Language Ideology

The vast majority of Chinese Malaysians have originated from south China with their native languages, Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Teochew, Hokchew and Hainanese. Most of these native languages are weakening due to lack of intergenerational transmission. Languages spoken in the families are largely shifting to Mandarin and English. This paper has investigated the reasons why the community is shifting away from their native languages. Language attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies held by the majority of Chinese Malaysians have been collected and they are presented together with the historical development of Chinese languages. The origins of the factors, which put their native languages into disadvantageous positions, are discussed. This paper also explores the possibilities of running language revitalization programmes in the community.

This essay offers an introduction to 'dialect', 'variety', and 'language ideology' as used by linguists and linguistic anthropologists. Specifically, I interpret the significance and delivery of Alysia Harris's remarks during 2017's Disrespected Literatures Symposium, drawing upon notions of language ideology and linguistic inequality, as well as excerpts from a contemporaneous interview with Harris. The analysis is contextualized through review of key flashpoints in public debate the appropriateness of African American Language in the U.S., and the inclusion of American dialects within considerations of language and literature. I also incorporate insights from my experiences as an African American woman and reader of both Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Shakespeare's Hamlet, each of which Harris discusses. By using her performance as an opportunity to celebrate the language-affirming activism of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Harris sounds a powerful critique of the often narrow notion of literature, and visibilizes the racial, gendered, and literary contours of intersectional linguistic inequality.

RE: Facades, illusions & ideological concepts created & promoted by ancient royalty out of necessity; effective creation of an alternate version of reality. It is only by knowing this information that the true nature of ancient texts may be understood correctly. Not knowing, means making incorrect assumptions & conclusions. Important!

Final (post-viva) research masters dissertation, Aberystwyth University, 2016. A published version with significant revisions and additions is envisaged.

The present thesis provides a linguistic overview of the revived variety of Manx Gaelic, the Celtic language of the Isle of Man currently spoken by a few hundred people who have learnt it as a second language, and a small number of children raised bilingually. The introductory chapter presents an overview of the recent history and current situation of Revived Manx; the academic literature on both varieties of Manx; the study of language revival in general; and the ideological issues surrounding the terminology of language ‘revival’ and of language ‘death’. In Chapter 2 an overview is given of the linguistic features of Revived Manx (RM) with comparisons to the traditional variety (Traditional Manx, TM), with sections on phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, and lexis, idiom and style. In Chapter 3 RM is placed in the wider context of the phenomenon of language variety, with particular focus on comparisons with Revived Hebrew (and the problems with such comparisons); the concept of interlanguage; language revival as language contact; and existing language ideologies prevalent in the RM community. Finally consideration is given to the future prospects of the language, and recommendations are made concerning ideological clarification and corpus planning.

This Handbook offers a state-of-the-art account of research in language policy and planning (LPP). The Handbook examines the ways in which scholarship in language policy and planning (LPP) has understood the changing relationship between LPP and political-economic conditions, and how this changing relationship has shaped knowledge production in the field. With an underlying interest in language, social critique, and inequality, scholars in this volume work in widely divergent local, regional, national, and institutional settings, to investigate the ongoing processes that have gradually become the focus of contemporary LPP research, in many cases forcing scholars and practitioners in the field to revisit their own assumptions, views, and methodological perspectives. Through a critical examination of LPP, the Handbook offers new directions for a field in theoretical and methodological turmoil as a result of the socioeconomic, institutional, and discursive processes of change taking place under the conditions of late modernity. Chapters in this handbook are divided into three major sections: conceptual underpinnings of LPP; LPP, nation states, and communities; and LPP and late modernity. Subsections include chapters focusing on LPP and nationalism, minorities, standardization, and globalization; LPP in institutions of the nation-state and in communities; language, neoliberalism, and governmentality; language and mobility, diversity, and new social media; and new approaches to extending LPP scholarship. A final chapter offers an integrative summary and suggestions for future directions in LPP research.

Pre-publication draft.

Zusammenfassung:

Dieser Artikel betrachtet die Entwicklung der theoretischen und ideologischen Standpunkte, die einem großen Teil der wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten zum Thema des Manx-Gälischen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute zugrunde liegen. Vorgeschlagen wird, dass in Diskussionen des Manx die Annahme herrscht, die Sprache sei ein zerfallener, anglisierter bzw. kreolisierter Dialekt, was in O’Rahillys bekannter Erklärung dargelegt wird: ‘Manx hardly deserved to live’. O’Rahillys Ansichten haben zu unterschiedlichen Graden die Auffassung nachfolgender Wissenschaftler von der Sprache beeinflusst, so sehr sie auch seine rhetorischen Exzesse verwerfen mögen. Der Artikel untersucht die Behauptungen dieser Wissenschaftler und stellt die generelle Ansicht bezüglich kontaktinduzierten Sprachwandels im Manx-Gälischen infrage. Kritisch betrachtet wird auch Williams’ Theorie eines mittelalterlichen nordisch-gälischen Patois als Grundlage des späteren Manx angesichts Trudgills Ideen zur soziolinguistischen Typologie.

This is how the goals of this book are described in the Preface:
This study seeks to define language ideologies having first reached a definition of ideologies in general; that is, it proceeds from the general to the specific.
A comprehensive review of the literature on language and ideology is also provided, which allows the advanced student to move at their own pace through various theories and research tools and choose the ones that better suit their own research interests.
The book is structured around two fundamental principles. .
The first principle, “Barthes’ principle”, determines the semiotic nature of ideologies in general. According to it, ideologies are second-degree semiotic systems, which do not signify directly but only through language (or through other first-degree semiotic codes). They do not signify; they connote or implicate, or under- or over-signify. Implicature and presupposition are ideologies’ favorite modes of signification.
The second principle, “Silverstein’s principle”, defines in a very general way a very specific application of the first. Language ideologies, just like all ideologies, are second-degree semiotic systems (Barthes’ principle); in addition, they also are or they are also capable of becoming metalinguistic systems (Silverstein’s principle), i.e. semiotic codes whose universe of discourse is defined by first-degree semiotic systems, i.e. by languages.
The book is structured after those two principles. The second chapter, which could be read first, presents Barthes’ principle, some of its corollaries as well as some reasonable restrictions on it.
The third chapter presents Silverstein’s principle as a further condition on Barthes’ principle.  Language ideologies are defined as second-degree metalinguistic systems. The notion of metalanguage is explained at length. It is argued that, language ideologies, as second-degree metalinguistic semiotic systems, are ideologies par excellence. Although language ideologies are but a subcategory of ideologies in general, their analysis can now be used to shed light on ideologies in general.
The first chapter provides the necessary historical prolegomena to the next two chapters. It could be read independently of the other two.  It explains how the study itself weighs itself against two imposing and competing paradigms in the theory of ideology. The first: the original, descriptive, synthetic paradigm developed by the French idéologues, who first introduced the notion of idéologie; and the second one: the critical and analytical paradigm prevailing today, a paradigm established simultaneously with the deconstruction (or partial destruction) of the concept of ‘ideology’. The starting point for this second paradigm is, to my opinion, the critique by Marx and Engels of The German Ideology.
The study of these two “first moments” in the genesis of ‘ideology’ reveals how the concept of ‘ideology’ changed in parallel with the critique to it, a critique aiming simultaneously at specific ideologies and earlier theories of ideology. The subject of criticism became its object. We can no longer settle with a descriptive agenda. We do not believe in a General Science of Ideas, a General Idealogy capable of describing and classifying every idea and every ideology. Destutt de Tracy and his followers failed. But neither could we today adopt a critical attitude, pretending ideological neutrality and scientific objectivity - as if there were a science of ideology in which our critical force is founded. What is needed, I argue, is a synthesis of the two paradigms, which does not preclude a critical attitude towards ideologies, while at the same time providing detailed and inductive descriptions of them. The book’s approach is conceptual and explanatory; it draws from linguistics – and, more particularly, from sociolinguistics and metapragmatics.
The historical study of the early stages in the theory of ideologies is also revealing of how intellectuals working from within these two different paradigms perceived the relationship between language and ideology. In both paradigms we find the notion of ‘language’ to overlap with the notion of ‘ideas’ (concepts, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs). This partial identification, which, depending on one's interest, might be called either linguistic or conceptual relativism, can be attributed to the inability of both theoretical paradigms to distinguish between first-degree and second-degree semiosis, on the one hand, and between language and metalanguage, on the other. The absence of this double distinction is manifested in a paradoxical symptom: linguistic or conceptual relativism is invoked in the critique of ideology/ies, while, as documented in the third chapter, relativism is in fact one of the most important mechanisms of the ideology/ies thus critiqued. Particularly in the field of language ideologies, relativism, it is argued, is the finite mechanism that generates ideologies, while, at the same time, the ideologies thus generated become indistinguishable from the description or the critique to which they are subjected. Relativism is a metalinguistic principle, not a linguistic one. The ideologies it generates are language ideologies.
The three chapters of the book follow, therefore, the three steps in an argument. The first chapter defines the historical context in which the study is placed. The second defines the broad area defined by Barthes’ principle. And the third concentrates on the unexplored territory of language ideologies.
The book’s argument is largely explanatory. In the literature one comes across several definitions of “language ideologies”. The definitions reflect an author’s own interests and they are often incompatible with each other. The following distinctions are introduced, distinctions which define different (although interdependent) areas of research:
A) the language of ideology/ies;
B) language ideologies - linguistic ideologies;
C) ideologies-in-language.

A) The study of the language (or the “languages”) of ideology/ies is concerned with issues pertaining to the functioning of ideologies as semiotic (or “symbolic”) systems. The most important issues in this category are:
1) the analysis of ideologies as second-degree semiotic systems;
2) implicature as a tool for understanding second-degree semiosis;
3) the formation of ideological stereotypes;
4) the use of presuppositions and metaphors in forming stereotypes;
5) the normative and performative character of ideologies.

B) On the other hand, language ideologies are implicitly (Barthes’ principle) or explicitly (Silverstein’s principle) about language.  The study of language ideologies includes all those issues which are openly debated within a linguistic community, issues which have become stereotypical, which have left their imprint on the collective consciousness (such as the Greek Language Question). One of the most salient language-ideological issues is standardization. Standardization is but the guiding of linguistic behavior by ideas (standards). But this is also the definition of language ideologies: the positing of a linguistic variety according to a metalinguistic model, which usually results in the attempt to make the linguistic variety “conform” to the pattern through which it is perceived. Language ideologies always exist when there is metalinguistic consciousness – and the aim of standardization is to increase metalinguistic consciousness at a collective level. Language ideologies are also distinguished from linguistic ideologies (i.e., ideologies within linguistics); not only are language and linguistic ideologies part of “divergent larger systems of discourse and enterprise” (M. Silverstein), their semiotic mechanisms are also different.

C) Finally, ideologies-in-language are more often than not confused with language ideologies. Ideologies-in-language have to do with differentiation. In this third category belong all the issues relating to perceived variation. It is shown that the correlation of linguistic variables with independent ones is not necessarily mediated by language ideologies; on the contrary, the correlation is more often than not mediated by non-linguistic ideologies (such as ideologies of prestige, of social class, of gender, etc.). These non-linguistic ideologies may also have linguistic manifestations (as ideologies-in-language), although it is not necessary that they develop to full-blown language ideologies. In fact, it can be proven (with semiotic arguments) that Barthes’ and Silverstein’s principles are incompatible for the same set of semiotic units; their incompatibility necessitates a semiotic mediation through non-linguistic ideologies for both principles to apply.
The theory of language ideologies developed in this book is exemplified by a comprehensive presentation of the development of Standard Modern Greek. Reference is also made to other languages and language ideologies.

Quelle place accorder à la variation, en particulier diatopique, dans l’enseignement / apprentissage de la L2 ? Malgré une réflexion abondante et de longue date en Français langue étrangère, ou plus discrète en Italiano lingua straniera, l’introduction d’un discours variationnel de type sociolinguistique en classe de L2 reste encore aujourd’hui un exercice délicat, d’autant que l’évocation de la diatopie est un excellent déclencheur des opinions et des stéréotypes sur la langue
Partant de la notion de communauté linguistique comme communauté de normes partagées par l’ensemble des membres, on a considéré 3 types de contextes sociolinguistiques : 1. l’espace français, fortement monocentrique, et dont le modèle de langue largement diffus à travers l’Hexagone tend à la neutralité du point de vue diatopique, 2. l’espace francophone européen, hors Hexagone, en marge de la langue mais dans lequel on assiste malgré tout à l’émergence récente d’un lent phénomène d’auto-légitimation des communautés francophones périphériques, 3. l’Italie et le Tessin, puisque cette même dimension diatopique y constitue la toile de fond de l’italien contemporain et qu’elle est omniprésente dans les pratiques langagières de tout locuteur.
Sachant que l’institution scolaire est le principal agent de reproduction, de diffusion et de réélaboration constante de l’idéologie linguistique du standard et de l’unilinguisme, on a voulu enquêter en direction des attitudes et des opinions des enseignants d’ILS en contexte francophone européen et de leurs collègues de FLE en contexte italophone.
Un questionnaire a été réalisé en deux langues et a fait l’objet entre 2013 et 2014 d’une diffusion en ligne systématique auprès de tous les établissements scolaires de niveau équivalent lycée – gymnases, athénées, scuole superiori, etc. – de Belgique francophone, de France, de Suisse romande, d’Italie et du Canton du Tessin. Cette enquête, à laquelle plus de 1100 enseignants de FLE et d’ILS ont participé, a fourni un grand nombre de données ayant requis une analyse en plusieurs étapes.
On a d’abord pu observer que l’appartenance de l’enseignant à un contexte sociolinguistique plus ou moins ouvert à la diatopie a une influence minime sur sa perception de cette variation et de ses propres pratiques didactiques. Ensuite, les informations recueillies nous ont permis de mieux appréhender la dialectique existant, au sein de l’imaginaire linguistique de la profession, entre vécu langagier individuel et adhésion à l’idéologie linguistique dominante du standard. Enfin, l’analyse et la confrontation des données quantitatives et textuelles ont permis de mettre finalement en évidence que les enseignants des différents contextes sociolinguistiques considérés partagent des représentations linguistiques tout à fait semblables mais surtout un seul et même imaginaire professionnel.

This paper presents Jamaica as a case study of the intersections between language practice, language ideologies, and music, using a historically grounded descriptive approach spanning a period of more than three and a half centuries. It describes secular and religious Jamaican music(s) and ideologies connected to them through different periods of the country's history characterised by different social and socio-political configurations (e.g., slavery, colonial rule, Independence). These systems and the emergent socialities to which they gave rise influenced the creation of new musical genres and determined to varying extents how linguistic codes were distributed by genre, and in the lyrics themselves.

Keywords
Jamaica; Historical description; Genre; Creole

In this article we connect the institutionalization of bilingual education to a post–Civil Rights racial formation that located the root of educational inequalities in the psychological condition of people of color in ways that obscured the structural barriers confronting communities of color. Within this context, bilingual education was institutionalized with the goal of instilling cultural pride in Latinx students in ways that would remediate their perceived linguistic deficiencies. This left bilingual educators struggling to develop affirmative spaces for Latinx children within a context where these students continued to be devalued by the broader school and societal context. More recent years have witnessed the dismantling of these affirmative spaces and their replacement with two-way immersion programs that seek to cater to White middle-class families. While these programs have offered new spaces for the affirmation of the bilingualism of Latinx children, they do little to address the power hierarchies between the low-income Latinx communities and White middle-class communities that are being served by these programs. We end with a call to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to combat the racialization of Latinx and other minoritized communities.

PhD dissertation (Universities of Bergamo, Perpignan and Sydney), defended at the Institut Franco-Català Transfronterer, University of Perpignan via Domitia on September 2 2016. Mention très honorable avec félicitations du jury à l'unanimité.

This dissertation focuses on the variety of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé, the capital of São Tomé and Príncipe, and its surroundings. From the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, Forro, Angolar, and Lung’ie (three native creoles) were the most widely spoken languages on the islands. However, the massive arrivals of contract laborers starting at the end of the nineteethn century, and the use of Portuguese as a lingua franca completely changed the sociolinguistic setting. As a consequence, a process of linguistic shift (from creoles to Portuguese) started to take place. This shift was intensified from the 1960s, with the rise of the nationalist movement, the independence of the country (in 1975), and the generalized access to education. Since then, children have been growing up with the local variety of Portuguese as their first (and often only) language.
The objective of this research, therefore, is to investigate the emergence of a Santomean variety of Portuguese, with special reference to rhotics and subject pronoun expression (SPE), and to explore the differences between Santomean Portuguese and other varieties of Portuguese. In a larger context, I am also interested in understanding the social and ideological phenomena that explain the linguistic choices, linguistic change, and language shift in São Tomé and Príncipe. The study is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and sociolinguistic interviews with fifty-six native speakers of Santomean Portuguese, aged between 12 and 73 years old, who were born and raised in the capital of São Tomé and its surroundings.
The results of the study show that the use of the rhotics is an innovative and distinctive feature of Santomean Portuguese. Some Santomeans use the strong-R (the historical trill) in word positions that would be considered non-standard to European and Brazilian norms. This reflects a change in progress led by the younger generations. Within the strong-R category, the rhotic fricative has emerged as a variant that clearly distinguishes two generations, Santomeans over forty years old and those under 39. This dividing point also marks the year of the independence of the country, a milestone in the history of São Tomé and Príncipe and the formation of its national identity. This suggests that fricative rhotics are a marker of Santomean identity. Surprisingly, however, the ideologies that surround this use of the rhotics are highly pejorative.
Regarding SPE, less social significance is attached to this feature. One reason for this might be the fact that it is a feature that has maintained a usage that is similar to European Portuguese. My results show that most of the linguistic constraints on SPE in Santomean Portuguese are similar to those of studies of other Portuguese varieties. The one element that differs from previous studies is social: highly educated people favor the use of overt subjects, while in European Portuguese null subjects are highly favored, and usually used more by educated speakers.
I believe that this study of rhotics and SPE captures the nature of Santomean Portuguese: it reflects a combination of creole influences, linguistic conservatism, and innovation. Indeed, the history of the islands is reflected in its languages: the creole influence that relates to the African origin of Santomean Portuguese, conservatisms from European Portuguese that recall the colonial society that endured for 500 years, and innovations that mark development of São Tomé as an independent nation.

Holistic investigations of language contact situations, and indeed of language contact phenomena such as lexical borrowing, code switching or language shift, require insights from across the social sciences - and especially insights into social attitudes and ideologies - if sense is to be made of the social, political, cultural and economic forces that shape language contact scenarios.  With this short paper, I propose that scholarship consider an additional social factor which may at first sight is camouflaged as attitude or ideology but in fact runs much deeper within the linguistic culture of a speech community and guides language contact outcomes: ontologies of language.  To support this, I will offer brief insights from existing literature on the linguistic ontologies attributable to the Indigenous Māori, Sámi and Hopi language communities of New Zealand, Norway and the United States respectively to raise the possibility that language ontologies – distinct from attitudes or ideologies - might expedite or slow the impacts of language contact.

In this essay, we reconsider the topic of "Linguistic Diversity in South Asia"-the title of the landmark 1960 volume edited by Charles Ferguson and John Gumperz-from the perspective of contemporary sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Reviewing a number of case studies, we argue that empirical and theoretical accounts of language, diversity, and South Asia cannot be disassociated from the ideologies and political projects that construe, objectify, and performatively realize such terms and their referents. At the same time, however, contemporary linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics have not disposed of the questions that animated earlier generations' investigations into linguistic diversity in the subcontinent but have reinvigorated and transformed them in sophisticated ways that are empirically sensitive to the realities of social and linguistic life in all its complex reflexivity.

The professional projects of Donna Haraway, a third-wave feminist, and Alexander McQueen, an avant-garde fashion designer, show remarkable convergence in their appropriative, purposeful blurring of the distinction between the natural and technological thereby disclosing what constitutes truth for both figures; namely, to be duped. The title of this presentation, HaraQueen, is a portmanteau of their last names that points precisely to this fact. HaraQueen is also a type of homophone - horror queen - that holds in concert the contradistinctive semantics of these two words: horror meaning an affection of disgust, revulsion, and dread, and queen meaning the status of divine right, potentate, and sovereign; not under the sign of the same, but in all their distinctive g(l)ory such that difference is honored. The aesthetic of McQueen exemplifies the ability, through his fashions, to recode the body in such a way as to upend what might be considered natural or beautiful. This commentary on the herd mentality of beauty - the patriarchal objectification of the female body as sex object - exposes the body as up for grabs, as a site of disputation. Coupled with his love of nature, this makes for an ironic paradox that punctures the dialectic, natural-technical, rendering it leaky and, yet, preserves the two dichotomies as indissoluble. Concomitantly, Haraway is committed to an analogous trickster methodology. As a trained biologist, her professional scholarship is infused with articulating a primordial being-with-others (e.g., technology, animals, humans, etc.) that comes from studying the radical anti-anthropomorphism of biological discourse. Most famously, she initiated cyborg studies as a way to envision a non-instrumentalist relationship with technologies as well as to inhibit said technologies critically. The site at which the confluence between Haraway and McQueen reaches its climax is in McQueen’s spring / summer 2001 show VOSS. This particular fashion show captures the sine qua non of both of their methodologies: the duping of the hegemonic other. What is so clever about VOSS is that the elephant in the room had been there the whole time but nobody knew there was an elephant - the elephant only came into being once the duping had occurred. Such a reveal generates an affective aesthetic by walking the razor's edge of camp and couture, being at once monstrous and enchanting; slip and the position either falls into either extreme otherness or reifies current norms. The audience members at VOSS were left with a feeling of being unnerved and unsettled, of not-being-at-home. The interface between Haraway and McQueen has implications for various strands of critical psychology. Although critical studies in psychology have tended to ally with social constructionism and reject any kind of foundational realism, the interface between Haraway and McQueen builds a bridge over the abyss between these two antinomies. This reading of VOSS demonstrates that trickster strategies can flank the iron curtain of metonymy and breach it through artifice: claims can be made about the world even if given indirectly through wit, humor, or irony.

El presente trabajo pretende indagar en cómo el lenguaje se pone a la disposición de los oradores públicos (fundamentalmente, políticos y periodistas) para trasladar su mensaje ideológico. En particular, surge de la preocupación en torno al uso manipulador de las palabras en los géneros informativos (sobre todo, la noticia) para alterar la interpretación de los ciudadanos conforme a los intereses y creencias del redactor de la información.

This paper investigates the discursive processes at work in public debates on a type of new urban dialect that has been under intense, often heated public discussion in recent years: variants of majority languages that emerged in multiethnic and multilingual neighbourhoods in urban Europe. Against the background of findings from a range of European countries, I present a case study from Germany based on a corpus of emails and online readers’ com-ments posted in the context of a media storm on such a new dialect. I analyse key topoi in the debate, the thematic strands linked to them, and some underlying ideologies supporting them, and argue that a particular construction of Standard German as a “Hochsprache” ‘High language’ establishes a powerful case of standard language ideology that reinforces a social and ethnic ‘us’/‘them’-dichotomy to provide a potent conceptual frame for the devaluation of such urban dialects and their speakers.
Key words: standard language ideology, public discourse, multiethnolects, Standard Ger-man, Othering, racism by proxy

This is a Linguistic Anthropology aproach to the linguistic conflict between Yaqui and Mayo languages against Spanish language. This includes an analysis about maintenance and language shift considering an eclectic model, including Political Ecology, Social Network Analysys, Language Ideology, Linguistic Conflict, Identity, and Discourse Analysis.

The interrelation between language and nation-building is a key issue in Belarusian media discourse. The discussion is conducted on all topical areas of language policy (status planning, corpus planning, acquisition planning) and includes different views on the present and future political orientation of the country. Based on statements made by selected political actors and intellectuals in Belarusian mass media in the years 1994-2010 this study identifies the main positions and argumentation patterns in the debate on language and nation-building. Belarusian president Lukashenka underscores the continuity of linguistic development since Soviet times and rejects a status reduction for the Russian language, i.e. a break with Soviet language policy. As to „oppositional“ Belarusian intellectuals, opinions on the language issue are divided: The range extends from the nationalistic and clearly anti-Russian viewpoint of exile politician Zianon Pazniak via nationally „conscious“ but moderate views to statements favoring „democratic bilingualism“, accompanied at times by an openly neglecting attitude towards the Belarusian language.

This paper compares language ideologies and approaches to corpus-planning in two closely-related minority languages, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. A framework developed to analyse language ideologies of Scottish Gaelic speakers (Ó Maolalaigh et al. 2014), and based on Fishman (2006), is applied to Manx. Broadly speaking, the dominant ideologies of the contemporary Manx speech community are the reverse of those of Scottish Gaelic speakers. Speakers of Scottish Gaelic, including L2 speakers, are much less open to non-traditional neologisms than Manx speakers. It is argued that this is associated with the fact that contemporary Manx is a revived language, with no L1 speakers of the traditional native variety, whereas in the case of Scottish Gaelic, L1 speakers of the traditional variety remain dominant within the speech community. A minority ideology within the Revived Manx community is also identified, which is more similar to the dominant ideology of Scottish Gaelic speakers. The importance of engaging with both majority and minority views in very small language communities, especially in the context of language revival, is emphasized. Language ideologies are also situated in the context of speakers' construction of language death and continuity, and explored in terms of Jaffe's (1999) "resistance of reversal", "resistance of separation" and "radical models of resistance".

The paper is an expanded version of a conference presentation delivered at the Celtic Sociolinguistics Symposium in University College Dublin in June 2015. Posted online here July 2019.

This dissertation explores the nature, purpose, function and role of language documentation in order to further our understanding of mechanisms of language transmission and maintenance in the face of language endangerment and the repression of indigenous identity. Beyond its traditional use for generating linguistic data, I argue that the act and the process of language documentation can be understood as a comprehensive means to evaluate the interactions between speakers and researchers and as the stage where various beliefs and emotions are displayed. Extending the notion of “sites” developed by Silverstein (1998) and Kroskrity (2009), I argue that the act of language documentation can create “sites” of linguistic transaction, of self recognition, and of ideological and emotional stance shift.

      To attain this goal, this project linguistically and ethnographically documents and describes Belizean Mopan, an endangered Mayan language spoken in the southern Petén region of Guatemala and in the Maya Mountain region (Toledo District) of Southern Belize as a case study. Ethnographic and linguistic observation suggest that characteristics of Belizean Mopan do not simply stem from its linguistic features but rather are derived from ethnic complexity, language ideologies, identity politics, the history of Belize and speakers’ awareness of the self. Linguistic biographies, interviews, participant observation, and ethnographic accounts indicate that the individual’s emotional attachments to the language and the sense of belonging to one’s linguistic community are crucial keys for effective language documentation and revitalization. Discourse and grammatical analysis of sound symbolic words in narratives suggest that speakers’ linguistic affects can be evoked through sound itself. The devices used during language documentation, such as voice and video recorders can be understood as “signifying instruments” (J. D. Hill 2014), which amplify or evoke speakers’ and researchers’ linguistic ideologies and/or affects.

    Tzik ‘respect’ plays a pivotal role in distinguishing Mopans from other Maya groups and many stories and personal narratives either explicitly or subtly demonstrate the concept and importance of tzik for regulating and maintaining the traditional community and for having a successful life, which resembles the secretos ‘secrets’ described in Hofling’s (1996: 109) account of Itzaj Maya lives. Focusing on tzik gained through being a ch’ija’an kristiyanojo ‘the grown-up people’, I argue that storytelling is a primary device to transmit and circulate traditional knowledge, worldview, ideologies and memories of Maya people from the present, the immediate past, and the mythological past and that in a sense, the role and meaning of dream divinations and my language consultant, Orlando Sho’s musical performances can be equated with the practice of storytelling. The act of language documentation is a portal to the site of linguistic and cultural transaction and of world learning, in which I see a key to successful language renewal and revitalization.

This chapter explores how speakers in Maningrida, a linguistically diverse Indigenous community in northern Australia, negotiate and evaluate their language practices within 'hybrid spaces' (i.e. spaces shaped by the interaction of diverse groups, institutions and ways of speaking). The analysis draws on data from two settings – a public school event, and a football match – and I consider the ways in which a translanguaging lens may provide insights into the interactional and socio-psychological realities of lived multilingualism in Maningrida. The major focus of the chapter pertains to Burarra/English mixing. I discuss the nature and functions of this language practice, and note that while speakers appear to 'soft assemble' their linguistic resources to fit the communicative situation at hand, there are also observable constraints exerted by the morphosyntax of the contributing codes. Issues of heteroglossia (e.g. in the use of vocabulary shared across language boundaries; in the treatment of adapted borrowings) are explored. These practices are further situated against the backdrop of long-standing multilingualism and language ideologies in the Arnhem Land region. The chapter evaluates translanguaging as a possible useful addition to the nomenclatural and analytical toolbox of researchers in the Australian Indigenous context, and as an important step towards decolonising understandings of local language practice, and further provides critiques and suggestions for strengthening the model's descriptive potential.

This paper investigates patterns of interdialectal language accommodation among Arabic speakers in the U.S. It contributes to Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) by demonstrating that speakers’ motivation to accommodate is predicated on their attitudes toward the different Arabic varieties. Using data from natural conversations, personal interviews, and ethnographic observations, this study shows that language attitudes affect the degree of a speaker’s convergence or divergence toward their interlocutors. The
theoretical undertaking of this study is to examine the relationship between micro-level accommodative strategies and macro-societal relationships that arrange the asymmetries
between these varieties and their speakers.

The “language regime change” (γλωσσική μεταπολίτευση), prophesied by Manolis Triandaphyllidis in 1938, marks an important shift in the ideology of the Standard Language. New “language issues” have been raised after the reform of 1976 and the official adoption of a “Common Language” based on the demotic norm (Standard Modern Greek). The issues of the 1980s (teaching of Ancient Greek in secondary education, youth’s presumed “λεξιπενία”, the influence of English on Modern Greek) were soon followed in the 1990s by issues of territoriality, language contact, and hegemony. Diglossia and language reform are still invoked as frames of reference for some of the subsequent language debates, but they are not themselves the cause of the debates.
SMG is now conceptualized and spoken of in mass communication discourse as a “regime language”. The language of the realm is itself conceived of as a realm, comprising a pure and sacred “territory” that has to be protected by everything alien to it. This “regime” conception of the Standard Language can be shown to affect, or to have been affected by, a change in language standards. The standardization formula of late demoticism (“SMG = demotic + learned forms”) has assumed the status of a descriptive principle and it prevails in reference works about Modern Greek. Proper usage is now prescribed by a new elite of “craft professionals” (writers, editors, proofreaders) who place emphasis on phraseology and idiomaticity, irrespective of any morphological differences between demotic and katharevousa. Finally, linguistic purism has ceased to be diglossic and it has long become bi-glossic; it is being practiced on a mass scale; and it is manifested as an outward rejection of bilingualism and language contact.

Ph.D., Political Science, 2008

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Serif Mardin

Keywords: language regimes, ideology, Turkey, globalization

There are two main aims of this dissertation: to present a legal and ideological history of the formation of the language regime in Turkey in the Republican period; and to analyze its transformation in the post-1980 era. A language regime is defined in this dissertation as a de jure or de facto regulation of the linguistic behavior, in its content or in its status, within a space of communicative action, such as that of a nation-state or a speech group. In other words, a language regime is a system of the governance of the linguistic domain within a defined political territory by planning and employment of particular policies. Language ideologies, on the other hand, are inseparable aspects of the formulation and operation of the language regimes. Such a conception of language enables an analysis of language as a domain of social and political power. In the first part of the dissertation, the history of the language politics in the Republican Turkey is analyzed through the concept of language regime, and the ideological repercussions pertaining to the designation and practicing of these regimes are assessed. The second part concentrates on the changes in post-1980s, within a globalizing environment, in the broadcasting policies and the ways in which language regimes have been transformed. Controversies over two basic processes have been analyzed in this part: the commercialization of the audio-visual domain, and the developments concerning broadcasting in minority languages.