Volume 2016, Issue 238 - Special Issue: Multilingualism and minorities in the Czech sociolinguistic space, Issue Editors: Lida Cope and Eva Eckert

The contribution discusses aspects of the language of Czech Jewry residing in Prague during the Přemyslid reign. The author shows that their vernacular was basically identical with contemporary Prague Czech. The corpus of Canaanite, i.e., Slavic, especially Old Czech glosses in Hebrew script is remarkable for its orthography, phonology, lexicology and grammar. The author discusses the linguistic situation with respect to multilingualism, Slavic interpretation of the glosses, their functions and features and several sociolinguistic aspects such as archaisation, place names in communication and name giving.

This corpus-assisted study attempts to unpack the Czech majority’s image of the Others – people who are different from native ethnic Czechs – and of their native languages as seen by the majority in the Czech Republic. The data from collocation and keyword analyses suggest there is increasing expectation for national minorities and immigrants to acquire proficiency in Czech. Given the strong association between language and power, the image of languages other than Czech does not fully overlap with the image of the large part of the Others, especially national minorities. Multilingualism in the Czech majority view is not understood as nurturing a community where multiple languages coexist within the country.

The study was prompted by the question of whether Romani, the language of the dominant and traditional minority, is acceptable as a language in the profile of a bilingual living in the Czech Republic. It outlines the situation of Romani in the Czech sociolinguistic space and argues for its rehabilitation so that it could be studied, taught, maintained in a community, and used to represent its speakers. This is necessary in order to raise its prestige, positively affect its speakers’ identity and in turn stimulate an attitudinal shift and social change. Obstacles to Romani rehabilitation are related to it being framed by Czech culture, which is driven by a standard language ideology rendering Romani a stigmatized language. Romani speakers distance themselves from Romani dialects and the ethnolect as expressions of social and economic disadvantage. Recent research has established that Romani has shown signs of language shift.

Czech Sign Language (CzSL) is a vital means of communication used in the Czech Deaf community; it constitutes an essential communication tool for a minority population in the Czech sociolinguistic space. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the usage of CzSL in contemporary Czech society, to sketch a brief history of its formative stages and to list the challenges the Czech Deaf face nowadays. An emphasis is placed on the question of bilingualism of the CzSL users. Our special focus is on the questions of language socialization and social-cognitive development, as the early years set the stage for a Deaf child’s and the Deaf community’s subsequent advancement. Real world implications for the healthy and uncompromised development resonate throughout the discussion of the Czech education system and the place of the Deaf in it. CzSL represents an irrefutable part of the identity of the Czech Deaf population and, as such, merits a critical consideration in the context of the minority languages in the present day Czech society.

This article focuses on the Texas Czech Legacy Project and its main initiative, the building of an open-access digital Texas Czech Dialect Archive . Texas Czech dialect is a product of over a century and a half of contact between Moravian Czech and English spoken in Texas. While its life cycle is rather typical of diasporic dialects, its resilient life span represents decades of self-sufficient existence in a rather enclosed sociolinguistic space organized around farming and small business ventures periodically rejuvenated by religious and fraternity activities without the need for an outside social world. Following a brief sketch of the socio-historical background of ethnic Czechs and Moravians in Texas, I discuss the objectives of the Project and the design of the Texas Czech Dialect Archive , bearing in mind the complexities involved in designing a product that is to serve community members, educators and students of the Czech language and culture, as well as a diverse group of researchers. The Project’s purposes and practical value of its digital archive for these multiple audiences are demonstrated using examples of both typical and idiosyncratic features of this diasporic dialect.

The article deals with essential aspects of the sociolinguistic situation and, partly, the phonological and grammatical systems of Czech immigrants’ dialects spoken in Russia. One of the examined dialects is used in two villages near Novorossiysk and Anapa in the Northern Caucasus, and the other in the Middle Irtysh area of the Omsk Region. The dialects appeared as a result of different waves of Czech rural migration at the end of the 1860s and the start of the twentieth century. The primary purpose of this research is to describe the process of formation of the two dialects, their functioning within the community and their contact with the languages used outside, as well as external factors that contributed first to their survival and then to the breach of dialect transmission in families since the 1970s. In the process, the article outlines the main linguistic features of the two dialects, focusing on those that indicate the dialects’ origin and those that have been affected by the languages of their surroundings. The corpus of interviews with speakers of Czech heritage in Russia used in this article likely represents the largest data collection to date.

This article concerns a Czech language minority living in the south-western Romanian region of Banat. First an overview of the situation of Banatian Czech speakers is given, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective, followed by a sociolinguistically focused description of the linguistic conditions present in this language island. Next, the article examines seven syntactic and morphosyntactic structures found in Bígr Czech, namely three word order phenomena, use of the indefinite determiner, totality quantifiers and prepositional phenomena. Using the specialized corpora, BANAT for Banatian Czech (BC) and the ORAL corpus for Common Czech (CC), the BC and CC structures are compared to reveal that some of the investigated features previously assigned as characteristic for Bígr Czech are equally present in Common Czech spoken in the Czech Republic.

This qualitative study examines heritage language maintenance goals, motivation, and strategies in eleven Czech and Slovak immigrant families in the Southeastern United States. The goals of this article are threefold. First, this article outlines the changes in Czech and Slovak immigration patterns over time, documenting that while Czech immigrants used to settle mainly in Texas and the Midwest in the past, they generally opt for the East and West Coast today. Second, this article describes language practices of current Czech and Slovak immigrants in the Southeast and finds that the most successful factors of heritage language (HL) retention include: (a) expectations that children will need the language in the future; (b) consistent HL use by both parents; (c) annual lengthy trips overseas; and (d) parental ability to use additional strategies, such as involving grandparents or employing Slavic au pairs. Third, this article compares today’s HL maintenance with the classical period of immigration. In the past, Czech and Slovak children in the United States learned and used their native languages within ethnic communities. Today, the necessity to learn and use Czech or Slovak in the context of the United States has largely disappeared. Instead, it is the transnational context that is vital for HL retention.