Volume 2017, Issue 248 - Singles Issue: Language contact, mixing, and separation, Issue Editor: Florian Coulmas

This article examines patterns of maintenance and shift affecting Kaqchikel-Maya in contact with Spanish in a municipality of the central highlands of Guatemala. It examines self-reported skills in the use of Spanish and Kaqchikel-Maya as well as directly assessed knowledge of Kaqchikel in relation to ethnicity, generations, and gender in town and village in the municipality. The study draws on fieldwork between 2011 and 2013 in the municipality of Parramos, Chimaltenango. Two researchers in collaboration with native Spanish-and-Kaqchikel-speaking assistants surveyed 280 speakers. Data are based on responses to an orally administered questionnaire that included self-reporting of language skills and direct assessment measures focusing on knowledge of Kaqchikel vocabulary as well as on the ability to respond to conversational questions in Kaqchikel. Results are interpreted in relation to stability vs. instability in the use of the two languages and to the asymmetry of the bilingualism that distinguishes the ethnic communities.

The present study analyses the attitudes of Italo-Mexican speakers in a bicultural, bilingual community, Chipilo, Mexico, who have preserved their minority language, Veneto, for over a century. The study was guided by two research questions, which examined the possible instruction in Veneto in schools and the link between speakers’ identity and Veneto. Three social variables were examined: gender, age, and education. The results showed a positive correlation between participants’ identity and Veneto use, specifically among younger male speakers. In terms of instruction in schools, the data revealed the possibility of incorporating Veneto in classrooms; predominantly positive responses were given among males (aged 35–55+) with College and University levels of education. Based on these two results, there is a high probability of Veneto maintenance in the near future.

This article sheds light on the issue of new speakerness via a case study focusing on one adolescent – “Elle” – and her efforts to claim and regain Sami, a national minority language in Sweden. Elle did not acquire Sami at home, but attended Sami school from first grade to sixth grade, where she learned to understand, read, and write the language. Ever since childhood, Elle has “struggled” to learn more Sami and to be acknowledged as a Sami speaker. It was only recently that Elle started using Sami actively in speech, reclaiming her Sami voice and breaking a silence to which she had been involuntarily submitted. A condition that for Elle could have resulted in language loss was, thus, by her efforts to regain the language, turned into a condition of language revitalization. This article shows how Elle’s narratives are linked to language ideologies and language policies in Swedish society, to negative attitudes towards Sami culture, and to discrimination. By learning and actively using Sami in writing and in speech, Elle exercises agency, and by taking the important step to start speaking, Elle proclaims her right to speak Sami and to her representation. The agency that Elle exercises by using Sami is beneficial for her own language development, but could also potentially contribute to the language revitalization of Sami and to the linguistic empowerment of other speakers/learners of Sami.

The official narrative told by national census data in Singapore is that of massive language shift within one generation from a myriad of Chinese dialects towards Mandarin and English as dominant home languages. This story of shift is often told in ways that suggest the community completely and pragmatically transformed its practices and allegiances (Jaffe 2007) in alignment with government policy. However, such notions are premised on narrow ideological assumptions of language with fixed attendant linguistic practices. The choices that people make about their language practices and how they identify with language is much more complex that the term “language shift” captures. We employ Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of field, capital and habitus – especially field – to understand the “messier” realities of historical language shift in Singapore alongside a persistence, even a renaissance, in the use of dialects despite government policies and quadrilingual discourses. We anchor our discussion on the Speak Mandarin Campaign, the keystone of continuing government efforts to influence the habitus within the linguistic field. We provide two specific examples: the continued agitation for the use of dialects in the mass media, and the government’s failed attempt to influence a change in family surnames. Singapore’s story problematizes the notion of language shift in multilingual communities. It also raises interesting questions about the nature and impetus of language shift, the socio-political discourses surrounding these shifts, and the complex interplay of government policy and community and personal choices.

Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken mostly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, is at present undergoing changes in usage. The spread of Standard Chinese promoted by the national government and the growing Han population are contributing to the Sinicization of Uyghur and shaping new language practices. Language-related issues are therefore a common topic in the Uyghur community, in intellectual discourse as well as in daily conversation. This article analyses a Uyghur comedy sketch entitled Chüshenmidim , ‘I don’t understand’, whose main theme is the Sinicization of the Uyghur language. In this analysis, I focus on parts of the sketch that reveal Uyghurs’ attitudes towards the emergent code switching, the use of Chinese loanwords, and the value of the mother tongue for identity formation.

It was recently claimed, in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (Issue 242) that the Bildt dialect in Friesland (Netherlands), spoken from the sixteenth century in a region reclaimed from the sea, poses a specimen of so-called “mixed languages”, characterised by a split between the source language of the “grammar” (from Frisian) and that of the “lexicon” (from Dutch). This article evaluates the linguistic arguments and poses a rather different conclusion to that above. Many of the grammatical similarities between Frisian and the Bildt dialect are not the result of borrowing or imposition from Frisian, but are (a) shared innovations in Frisian and Dutch based varieties in Friesland (including the Bildt dialect) in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, (b) commonly preserved archaisms, and (c) the result of the convergence of Frisian with Dutch. It is suggested that all early-modern language varieties spoken in Friesland were part of a Sprachbund , that also comprised the vernaculars of North Holland, under the umbrella of the emerging Standard Dutch. This different linguistic interpretation makes the sociolinguistic argument of identity-driven language mixing obsolete, because such a mixing never took place. It can, however, be acknowledged that the current shape of some Dutch-based varieties in Friesland can synchronically be re-analysed in terms of being “mixed languages”.

The Republic of Armenia is for the most part an ethnically homogenous country. According to the 2011 census, the share of ethnic minorities is about 1.9 percent of the population, comprising eleven registered minorities and at least two additional groups, namely the Udi and Tat refugee minorities. This article examines the different values that ethnic minorities of Armenia assign to language in the process of identity construction. Despite their cultural and religious diversity, the ethnic minorities of Armenia have a feature in common: none of the groups originates from the territory of the present-day Republic of Armenia, and in each instance immigration occurred under Tsarist or Soviet rule. Various social and historical factors related to migration condition the relevance of language for individual ethnic minorities. In some cases, these factors also influence collective self-perception in a way that is inconsistent with actual language practices and actual linguistic competence. The present article is descriptive in nature and aims at characterizing the role that language plays in identity construction by minority groups within a predominantly mono-ethnic country.

Essentialist conceptions about language, and the relationship between language and other things, are still fairly common in society, and to some extent in linguistics. It is of particular relevance when working with specific (named or unnamed) languages in multilingual environments, or with one specific (named or unnamed) variety of a language among many. This article investigates how essentialism manifests in a collection of macro-sociolinguistic research articles on Afrikaans in contemporary, multilingual South Africa through critical discourse analysis. The findings indicate that subtle and covert indications of an extent of essentialism are quite common in the data, and even explicitly essentialist statements and claims are not completely absent. Some counter-examples of and challenges to essentialism in the data are also explored, although they are found to be less common than covert instances of essentialism. Suggestions regarding a few essentialism-related problems that arise from the data are discussed briefly.

This article explores hip hop music as a powerful tool for educational institutions to promote minority languages among teenagers living in multilingual contexts. It reports on an educational experience in secondary education that consisted of a series of rhyme workshops given by a guest hip hop artist in a secondary school in Catalonia, where two main languages (Spanish and Catalan) coexist in an unbalanced situation that favours Spanish for peer-communication. Drawing on two articulated pieces of fieldwork (the first one in the classroom and the second outside school with three students who were emergent rappers), the study shows a rift between language practices in the classroom and hip hop language practices in the teenagers’ lives. It also shows the powerful effect of bringing a professional musician into the classroom and how the school can have an impact on the language practices of the students outside school.