Volume 2013, Issue 224 - Fluid Borders–Languages and Varieties in Flux

Using the example of the Portuguese language at the United Nations, this article argues that language planning matters. More specifically, without proper language status planning, the present political discourse aiming at making the Portuguese language official at the United Nations (UN) has very limited probabilities of being successful. This article applies a language policy and planning (LPP) theoretical framework and uses qualitative research methods to identify the set of key variables that may help bridge political discourse with a political goal. In this sense, the authors propose a research agenda toward the design of a status planning strategy for the Portuguese language within the context of the most representative international and multi-lateral organization. This prospective strategy is viewed as a decisive tool to bridge the current gap between the volatile political discourse of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) defending Portuguese as an official UN language and a concrete policy design or action plan toward that same goal.

This article reports on 279 surveys that were conducted to determine how Montevidean consumers perceive the forms of address inherent in written advertising. Survey participants were shown five pictures of commercial ads and asked to identify if the ad addressed them as tú or vos . The ads contained only null subject verb forms. The results show that while a majority of consumers identified tú as the form of address inherent in verbal tuteo forms that use a written accent mark, other verbal tuteo forms that do not use a diacritic were less readily identifiable. At the same time, younger speakers showed a propensity for seeing vos in advertising more regularly than older speakers. Finally, the results suggest that since Montevidean consumers are accustomed to seeing vos in written advertising, in many cases they identify that form of address regardless of the advertiser's intention.

This article reports the effect of participants' generational differences and subsequent amount of contact with non-native speakers on the perception of foreign-accented speech in the context of internationalization of Japan. The participants were people in their 50s or 60s who were in variety of occupations. They spent their youth from the 1970s to the 1980s in Japan, when Japanese society went through a rapid change in terms of internationalization. Since then, the number of foreign residents has tripled and non-native speakers are commonly encountered on the street and in media. The participants' perception of speech was compared with that of the younger generation to determine whether the historical period in which people grew up affects their perception. It was found that regardless of the age of native listeners, foreign-accented speech was evaluated less positively than native speech. However, experience of contact with non-native speakers made a difference in some aspects of the judgment by native listeners.

From the beginning of modern sociolinguistics, a major goal has been the study of speech communities characterized by language contact. Languages don't actually come into contact with each other. It is always the speakers of the languages who are in contact. This article is a sociolinguistic investigation of a simplified Kuwaiti Arabic form that Kuwaitis use when interacting with their domestic workers and which may be categorized under “foreigner talk”. The argument is basically based on foreigner talk theories, and simplified and broken forms of language. Ferguson (1975) defines foreigner talk, hereafter (FT) as a simplified register used by native English speakers when interacting with linguistically incompetent non-native speakers. Mainly, the article sheds some light on some of the simplified grammatical constructions Kuwaitis use through verbal interaction with their domestic workers. Five Kuwaiti families were chosen as subjects of the study. Each family has three domestic servants working for them. Tape-recording was done in different social contexts. A total of 72 hours were obtained and then transcribed and qualitatively analyzed. Eleven simplified grammatical constructions through twenty eight social contexts were fully analyzed.

A diary is often a personal and private matter, a well-kept secret. This article discusses findings from ethnographic research in which language diaries and diary-based interviews were used as a means to collect qualitative data. The article is based on case studies of six high school students who at the time of the study were enrolled at an international boarding school in Sweden. During the interviews, the students spoke about personal matters associated with languages, identities and discriminatory practices in school and in society. The aim of the paper is twofold: (1) to investigate and describe the students' language practices, their translanguaging practices and their multilingual literacies, and (2) to analyze diary-based case studies – based on language diaries and diary-based interviews – from a methodological viewpoint as a means to collect data. The study wishes to contribute to the growing body of ethnographic research on literacy that highlights and nuances the intricate ways in which languages are being used by bilingual and/or multilingual adolescents in their everyday lives in a globalized world. The diaries together with the diary-based interviews reveal significant findings about multilingualism both on a micro and macro level. On a micro level these findings relate to, for instance, the use of translanguaging that forms part of the students' multilingual repertoires and the construction of identities in a transnational space such as the school. On a macro level, the findings relate to, for instance, language ideologies, language policies and teaching and learning in a transnational space. The results of the study have implications for language policies and teaching practices in schools with bilingual/multilingual students. The study shows how the students' language practices differ from that of the school. Furthermore the study contributes to the methodological advancement of ethnographic research methods and shows how the use of language diaries can enable the production of self-reflection based on students' language practices.

This article explores the nuances in the type of diglossic society in Cyprus towards a characterization of the precise stage of diglossic progression that accurately describes the current sociolinguistic state of Greek-speaking Cyprus. The question concerns the identification of that status as diglossic, as standardwith-dialects (social dialectia), or as bidialectal. We propose that the society can be characterized as diglossic, likely moving towards diaglossia. The term co-overt prestige is also introduced here, juxtaposed both with canonical Bourdieuan overt prestige and with the concept of covert prestige (Trudgill 1972), a juxtaposition which drives the classification. This article also puts forth the notion of (discrete) bilectalism to capture the “linguality” of Greek Cypriot speakers, that is, bilectal in the local vernacular, the L variety (Cypriot Greek), and the superposed official language, the H variety (Standard Modern Greek), thereby refuting the notion of a continuum bridging the two varieties. The case is also made here that studying language acquisition and development in diglossic societies contributes to a better understanding of discrete linguistic systems in children and fully developed speakers alike.

This article describes the results of a follow-up sociolinguistic study to assess changes which have taken place in Strasbourg, France, since the early 1980s, when the situation there was studied by the same author. The linguistic context and the results of the original study are described, as well as the implications and difficulties of such real-time studies. Although the latest large-scale statistical surveys are not directly comparable with the earlier ones, an accelerating shift away from the Alsatian dialect to the use of French is nonetheless evident. This results partly from diverse social changes affecting the city as opposed to the countryside. Alongside this, there is a snowball effect of trends which were already visible in the 1980s, reflecting the loss of an elderly dialect-speaking generation who helped maintain Alsatian within the family. Rapid anonymous surveys carried out in town show the dialect to be used only in specific “pockets”. Some six hours of conversations involving code-switching were also compared with a similar corpus collected earlier, and revealed a decline in more complex grammatical forms of switching in favor of more single-word switches. Alternation was the dominant pattern although different proportions of switch-types occurred in different conversations. The functions of code-switching, e.g., for humor and solidarity, remained similar. The conclusion reiterates the difficulties but also the advantages of real-time sociolinguistic comparisons, as different socioeconomic and lifestyle factors interact with ongoing linguistic shift and change.

At present, discussions about potential language shift from African languages or Afrikaans to English are widespread in South Africa. This article focuses on the position of Afrikaans. Researchers interested in the position of Afrikaans today hold different views and there are some methodological problems with current studies. The main aim of this article is to problematize claims of language shift among Afrikaans speakers by analyzing relevant data from a larger scale survey of the language repertoires of an identified Afrikaans population (n = 244) in the Vaal Triangle region. 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 that: (a) Afrikaans-English bilingualism (and bi-literacy) is prominent among the Afrikaans participants in the study; (b) the position of English as an important language in the bilingual repertoires of the participants is confirmed; and (c) Afrikaans seems firmly set as the language that contributes most to the identity of these participants. A pattern of stable bilingualism and bi-literacy 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. The impact of the omission of Afrikaans-English bilingualism in the debate about Afrikaans is discussed.

Assessing the vitality of minority languages is a concern for many small language advocates and language planners. To date, most quantitative data for measuring the social presence of a language have been limited to reported language competency and use. In this article, a Basque language researcher and U.S. anthropologist collaborate to describe a novel instrument developed in the Basque Country called the Kale Neurketa or Basque Street Survey. Developed by Basque language researchers, the Street Survey is unique in offering a quantitative measure of observed, rather than reported, language use. We describe the origins of the survey in grassroots language advocacy, the knowledge gap it has sought to address, its methodology and evolution over time, and some of its key findings in the Basque context. We conclude assessing the strengths and weakness that this method of direct observation of language use offers to scholars and advocates of minoritized languages.