Volume 2024, Issue 288 - Special Issue: Mobile Borders; Issue Editors: Juldyz Smagulova and Kara Fleming

In 1927, the nascent Turkish Republic engaged in its first endeavor as a nation-state to systematically account for all its citizens. Included on this census were a number of different attributes the Turkish government wanted to know about its citizenry, including language. In the Turkish context, examining the language categories on the census between 1927 and 1965 and how – they changed over time – provides insight into how the new republic was imagining its citizenry (and by extension, itself). The dynamic nature of the language categories not only reflected an ambiguity that the nascent nation-state had regarding what constituted salient ethnolinguistic category for governing purposes, it also reflected the realization and subsequent politicization of minoritized populations over time. After examining the history of the development of the Turkish census, the article outlines the use of running records like censuses to provide insight into how state apparatuses were creating taxonomies to realize (or visualize) its citizenry and the value of utilizing such unobtrusive measures in Durkheimian social facts such as those who are “Us” and those who are “Other”. This article then situates the census data in its geographical context and demonstrates how the delineation of historic parts of the country that were settled by non-Turkish communities were ones that were then later demarcated into smaller administrative borders, allowing for closer government and military oversight. While this article is an exploratory case study of the Turkish census as part of its state building process, I contend that looking at how language categories were used in the 1927–1965 censuses provides insight into the nature of the Turkish government’s imaginings regarding its citizenry. In particular, the use of language data as a proxy for ethnicity was concomitant with processes of internal border demarcation that was taking place to increase government oversight in particular non-Turkish contexts, resulting in a “new” form of minoritization and marginalization in the Turkish Republic.

In this paper, we examine discourses about border and scale in the context of Hong Kong’s relationship with mainland China. We argue that, as the physical and political borders between Hong Kong and the mainland are eroding, other forms of bordering practices – such as linguistic borders – become more salient and contested. We draw on selected thematic analyses of a corpus of 70 articles from Hong Kong English media, as well as socio-historical analyses that have widely circulated since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, in order to examine how the construction of “Cantonese” and “Mandarin” is managed against anxieties about Hong Kong’s potential loss of distinction and fears of becoming “just another Chinese city”. In this process, both borders and scales become key terrains of negotiation and function themselves as ideological resources in debates about Hong Kong’s identity and future, as certain distinctions take on reduced or pronounced meaning from particular scalar perspectives. Amid an ongoing reframing of what it means to be “Chinese”, examining language ideologies in Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of how national and linguistic categories achieve or reframe their social meanings.

In this article, we examine the imagining of homeland as one of the discursive practices of rearticulating belonging within new state borders. The study focuses on an under-researched diasporic group of the Dungan community in Kazakhstan and examines how the diaspora subjects make sense of shifting borders and legitimize their presence within an increasingly homogenizing nation-state. Specifically, our interrogation focuses on spatiotemporal frames for re-imagining the notion of homeland and belonging in the context of shifting borders and changing conditions of settlement. We show how the Dungan negotiate their social positioning by re-orienting themselves to their ancestral home and their current place by discursively constructing double loss – permanent dispersal from China, their ancestral homeland, and displacement from the home and ideal life they managed to build in the Soviet Union. This spatiotemporal perspective allows us to see that the notion of homeland, a defining feature of diaspora and often viewed as naturalized and fixed, is a fluid construct, and one which can be rooted in time just as much as in space. The study contributes to understanding of processes of diasporic imagination in response to sociopolitical changes, and shows us that feelings of displacement can arise without physical dispersal, that temporality is as important in the processes of constructing diasporas as spatial movement.

Set in the peak of the so-called “European Migrant Crisis” and situated in the conflict-affected Cypriot context, this article examines Greek-Cypriot High School students’ representations of Syrian refugees as they were debated in classroom discussion. Drawing on ethnographic research that took place in 2016 in a Lower Secondary School in Cyprus, we analyse the interactional dynamics through which ‘bordering’ processes took place, showing how different types of borders were (re)-negotiated and re-instated in the classroom. Considering the sociohistorical context of Cyprus, we also investigate how teachers’ and students’ understandings of borders and ethnic identity-making were reshaped by local discourses. Our analysis shows that teachers, despite prompting students to take an active stance towards Syrian refugees as part of a peacebuilding stance, mobilised ethnocentric discourses that victimised refugees, portraying them as someone whose agency is taken away from, and for whom we can speak and act. Approaching borders as social constructs, we show how the national border separating “us” and “them” was construed and reaffirmed in such discussions, and how the representation of refugees as ‘the victim’ functioned as a way of narrating the ‘cultural fantasies’ of the national self.

Adopting a mentalist approach to the study of language attitudes, social prestige and stigma, as well as the values and stereotypes bestowed on Sardinian and Italian and their speakers were studied for the first time in Sardinia using the Matched-Guise Technique. The experiment was administered to Sardinian students of different ages, from different parts of the island, with different degrees of Italian/Sardinian bilingualism. Results show that Sardinian speakers are more favourably perceived in terms of friendliness and social pleasantness. Both Italian and Sardinian speakers, with no statistical difference between them, received moderately positive evaluations in traits related to socio-economic and cultural status, suggesting a decline in the traditional negative stereotypes associated with minority language speakers. Moreover, participants’ self-reported use and competence of languages, as well as their amount of school activities involving Sardinian, turned out to interact with the attitudes towards the minority language, as higher values of those variables were associated with higher ratings for Sardinian speakers. Findings could be useful to policy-makers in efforts to maintain Sardinia’s multilingual repertoire, and, more generally, to the scientific community in understanding the patterns and most relevant factors that affect language attitudes in bilingual contexts involving an endangered minority language.

Mountain Jews (MJs), native of the eastern Caucasus, mass immigrated in the 1990s to Israel and the US. MJs brought with them two heritage languages (HLs): Russian, the language of wider communication in the former Soviet Union, and Juhuri, their traditional home language. The present study explores the effects of HL attitudes on proficiency among 146 Israeli and 138 American MJs differing in age ( M  = 35.42) and in education level. A questionnaire based on a triadic attitude model comprised of Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive items was used to examine the impact of language attitudes on self-rated Comprehension and Production of the two HLs. Results showed more positive attitudes toward Russian than Juhuri in both Israel and the US, with highest values registered for the Affective component. Attitudes toward Russian did not differ across countries, whereas attitudes toward Juhuri were more positive in the US. Attitudes predicted proficiency of Russian better than Juhuri and better in Israel than in the US. The findings are discussed in light of societal and cultural differences between Israel and the US, in terms of ethnolinguistic vitality and the status of the societal languages, as well as the implications of the unique attitude structure of the two HLs in the two countries.

This study examines the sociolinguistic challenges and explores new perspectives on the evaluation of French competency in creole-speaking communities, particularly in Haiti. Due to the absence of an effective and adaptable French proficiency test in the country, the percentage of Francophones often varies between 5 % and 10 %, and as high as 42 %. This inconsistency may be the result of the assumption that schooling is an effective metric of French proficiency. In this study, I argue that while schooling creates some French speakers, it is not necessarily indicative of French proficiency for all Haitians. In other words, not all Haitians enrolled in schools can count as French speakers. I make three propositions to improve the accuracy of the proportion of French speakers in Haiti: (1) combining schooling with some proficiency instrument to determine French speakers; (2) using an adaptable proficiency test that is based on the salient features that distinguish French from Haitian Creole (Kreyòl); (3) controlling for sociolinguistic varieties such as Frenchified Kreyòl or Kreyòl swa to prevent the miscategorization of monolingual Kreyòl speakers as French speakers.