Volume 29, Issue 3-4 - Special Issue: Changing standards in sociolinguistic research: Celebrating the work of Roland Willemyns

While the concept of standardization is well-established in linguistics, destandardization is a more recent addition to linguistic terminology. Drawing on historiographic and ethnographic data from isiXhosa, one of South Africa's indigenous languages, this paper reflects on both of these concepts. Standardization is discussed as a modernist grand narrative whose continued application to linguistic thinking has outlived its usefulness, and standard languages as such (hegemonoc, prescriptive, etc.) might be assigned to Beck's (Theory, Culture & Society 19: 17–44, 2002) zombie categories of modernity. Discussing the example of brandy-talk in isiXhosa from the perspective of ethnographic lexicography (Silverstein, Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 481–496, 2006), the paper argues for a linguistic perspective which focuses on the articulation and reproduction of social meaning as a central mechanism in the formation of linguistic conventions or ways of speaking. It advocates a recognition of the practices of speakers as they draw on standard and non-standard forms, as well as their associated meanings and ideologies (first/second order indexicality), in positioning themselves as social beings with identities, histories, aspirations, and ideological stances in everyday talk.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of fears concerning the status of English in Quebec. Unlike in the past, many now claim that it is francophones themselves who risk undermining the achievements of 30 years of successful status planning. The finger is pointed in particular at young francophones, accused of adopting an unfettered bilingualism and overly positive attitudes towards the global lingua franca. In an attempt to explore the veracity of the accusations, the present study makes use of a questionnaire distributed amongst 463 francophone university students in Quebec. Far from revealing an uncritical stance towards English, the results expose the diversity and complexity of the relationships maintained with the language, which serve to distinguish young francophones today from previous generations.

Language extinction is one of the most pressing issues in linguistics today, and the literature is full of discussion about how to combat it. Statements that Norwegian is amongst the languages that are already extinct are merely examples of a widespread tendency in the literature towards erroneous information about Norwegian. Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that Norwegian is undergoing a process of ‘domain loss’, and policies to address this form of language shift lie at the heart of the most recent developments in the history of language planning in Norway. A policy of parallelingualism is widely advocated, but without proper sanctions in higher education and in the business world for infringements of the parallelingual strategy, it is unlikely to have much effect.

The present article argues that the social category of ‘standardisation’ has been instrumental in creating a Foucaultian discourse archive governing what may and what may not be stated on the subject of the history of English. It analyses the question of how language attitudes have been instrumental in creating the myths that have driven the discourse of Standard English since the 19th century, but it goes further than this by showing how language performance, in the form of folk songs in England, has also come under this same archive of standardisation. However, in both cases, i.e. language and language performance, it is argued that a below-the-surface alternative discourse has now gained enough force to seriously challenge the doctrine of standardisation and to necessitate the formation of new discursive contents for a social concept that is in serious danger of becoming hollow and outdated.

This contribution deals with language contact and language conflict in autochthonous language minority settings in the European Union. It rounds up a number of concepts that guide macro-socio-linguistic and macrocontact-linguistic research on language minorities. The description of these concepts results in a list of research desiderata.

The thoughts on a language history within a European context sketched out here represent an attempt to extend the concepts of regional and particularly national language history by adding a third dimension: transnational language history in Europe. After a few general thoughts on the extended area of research, in which so-called external language history is linked to historical pragmatics and particularly to historical sociolinguistics, four research paradigms are outlined: the comparative sociolinguistic approach, the concept of the cycle of communication, the language contact approach and the socio-historical and cultural-historical approach.

Subjective and objective language data collected in a research project on language variation in north Germany not only reveal information on current linguistic trends in north Germany; they also show how language change in this region is represented in the consciousness of the speakers themselves and described in comments by them. This diachronic dimension is supported, in the case of Brandenburg, by means of lexicographical data and recordings that were made within the framework of the Brandenburg/ Berlin Dictionary compiled around 1960. It becomes clear that the original area of Low German varieties in Brandenburg has, for a long time time now, not been structured by distinct languages or the polarity between dialect and standard, but rather by certain varieties of spoken German (vsG) or ‘Sprachlagen’ that display regional features alongside everyday linguistic forms and – at least this is my hypothesis – are developing into a regional standard variety.

In this paper a series of studies of standard Dutch pronunciation in Belgium and the Netherlands is presented. The research is based on two speech corpora: a diachronic corpus of radio speech (1935–1995) and a synchronic corpus of Belgian and Netherlandic standard Dutch from different regions at the turn of the millennium. It is shown that two divergent pronunciation standards have been developing, but it is argued that the divergence will not create two autonomous standard languages. As such, Dutch is not different from its two closest pluricentric neighbors, German and English.

This paper discusses metalinguistic discourse and orthographical practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the southern Netherlands (‘Flanders’). Whereas a lot is known about Dutch language standardization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what happened after that, especially in the southern territories, is still partly uncharted territory. This contribution will examine and challenge the myths of language decline and linguistic chaos that are often associated with eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Flanders. The authors show that there was a vivid and coherent normative tradition, especially on the level of orthography, and that even a case of apparent orthographical disorder, such as the so-called accent spelling, can be counted as an instance of language standardization in the eighteenth-century southern Netherlands.