Volume 2019, Issue 260 - Singles Issue: Adapting to changing landscapes: Language standardization, revitalization, digitalization. Issue Editor: Florian Coulmas

The aim of this article is to present the current sociolinguistic situation of the Cypriot Maronite community and report on recent efforts to revitalize its language, Cypriot Arabic or Sanna. After a brief historical account, the article focuses on the sociodemographic and sociolinguistic characteristics of the community, which has steadily declined ever since its establishment on the island of Cyprus in the seventh to eighth century AD. Finally, the article discusses the revitalization efforts undertaken since 2007 as well as recent political and social developments that (de)favour the process of revitalization.

The Valencian autonomous community is a bilingual Spanish region where, alongside Spanish, a second language is officially recognized. Yet in many areas of the Valencian administration the language law is not implemented. This article explores the presence of the two official languages in the electronic communications of this region’s city and town council agencies. It combines a variety of methods (use of secondary data, content analysis and a variation of the “mystery shopping” technique) with statistical analysis of data merged into a unit matrix of 397 municipalities. A comparison of present web page data with data from 2005 to 2010 reveals that there has been advancement on the implementation of legal provisions: Spanish monolingual web pages are being replaced by bilingual portals. Evidence also shows a greater presence of Valencian in the official social media accounts and in telephone and email interactions. However, the use of Spanish on public administration websites is still prevalent. Likewise, this study confirms the significant power of the social use of language, influenced in part by the political party in power.

This article examines the current sociolinguistic situation of Veneto in Santa Teresa, a small municipality located in the highlands of the state of Espirito Santo, in Southeastern Brazil. Santa Teresa was founded in 1874 by a group of about 300 Italian immigrants from Veneto-speaking towns in Northern Italy. The study is based on a survey conducted in 2016, which compares three distinct age groups of descendants of Veneto heritage residing in the rural area of Santa Teresa by examining self-rated language abilities in both Veneto and Portuguese, language use, and attitudes. The 98 informants that participated in this study belong to the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth generations of Veneto descendants. At the conclusion of this preliminary study, the results of the self-evaluations show that Veneto continues to be spoken and used at home, at work, and with neighbors and friends by respondents of all of these generations, which means that the rural community of Santa Teresa surpassed the typical three-generation shift to the majority language observed in heritage language families in the United States. However, findings also indicate that language shift towards Portuguese is taking place in Santa Teresa, and that the heritage language runs the risk of disappearing in the near future if nothing is done to stop the ongoing language shift.

This study on Yucatec Maya language planning analyzes the linguistic standardization process over a six-year period. The primary research site was the programa , a mandatory Yucatec Maya course for 1,600 Indigenous Education teachers in Mexico. Alongside this acquisition planning effort, other government agencies simultaneously produced an official standard Maya. Programa administrators who oppose official standardization made their own model of Maya in widely distributed government textbooks. Neither model was the main target of programa language teaching; the Maya of classrooms is characterized by vast variation. Although the government promulgated an official standard in 2014, standardization of Maya has not been attained. The difficulties of creating a popular standard by and for Indigenous language speakers are analyzed. Social networks upholding different models of Maya are examined through an economy of language planning framework that views language as social capital and integrates knowledge and learning economy concepts. This research presents the notion of social-linguistic orders to understand how different models of a language coexist and/or compete in a language planning endeavor.

This article presents observations and findings from an ongoing research on language revival among Italian new speakers in Crimea. Victim of Stalin’s mass deportations of minorities in the 1940s, the community experienced severe physical, demographic, social and cultural dislocation that led inexorably to language shift towards Russian. Through the use of ethnographic research methods, including participant observations and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the study explores the participants’ motivations, learning experiences and language use as they are involved in the project of reviving the Italian community.

This article investigates the relationship between linguistic preferences, religiousness and religious denomination in Central Ukraine. On the one hand, the Ukrainian linguistic situation is characterized by the co-existence of Ukrainian, Russian and substandard forms of Ukrainian Russian mixed speech, on the other hand, the Orthodoxy in Ukraine is split into different denominations. In Central Ukraine, most notably the conflict between the Kyїv and the Moscow Patriarchate is relevant. For both linguistic and religious affiliation, a correlation with political preferences has been postulated, and, in a similar vein, a connection between religious denomination and the degree of religiousness on the one hand, and different aspects of linguistic affiliation, i. e. language usage and native language, as well as attitudes toward substandard speech on the other hand. Based on field work from 2014, we show that there is no preference for the Russian language among members of the Moscow Patriarchate in comparison to those of the Kyїv Patriarchate, and only a slightly more pronounced preference towards substandard forms of mixed speech among respondents with lower degrees of religiousness. Overall, the results argue against the existence of a “language conflict” in the Ukrainian population, outside the elites.

This study investigates the potential role of context-relevant sociolinguistic factors in explaining young L1 indigenous South African language speakers’ IAT (Implicit Association Test) scores towards two varieties largely associated with the white group: Standard South African English and Afrikaans accented English. To this end, a post-IAT sociolinguistic survey on participants’ linguistic background, language exposure and intergroup social distance levels (among other social factors) was used. Separate ANOVAS were performed using the IAT reaction times as a dependent variable and sociolinguistic variables as factors. Notably, the sociolinguistic approach revealed that more positive attitudes towards Afrikaans accented English are correlated with the language range of participants, the dominant languages spoken in their places of origin, and the type of school they have attended.

This study aims to examine the use of English loanwords inflected with Arabic morphemes by young people in Amman, Jordan. It adopts a quantitative corpus-based approach supported by qualitative data. We collected data from young Facebook male and female users who come from families with different socio-economic status, and we conducted semi-structured interviews with 60 students at the University of Jordan to get more insight into the attitudes of young individuals in Jordan who use these English loanwords, and to account for the reasons that drive these individuals to use them. Data analysis shows that the participants’ gender and socioeconomic status are major factors that affect the use of these loanwords. Data analysis also reveals that these English loanwords could be used as a form of slang by a certain group of young individuals in Amman to claim a specific social identity and an in-group membership that distinguishes them from another group of young individuals who do not use these words. We argued that a number of symbolic values could be attached to the use of English loanwords inflected with Arabic morphemes by that group and analysed the reasons behind such linguistic behaviour.

English has been portrayed in linguistic landscape literature as the definitive language of commodification. However, using linguistic landscape images from two rural communities in the Northern Cape, South Africa, this article shows how indigenous African languages and localised English are entangled as commodities – whether used independently or in hybridised form – for the sale of various goods and services. We show that the commodification of the languages and hybridised forms speaks to semiotic choices of local authorship of signage and to the influence of local communities’ languaging practices. We propose that commodity status of languages or their linguistic features is variable, since commodified languages or linguistic features as modes derive meanings from the assembled multimodal resources, whose design features as languages or translanguaged “blends”, and their statuses as being in and out of favour, depend on communicative purposes, the kinds of goods and services being marketed and the intended consumers. We conclude that languages, or their linguistic features as modes in signage, should be valued as mobile socio-culturally given and multimodally shaped semiotic resources deployed for communicative impact on consumers in local contexts of use.