Volume 2023, Issue 281

Societal multilingualism and multilectalism have been among the leading justifications for language policies, especially in the Global South, where many of these have failed. I associate the failures with poor choices of official languages and media of education, which are not consistent with the linguistic behaviors of the majority of the citizenry and the socioeconomic structures of the relevant polities. I review some cases of adequate and inadequate policies around the world and explain ecologically some reasons for either their successes or their failures. In a subset of the cases, I assess the results as mixed. My recommendation is of course not to follow the policy of a particular polity simply because it has succeeded there but to also check whether the ecology of its success is similar to that of the new polity. The relevant ecology includes the socioeconomic structure/system and the linguistic practices of the citizenry for whom the policy is intended. Among the issues to address is, for instance, whether the language adopted as the official language and medium of education is easy for the majority of the citizenry to learn successfully. Another is whether the language policy will make the economic development of the nation more inclusive and empower the majority economically and politically.

The paper explored the shift away from Chaouia, a variety of Tamazight, to the use of Algerian Arabic in Batna (northeast Algeria). The Chaouia-speaking community had recently witnessed a large rural exodus and significant social changes and mobility due to economic opportunities, education and ethnic contact. The paper focused on gender differences in language use and considered how socialisation and cultural ideologies regarding men’s and women’s relationship to language shape linguistic decisions and choices. Building upon representations of masculinity and femininity, we investigated the ways in which these gendered practices constrain or restrict Chaouia use among working-class Chaouias. We used a qualitative approach with an embedded quantitative element to analyse interviews and surveys across the domestic setting as well as schools and social networks in Batna to examine the interplay between gender identities and language socialisation at home, language choices at school and among friends. The increase in cross-ethnic contact with the larger Arabic-speaking community had introduced significant re-considerations of social and linguistic priorities in the community. The findings showed a clear impact of parents on the acquisition of a gendered pattern of language choice, with boys being socialised in Chaouia and girls in Algerian Arabic. This pattern was further reinforced at school and among peers through teachers and social networks. Females’ networks were ethnolinguistically heterogeneous whereas males’ networks were Amazigh-oriented. Hence, the traditional link of Tamazight to femininity was re-negotiated to generate a discourse of blame for the ongoing language shift and identity loss.

Language revitalisation gives voice to those who participate in it. But it is not always clear whose voice the participants make heard. It is also not straightforward who hears and wants to listen to the voices that are raised during language revitalisation. In this article, we present a language educational programme which aims to give voice to the participants of the Moldavian Hungarian (also called Csángó ) language revitalisation in North-East Romania. Applying the Goffmanian participation framework, we demonstrate that the participants of the programme collaborate in giving voice to a Csángó-speaking figure while covertly performing different roles. Drawing on our linguistic ethnographic research, we point out how this institutionalised participation framework promotes the achievement of one of the objectives of language revitalisation: the restoration of past language practices. Nevertheless, it also creates an obstacle to another: to the way that the speakers of this language can have a voice worth hearing. The analysis highlights the tensions of institutionalising a participatory framework in language revitalisation, which aims to produce the belief in a Csángó figure representing the essential link between language and (national) community.

What we in this article describe as “Sino-Muslim heritage literacies” have existed in China for as long as there have been Muslims in the region (since the 7th century according to the best evidence). The community’s religious and heritage literacy practices can incorporate a systematic Arabic representation of Chinese, systems of Chinese characters representing Arabic pronunciation, and more contemporary digitalised manifestations of heritage literacy in everyday life. Using a social practice approach to literacy, this paper reports on multi-generational interviews, artefact collection, and ethnographic observations with two families in Xi’an (Shaanxi, China) to explore how heritage literacy practices maintain a presence in Sino-Muslim life through traditional systems of community and religious education and contemporary social and material networks. We discuss what these empirical cases reveal about literacies in Sino-Muslim religious life, with respect to how heritage is adapted or diminished across generations. We also argue that it is crucial to situate Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in spaces beyond rigid and state-defined ethnic and religious discourses which tend to confine the identity of Sino-Muslims into officially designated categories. Doing so, we contend, has useful theoretical and methodological import, and can shed light on inquiry about heritage literacy in other minority settings.

Based on an ethnography incorporating interview, linguistic landscape and observational data, this research illustrates how temporary linguistic value is negotiated and how an Arctic tourism destination is made fit for consumption for a specific audience. Set within a tourism resort in the Finnish Arctic during two weeks in Winter when the region habitually receives a large influx of Russian-speaking visitors, we illustrate how Russian is conceptualized as a means of economic practice by stakeholders in the local tourism industry. While some offer services specifically for a Russian-speaking audience as part of a short-term high-risk/high-reward investment, others regard Russian as an expression of a negative niche market that compromises the overall image of the Arctic as a global tourism destination. We discuss these different understandings of commodity value and highlight, how stakeholders in the local tourism economy imagine and discursively construct Russian-speaking tourists. In doing so, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the conditions of language commodification and the processes involved in the valuation and devaluation of linguistic resources within temporary linguistic markets.

This study examines how Hong Kong returnees negotiate and construct their transnational identities in their post-sojourn period via two indexical cues, stance taking, and self-labelling. Based on the narratives about remigration, this study investigates how returnees construct their identities discursively by taking stances to evaluate and align with sociocultural values and using self-labelling to index their transnational identities in their post-sojourn period. In doing so, this study hopes to contribute to the existing migration studies on Hong Kong returnees in terms of language and identity construction.

This study aims to reveal the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the necessity of using English as an international language. For this purpose, this study conducted a web survey of Japanese workers, and statistically examined the extent to which the use of English increased or decreased after the outbreak. The findings are as follows. First, although some types of use decreased or increased, the majority did not show substantial changes. Second, the changes in English use were largely influenced by worker factors, such as types of occupation and employment (e.g. it declined typically among sales workers but not among the self-employed and freelancers), the degree of remote working (e.g. not being allowed to work remotely reduced it), and industry (e.g. it declined among workers in accommodation and real estate sectors but increased among public servants). These findings suggest the following implications: (1) non-decline in English use would suggest its resilience as an international language, the necessity of which could endure even in such a global upheaval; and (2) the frequency of using English (and other modes of international communication) is relatively independent of reduced human mobility, but it is largely affected by the economic climate.

This comparative case study illuminates communicative strategies arising in contact between two migrant clients, ‘Maria’ and ‘Suda’, and their caseworker at the Norwegian welfare office. Suda and Maria mobilize bureaucratic, digital, and linguistic abilities as part of their health literacies to manage in-person contact, institutional websites, letters, and digital bureaucracy. Additionally, they collaborate with their Norwegian spouses to navigate the complex communicative situation at the welfare office and actively bring up this brokering strategy to increase their social and linguistic authority vis-à-vis their caseworkers. Combining Bourdieusian symbolic power with epistemic stance , and drawing on observations and interviews, I investigate how power and responsibility are negotiated between the women and their caseworkers. In their interactions, brokering strategies function as social capital in several ways, enabling the women to access institutional services, and reassuring their caseworkers that the women have sufficient literacy resources to gain access. I discuss the dual nature of brokering strategies as capital, but also as a factor that may reproduce structural vulnerability, and argue for better understanding of brokering as a health literacy strategy.