Volume 2016, Issue 242 - Singles Issue: Language Shift and Shifting Standards, Issue Editor: Florian Coulmas

Research into linguistic purism often reflects a critical, if not contemptuous attitude towards its subject of inquiry. The reasons for this are purists’ prescriptivist stance, as well as their frequent association with ethno-linguistic nationalism, an ideology in moral disrepute. We argue that this approach of purism produces blind spots. Following Pratt’s suggestion, we reconsider linguistic purism in this article as the effect of a utopian discourse and show how a desire for (linguistic) purity is at the very heart of the project of modernity. We apply our theoretical framework to the history of purism in modern Flanders (nineteenth to twenty-first century).

Neutrality is a crucial aspect of lay and expert definitions of standard language and of the standard language ideology. Smakman (2012, The definition of the standard language: a survey in seven countries. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 218. 25–58) shows that this applies to the Dutch language area, in particular. Since linguistic forms are not inherently neutral, neutrality needs to be constructed in discourse. Tying in with recent research on language myths, the present article aims to historicize the myth of neutrality by showing when and why it came into existence and which function it fulfilled in public and academic discourses on language. An analysis of Dutch metalanguage from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century shows that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century concept of neutrality as a shared space was gradually replaced by neutrality as unmarkedness . The first type leaves room for variation and considers standard forms as additions to existing repertoires. The second type is absolute and considers standard forms as the only true linguistic forms. The historical development outlined in this article entails a conceptual shift from neutrality as a shared space to neutrality as unmarkedness. The decades around 1800 constitute the decisive period in this shift, when linguistic nationalism came into existence as a side effect of the rise of nationalism as a political ideology and of the formation of the modern (western) European nation-states.

Bildts is a speech variety spoken by around 10,000 persons as a first or second language in the province Fryslân, in the north of the Netherlands. It is commonly claimed to be a dialect of Dutch containing some Frisian loan words. This article provides an analysis of Bildts based on a comparison of Bildts with its source languages: Frisian on the one hand and specific dialects of the province of South Holland on the other hand. It argues that Bildts combines a core lexicon mainly derived from Hollandic dialects with a grammar mainly derived from Frisian. However, the core lexicon also contains some Frisian words and the grammar has to some extent been levelled. The precise mixture is not easily described, let alone accounted for, in most models of language contact. Our approach combines sociological-historical information with linguistic factorisation in order to arrive at a plausible view of how Bildts came into existence. It is argued that Bildts is a mixed language, comparable to better known cases such as Ma’á, spoken in Tanzania, and that the specific nature of the mix involved the mutual accommodation of two groups of speakers: a group of mother tongue speakers of Frisian who acquired Bildts as a second language and a group of balanced bilingual speakers of Bildts and Frisian.

Drawing on questionnaire and interview data, this study explores the process of language maintenance and shift across three generations of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands. It compares three generations of Turkish-Dutch bilinguals by examining age and place of language learning, self-rated language proficiency, and language choices in six domains (home, school, work, friends, media and leisure time activities, and cognitive activities). Furthermore, it investigates bilinguals’ experiences, motivations for learning languages and attitudes towards bilingualism. Findings suggest that following the typical pattern of language shift described by Mario Saltarelli and Susan Gonzo in 1977, language history, self-rated language proficiency and current language practices of third-generation children differ from those of first- and second-generation bilinguals. Consequently, possible language shift among third-generation bilinguals causes socioemotional pressure about maintaining the Turkish language, triggering intergenerational tensions in Turkish immigrant families. At the same time, the perceived need to shift to Dutch for social and economic reasons causes immigrant children to experience tensions and ambiguities in the linguistic connections between the family and other social domains (e. g. school, friendship). The findings evidence that the Turkish immigrant community in the Netherlands may no longer be as linguistically homogeneous as once observed. The dissolution of homogeneity can be a sign of social change in which maintaining the Turkish language has become a challenge, whereas speaking Dutch is a necessity of life in the Netherlands.

This study examines the ambivalent attitude of the Ogu people towards their language. In a recent survey carried out by the researcher to ascertain the extent of shift from Ogu to Yoruba, findings revealed the ambivalent attitude of the Ogu to their language vis-à-vis Yoruba. A total of 121 copies of a questionnaire were administered in three local government areas of Ogun State. Eighty percent of respondents claimed that the Ogu were loyal to their language and wanted it maintained. This was a stark deviation from the reality on the ground as results from participant observation for a period of ten years showed that the people hardly patronized their language or identified with it. The ambivalent attitude of the Ogu is further confirmation of the inadequacy and unreliability of the questionnaire as an instrument for carrying out empirical research.

This article introduces a quantitative approach to modeling language shift in communities with millions of speakers. Using Indonesia as a case study, and employing a large body of data from the Indonesian population census, we document how factors such as urbanization, ethnicity, economic development, gender, and religion correlate with the shift from local languages (Javanese, Sundanese, etc.) to the national language, Bahasa Indonesia. Our findings inform ongoing research on the sociological foundations of language shift across both small and large communities. Methodologically, we introduce a statistical approach that borrows from other social sciences, and show how to exploit massive amounts of untapped linguistic, demographic, and sociological data.

The linguistic practices and creativity of youths reflect an amazing way of dealing with the dynamics of urban and global African city life. Communities of practice (CoP) emerge, in which global trends, local concepts and cutting-edge styles, identities of resistance and contested spaces all play a role and impact on the linguistic practices of youths. The implementation of linguistic manipulative patterns that are often acquired from other youth languages, as well as strategies such as translanguaging, borrowing, language crossing and bricolage, brought about through local, global and pan-African contact and trends, including music cultures such as Hip Hop and Reggae, have molded youth identities and urban practices. The focus of this article is on youth languages found in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Kinshasa/Goma (DR Congo), where the multilayered range of social and linguistic impacts of globalization has led to new linguistic practices and identities. Both speakers’ fluid patterns of contact and manipulation across digital (Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter) and real spaces, and their manipulative strategies in the formation of new “repertoires”, are analyzed in the article. Youth languages, especially in the African context, have usually been described as modern, urban and fluid. We argue that these characteristics also hold for other linguistic practices and non-urban contexts, and that youth languages differ in terms of the speed and manner in which these processes and modifications occur or are deliberately employed.

A growing body of research highlights the significance of visual language use in public sphere in discursively transforming geographical spaces into places. This symbolic construction of places plays a paramount role in the vitality of minority languages by increasing the prestige of minority languages and thus redressing the balance between minority and majority groups. The present article explores the symbolic construction of Tabriz, a Northwest metropolis in Iran which is home to nearly two million Azerbaijani-speaking people. Despite the rich bilingualism in Azerbaijani and Farsi in the city, Farsi, the official language of the state, continues casting a shadow over Azerbaijani through various language policy mechanisms. Drawing upon language policy and planning theories coupled with the principles of geosemiotics, the research examines linguistic landscape data collected in three main streets in Tabriz. The analysis demonstrates what types of discourses mediate and are created by language choices on governmental and private signs. Farsi is normalized for both governmental and private signs reflecting and reproducing national ideologies. The absence of Azerbaijani as the native language of the people in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Tabriz is noticeable. In its entirety, the findings suggest that the linguistic landscape is not always a fair representation of the linguistic repertoire of the people living in a geographical space, but rather language choice in the LL is deployed by the state and/or people to portray an image of a place they desire and aspire to.

Not only are nations invented (imagined) into and out of existence, but languages and states are as well. Decisions on how to construct, change or obliterate a language are essentially arbitrary, and as such dictated by political considerations. The entailed language of politics (often accompanied by the closely related politics of script) is of more immediate significance in Central Europe than elsewhere in the world, because in this region language is the sole and fundamental basis for creating, legitimating and maintaining nations and their nation-states. Since 1918, the creation and destruction of ethnolinguistic nation-states in Central Europe has been followed (or even preceded) by the creation and destruction of languages so that a unique language could be fitted to each nation and its national polity. This article focuses on the politics of the Albanian language in Yugoslavia’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo and in independent Kosovo with an eye to answering two questions at the level of language politics. First, what was the kind of Albanian standard employed in Kosovo before the 1968/1970/1974 acceptance of Albania’s Tosk-based standard Albanian in Yugoslavia? Second, why is Kosovo the sole post-Yugoslav nation-state that has not (yet?) been endowed with its own unique (Kosovan) language?

The relationship between nations (or states), languages and social cohesion have been studied over time. Contexts like Africa and India challenge the conceived Western notion of “one-nation-one-language”. Insights about multilingualism and social cohesion from complex sociolinguistic contexts like South Africa could provide a deeper understanding helpful for promoting social cohesion in emerging “super-diverse” situations across the globe. This article reports on selected data from a longitudinal language repertoire survey conducted over three periods (1998, 2010 and 2015) in the Vaal Triangle region in South Africa. It discusses the views of multilingual urban students (N=1900+) about the relationship between multilingualism and social cohesion. The main findings are that the multilingual African home language participants believe that being multilingual is related to social cohesion, while this is not a prominent finding for Afrikaans home language users (who are mainly bilingual). The data from the South African context indicate the importance of multilingual repertoires as instruments that support the fostering of social cohesion in complex settings. Multilingual repertoires facilitate communication that enhances the building of better relationships and a deeper understanding between people in diverse settings. The implications of the findings for emerging “super-diverse” global societies are discussed.