reasons for the Hawaiian success, rooted in the particular history and socio-cultural conditions of Hawaii: in particular in the nineteenth-century independent monarchy, the twentieth-century multi-ethnic territorial experience, and the resultant “political” and “dispersed” nature of Hawaiian identity, across multiple practices and a large part of the population of Hawaii. The conclusion situates events in Hawaii within larger trends in the Pacific, suggesting that the “dispersed cultural” rather than “ethnic” form of Hawaiian-ness currently dominant is both a result of Hawaii’s unique history, and a crucial factor for the current success of language and cultural revitalization there, while being largely absent in Native America.

This article focuses on the sociolinguistics of globalism (Blommaert 2010) in Mongolia by examining two dominant language identities, post-socialist English and fundamentalist nationalist Mongolian. Post-socialist English, emerging as a vital part of the free-market capitalist economy in the 1990s, is analyzed in relationship with the now receding language identity of socialist Russian. Post-socialist English supports the values of transnational development, neoliberal economic policies and post-industrial educational practices. The Mongolian fundamentalist nationalist language identity, on the other hand, responds to free-market globalism by appeals to the land and the traditional pastoral economy of herding. Yet, despite the fact that post-socialist English identifies Mongolians with anti-traditional and urban cultural and social values, the fundamentalist nationalist identity does not perceive of English as a threat; in fact, post-socialist English is used to mediate the anxiety that nationalist Mongolians feel towards China and their other new Asian trading partners. As free-market globalism continues to transform post-socialist Mongolia, including urban migration and the industrial mining of coal and other raw minerals, a sociolinguistics of globalism can continue to navigate the ways in which Mongolians craft their identity through language and, especially, the ways it relates to traditional notions of the land and the pastoral economy.