Volume 43, Issue 3

This article examines verbal and non-verbal communication between the interpreter and the injured party in a video-recorded main hearing of a criminal matter at a court of first instance in Finland. The language of the court was Finnish and the interpreter and injured party communicated in French, the interpreter’s B language and the injured party’s second language. Due to differences in the two participants’ ability to communicate in French, their verbal communication was characterized by significant problems. A salient feature of their communication consisted of abundant gesturing on the part of the injured party and the interpreter’s mirroring of these gestures and putting them into words in her renditions. The interpreter’s renderings combined mimicking of the injured party’s gestures, language interpretation, and intermodal (gesture to language) interpretation, as well as elements that had been mentioned previously by other participants. The analysis highlights the problematic status of intermodal and multimodal translation from the viewpoint of legal norms, interpreting norms, and the theory of multimodality. It calls for increased sociolinguistic awareness among interpreters, legal experts, and interpreting studies scholars, as well as greater communication between the theory and practice of multimodality and intermodality in the dialogue interpreting of spoken languages.

Through the analysis of materials such as online articles, blogs, and radio broadcasts, this paper investigates linguistic purism toward Russian and English loanwords in the understudied context of post-Soviet Armenia. Our analysis finds that public commentators categorize potential loanwords as “borrowings” (փոխառություն [pʰokhaṛutʰyun]) if acceptable and “foreignisms” (օտարաբանություն [ōtarabanutʰyun]) if unacceptable, while also comparing these loanwords with acceptable and unacceptable Armenian equivalent words. In categorizing both loanwords and Armenian equivalents, commentators base their arguments on evaluative contrasts related to threats to the language, the desirability of word meaning and usage, and stylistic appropriateness. Though commentators situate themselves into opposing purist and moderate camps, differentiated by their tolerance of loanwords and classifications of individual words, the two camps rely on the same ideological framework of contrasts and use similar argumentation. Thus, while the debate invokes binary criteria for evaluating words, similar to those identified in other instances of linguistic purism, Armenian commentators themselves often defy binary categorization, falling along a fluid language-ideological continuum in which seemingly opposing commentators sometimes demonstrate striking similarities. Framed alongside prior studies of language ideologies in post-Soviet spaces, this evidence suggests that the loanword debate has a more symbolic than practical function in Armenia’s contemporary multilingual society.

Research has suggested that Swedish higher education institutions’ (HEIs’) language policies may exclude some academic staff from work-related activities due to (dual) monolingual ideologies requiring one language at a time. This study, based on the analysis of twenty-one language policy texts, investigates HEIs’ policies using a lens of inclusion at workplaces with linguistic diversity, drawing on concepts from diversity management and language policy for democracy of inclusion. All documents examined began with statements of HEIs’ values relevant to the policies. Inclusion was seldom explicitly emphasized, although policies suggested ways to facilitate it. We argue that some of the approaches – namely, taking a top-down monolinguistic approach to language choice, requiring staff to be highly proficient in both Swedish and English, and offering unspecified language support – reinforce language-based in-groups and out-groups, likely compromising rather than facilitating inclusion. Another approach, emphasizing individuals’ rights to choose what language they use, facilitates inclusion only if support is provided for everyone’s understanding. Providing immediate language support and encouraging bottom-up, flexible language choice were less common approaches but seem particularly likely to facilitate inclusion. Our analysis suggests that policies prioritizing successful communication, not specific languages, facilitate inclusion and help employees develop job-related language and intercultural communicative competence.

This study aims at investigating how loanwords from Japanese and Korean are used in informal written Cantonese media discourse, including print and social media. Data from these media were collected from designated websites for 15 min every other day over a two-week period. The results show that loanwords from Korean, being written in a phonographic script hangul (한글), are rendered into written Cantonese typically through phonetic adaptation using Chinese morpho-syllables, while their Chinese-specific morphographic meanings are ignored. By contrast, lexical items from Japanese written in kanji tend to be borrowed directly through graphic borrowing, paying no regard to their Japanese pronunciation. Japanese being written with mixed scripts, kanji and two kana syllabaries, graphic borrowing from hiragana or katakana is rare, with the Japanese grammatical particle の being a notable exception. We conclude that lexical items written in a phonographic script tend to be rendered into written Cantonese phonetically, while those written in character-based hànzì are borrowed directly through graphic borrowing but assigned Cantonese pronunciation. In informal interaction between Cantonese-dominant Hongkongers, colloquial written Cantonese relies on the affordance of script mixing for its vitality, in print as much as in internet-mediated social media discourse.

Teachers play an essential role in fostering linguistic security in their classrooms. The aim of this study is to identify the language ideologies articulated by teachers in the Francophone schools of the English-dominant context of British Columbia (Canada) in order to explore how the different practices they implement to foster the use of French in their multilingual classrooms and foster linguistic security may interact and expose contradictions. The findings are based on a thematic analysis of interviews with twenty-one French-speaking high school teachers. I argue that linguistic ideologies provide a useful locus for studying the tensions produced by institutional policies and practices and the possible impact on the students’ feelings of linguistic insecurity. Building on excerpts from the interviews, the findings indicate that the practices the teachers use to implement the French-language policy in their classrooms must be examined further as they might be harming the efforts they are making to increase linguistic security. This paper is intended to contribute to the ongoing conversation about the practical process of engaging with linguistic insecurity.