Volume 37, Issue 2

This study investigates conditions for language use among Norwegian adolescents using the minoritized Norwegian written language Nynorsk. By combining survey data and focus group interviews, and deploying the framework of ‘capacity’ , ‘opportunity’ , and ‘desire’ as an analytical lens, the study explores some of the factors and forces that influence the adolescents’ choice to maintain the use of this non-hegemonic Norwegian written language. The paper thus seeks to add to the body of research investigating language maintenance of minoritized languages. The findings illuminate the discrepancy between regulations and practices in the Norwegian language community. Still, even if the collective structures are not optimal, many of the adolescents display a willingness to keep using Nynorsk – a willingness which is partly rendered possible by the existence of these same collective structures. The study thus demonstrates the dialectic relationship between these structures and individual language choices. Moreover, the data show that under given circumstances, some of the same factors and forces that usually further language shift, may also promote language maintenance.

An urban space’s linguistic landscape represents a multimodal and multilingual discourse, indexing the historical, socio-political, cultural, and ethnolinguistic aspects of the locale. Contributing to sociolinguistic research in our global cities, this study zooms in on an unexpected Chinese ethnic enclave, or Chinatown, in Dubai, a superdiverse urban space and multilingual contact zone in post-colonial UAE. Drawing on a corpus of authentic LL data taken from Dubai’s emerging ‘Chinatown’, the study shows that a multilingual triad involving Arabic, English and Chinese is a pervasive sight in this area, deviating from the taken-for-granted and ‘choreographed’ bilingual LL in Dubai overall featuring Arabic and English. Notably, Chinese, as an index of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity and marker of boundary, is the most prominent and informative, whereas Dubai’s official language Arabic often appears in small font size and is rendered inconspicuous. This gives rise to a scenario I call ‘small-print multilingualism’ – a conscious attempt for small-business owners to include Arabic reluctantly only to get the ‘job’ done and conform to relevant rules and regulations. Theoretically, this article argues for the relevance of Bakhtin’s concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces in helping shed light on the dynamic and negotiated relationship between official top-down regulations and bottom-up linguistic practices on the ground in ethnic enclaves. Ultimately, this study adds to our understandings of language and multilingualism in (super)diverse global cities

Luxembourgish is a Germanic language in Western Europe situated on the Germanic-Romance language border. The centuries-long multilingualism, that has included German and French as main contact languages, has led to much variation on all linguistic levels, yielding lexical doublets  – contact-induced synonym pairs. The study presents the results from the online Lëtzebuerger Futtballsprooch ‘Luxembourgish football language’ survey ( n = 1189 participants), set up to analyze the distribution of the variants of lexical doublets in the special language of football in order to exemplify the mechanisms of contact-induced lexical variation in Luxembourgish as a whole. The variation is correlated with sociodemographic and language biographical factors (quantitative analysis, beta regression). The study also introduces linguistic orientation as an overarching factor for the individual language biography that is useful to model the positioning of individuals in relation to the contact languages involved in a complex multilingual society. The results reveal a societal trend towards Germanic variants linked to the linguistic orientation of the participants towards German, mirroring sociolinguistic dynamics and changes.

The present study deals with the presence and role of the Sardinian language in the linguistic landscape of sixteen villages in the province of Oristano, Sardinia. Specifically, their entry signs and street name signs were photographed and analysed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. In the entry signs, Sardinian was found to have a very strong presence, generating a high degree of bilingualism with Italian, as recommended by national and regional language policies. Systematic bilingualism could not, however, be observed in the street name signs, where Italian clearly prevails. Notwithstanding, the local language is visible in around a quarter of all street name signs. Complying with the provisions of national and regional legislations, Sardinian is used in the majority of street signs to recall the historical memory of the communities. Nonetheless, signs could be found where Sardinian is used in parallel bilingual texts to express exactly the same content as Italian, fostering a modern vision of the minority language. The present work shows how top-down language policies can be locally implemented or re-interpreted in the linguistic landscape; moreover, the article sheds light on how street naming can be exploited to influence society’s perception of minority languages and convey messages of local or regional/national identity.

This paper centres on a dialogue with Liviu Matei, Professor of Higher Education and Public Policy at Kings College London, which aims to transcend sociolinguistic disciplinary boundaries by exploring the increasing use of English for higher education academic programmes at European universities within the context of university autonomy. Once Provost of the Central European University, forced to move from Hungary to Austria when its institutional autonomy was increasingly infringed by the state, Liviu Matei’s academic work combines intellectual acuteness with experience, further deepened in the practice of consultation and applied policy research for influential international bodies and organisations, including the Council of Europe and the European Commission. With him, we consider in novel ways the role that legal reform granting a regulated autonomy to universities accompanied by a more corporate style of higher education governance may have played in the rampant growth in recent decades of English language academic programmes in the now European Higher Education Area (EHEA). We reflect on the historical and public policy contexts out of which English as a medium of instruction (EMI) arose, the regulated autonomy of universities by ministerial practices of steering at a distance, and widely obtaining political epistemologies and policy narratives.