Volume 2015, Issue 236 - Singles Issue: Contact, Variation and Competition of Languages, Issue Editor: Florian Coulmas

By providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing communities. The aim of this article is to show an example of how sign language change is driven not only by language internal factors but also by changes in language perception, as well as in the changing groups of users and the contexts of use. Drawing from data collected at a sign language research centre in Italy on Italian Sign Language during a time span of over thirty years, the present study will show how language research was a major impetus for a new linguistic awareness and changes in language attitude has influenced new linguistic practices and has forced Italian signers to think about rules governing the use of their language.

Non-linguists’ attitudes towards language diversity are important since they reflect preferences and levels of prestige associated with particular speech communities. However, few studies measuring native-speaker attitudes towards both L1 and L2 English have been conducted, including amongst UK-born students. This is surprising in light of recent internationalisation policies adopted by many UK universities and the resultant increase in overseas students. The present study utilises implicit and explicit attitude measures to investigate 194 students’ perceptions of six English speech varieties. The results demonstrated that whilst explicit attitudes towards linguistic variation were generally favourable, when presented with speech samples, listeners’ implicit evaluations of UK English varieties were significantly more positive, on both status and solidarity dimensions, when compared to forms of Asian English. The findings are discussed in relation to the internationalisation agenda within UK universities and the methodological investigation into the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes towards language variation.

Language is often seen as an important symbol and marker of identity. The relationship between the two especially comes to the fore in the experience of immigrants who often must negotiate competing pressures on their identities and language usage. In this article we examine the link between language and identity through an exploration of the lived experiences of four Chinese individuals in South Africa. Drawing on interview data, we examine their language and identity shifts and the factors driving such shifts (or lack thereof). Our analysis reveals multiple degrees and expressions of Chinese identity, of which language is sometimes but not always relevant. We find that social and historical contexts shape the needs and motivations of the individual, who often uses language strategically and flexibly to emphasise or understate particular identities. We conclude that the situational view of the language-identity relation is more appropriate to explain the weak and strong language-identity links that occur at the micro-level.

This article examines the predictors of second-language proficiency for a group that until now has hardly been investigated: immigrants who rarely participate in the host society and who have a low level of second-language proficiency (sample characteristics are for example: no paid job, low educational and literacy level, high mean age and number of years since migration). In contrast with earlier research, not only self-assessments were used as indicator for second-language proficiency, but also language test scores. Results from a sample of 624 immigrants partly replicate findings from earlier studies: self-assessed second-language proficiency is higher among immigrants who have followed a language course, do voluntary work, have a high educational level, high mother-tongue proficiency, a low migration age, and a large number of years since migration. No links, however, were found between having psychological problems, gender, and migration motive and self-assessed second-language proficiency. Furthermore, some new predictors of self-assessed second-language proficiency were identified, namely similarity in alphabet between mother tongue and second language, daily interactions with natives in the public domain, and speaking the second language at home. For a subsample (N=98) second-language proficiency was also assessed via (objective) lexicon tests. When using scores on this test as dependent variables, only years since migration turned out to be a significant predictor. Though certainly tentative, this finding indicates that different predictors of second-language proficiency may apply depending on how it has been measured.

This study explores the extent to which first language (L1) versus second language (L2) use and attachments to native versus majority language and culture influence the proficiency in the L2 Dutch among the Turkish-Dutch bilinguals. The community under investigation is of particular significance because it represents the largest non-Western ethnic group in the Netherlands and it has often been discussed in the context of the group members’ ethnic and linguistic attachments as opposed to their perceived unwillingness to adopt the cultural norms of the Dutch society. What makes this immigration setting interesting is that the shift from tolerance to startling levels of restrictiveness in policies of cultural and linguistic integration has nowhere been as fast as in the Netherlands. Data are collected from the first generation Turkish immigrants (n = 45) who migrated to the Netherlands after the age of 15 and lived there for 10 years or longer and native Dutch speakers (n = 39) via an elicited speech task, a lexical naming/recognition task and a sociolinguistic background questionnaire. The first set of analyses reveals several links between the individual variables (i.e., L1 use in the family and with friends, L2 use at work, level of education, length of residence and cultural preference) and different aspects of L2 proficiency. However, the effect sizes of these correlations are weak to moderate. The second set of analyses applies a discriminant analysis where proficiency in the L2 has been established as one integrated score. In this analysis, only preferred language emerges as the best predictor of language development.

This article deals with the situation of the Belarusian language in Belarus in competition with the Russian language and Belarusian-Russian mixed speech, both of which are widely used by the young generation in the country. Based on a nationwide survey with 1,000 respondents carried out in 2013, we show how young Belarusians see their first linguistic socialisation and how they evaluate the different linguistic codes in various contexts. The article then describes how and to what extent the respondents’ self-reported competence in Belarusian varies with sociodemographic characteristics and (geo-)political preferences with regard to a “Western” or “Eastern orientation”. Finally, it discusses the question whether young Belarusians favour promoting Belarusian and whether a pro-Belarusian attitude correlates with political preferences. The article provides evidence for the peripheral status of Belarusian in Belarus, but it also shows that there is support for the maintenance and even promotion of Belarusian, which is only slightly affected by global political orientations.

This article compares “synchronic variation of language choice” (see Gal 1979) in the populations of six bilingual national minorities living in Hungary. A special focus is on the mechanisms and factors of sustainable bilingualism represented in the various local communities of Hungary’s national minorities. We compared phases in the gradual process of language shift observable in each of the six national minority populations. The national minorities are represented in this survey study by six local communities (one for each national minority). We chose local communities where the language shift process is in the “middle”, compared to other communities of the same national minority. The results were derived from a collective project, started in 2001, which was a comparative sociolinguistic study conducted in Hungary’s six national (bilingual) minorities (hereafter HuBiLing) (see Bartha and Borbély 2006).

The article applies political discourse analysis to presidential speeches in four countries. A qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 71 annual addresses delivered by the political leaders of the United States, Canada, Russia and Kazakhstan over the 20-year period since the fall of the Soviet Union is used to test the hypothesis of convergence between their institutional systems. The study shows that there are some tendencies toward negative convergence. Political leaders tend to place similar relative emphasis on such issues as power, trust, liberalism and the market, among others. Two elements of the context, namely the events of September 11, 2001 and the October 2008 financial crisis, served to strengthen the negative convergence.

This article considers how meaningful social differences are conveyed through the use of initial and final segments in Macau Cantonese. The research presented in this article provides a sociolinguistic account of the use of initial and final segments in Macau Cantonese, and specifically illustrates how social meanings of initials and finals are variable, and do not only subsume explanations that derive from internal linguistic constraint categories. This study employed an eclectic and multidimensional sociolinguistic approach that combines sociolinguistic survey methods, social network theory and constructionist approaches, with a view to accounting for the dynamics underlying initial and final segment variation in Macau Cantonese. Results of this study indicate that social constraints such as conversation topic, the affective relations between interlocutors, and other social factors such as gender and social class possibly impinge on the distribution and use of initials and finals in Macau Cantonese.

For members of the Japanese ethnic church community in Canada, perceptions about being Christian are influenced and perhaps conflicted by beliefs from the homeland about being culturally and linguistically Japanese. Being Japanese in Canada (or any foreign country) also may mean having beliefs that are often influenced by the dominant Canadian culture such as through acquiring English, which may influence the relationship between the medium (language) and the message (Christianity) (Woods 2004). This article is aimed at understanding the multiple and conflictual beliefs about identity of Japanese ethnic church members who live in Canada, in terms of the way they describe themselves as being “Japanese” and being “Christian” to varying degrees.

This article theorizes on the relation between individual and societal language loss. In this context, the notion of relic variety will be introduced, describing a setting where a language is spoken by a very small number of speakers who live isolated from the main speech community and have not acquired literacy in their L1. The article focuses on attrition phenomena in a specific relic variety, i.e. Barossa German, a German-speaking enclave in South Australia. It analyses phenomena caused by lack of usage (hesitation phenomena, code-switching, semantic restructuring) as well as reduction processes, namely of the German case system. The results of the analysis demonstrate that in contrast to canonical attrition settings, in a relic variety morphological markers are only retained in constructions that had been either entrenched early in the acquisition processes or are very frequently used. It will be argued that the main factors influencing the reduction process are the variety of input, a decrease of normativity and the absence of a written variety.

This article employs game theory to contribute to sociolinguistics (or the economics of language). From both the synchronic and the diachronic perspective, we are interested in the conditions (of language learning and literary production) that make some languages dominate others. Two results are particularly noteworthy: (i) Translations have an ambiguous effect on domination. (ii) We offer three different explanations of how a past language like Latin or Sanskrit can develop into a standard for literary production.