International Journal of the Sociology of Language（2010）

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Sociolinguistics and some of its concepts: a historian's viewJoan-Lluís Marfany11University of Liverpool

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摘要

The author takes an outsider's look at sociolinguistics and aims various criticisms at it. He sees the discipline's reluctance to let go of proper sociological and historical questions while at the same time insisting on remaining strictly a branch of linguistics as its first and foremost problem from which the rest ultimately derive. More specifically, he criticizes the idealistic and ahistorical use of such terms as “language” and “dialect” and the failure to see the usefulness of “patois”; the failure properly to define “bilingualism” and “diglossia” and to see the fundamental distinction between them; and the unfortunate confusion created around the idea of “code switching,” which inextricably mixes together (i) sociologically significant language switching (typical of situations of bilingualism), (ii) cases of diglossia, (iii) the would-be monolingualism of as yet imperfectly assimilated immigrant or subject populations, and (iv) a ragbag of banal individual examples too idiosyncratic to be sociologically meaningful.

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 A critical commentary on the discourse of language rights in the Naivasha language policy in Sudan using habitus as a method  

作者

Ashraf Abdelhay

摘要

This article uses Bourdieu's theory of practice to discuss the discourse of language rights in the Naivasha language policy in Sudan. The article argues that understanding language as a form of practice inseparable from the whole class habitus leads to the avoidance of any monothetic and totalizing discourses that treat language as a self-sufficient code. Instead, it argues for a recognition of the temporality and multidirectionality of language framed in a broad (critical) ethnographic sense. It contends that the statement of language rights in the Naivasha language policy cannot sanctify local languages as media of education unless it addresses the possibilities of creating the economic and social conditions for their use. It is these historical conditions that provide a value to the linguistic habitus of the subjugated groups in the Sudan. The endeavor invites a rethinking of the relationship in language rights campaigns between the academic habitus of linguists and the practical habitus of members of communities. The article concludes by arguing that any technical linguistic activities under the banner of Naivasha language policy that are not informed by the practicalities of everyday life are alienating; hence, they remain reproductive of the existing unequal power relations.

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 Mixed language usage in Belarus: the sociostructural background of language choice

作者

Bernhard Kittel,  Diana Lindner , Sviatlana Tesch, Gerd Hentschel

摘要

This article reports findings from a survey on language usage in Belarus, which encompasses bilingual Belarusian and Russian. First, the distribution of language usage is discussed. Then the dependency of language usage on some sociocultural conditions is explored. Finally, the changes in language usage over three generations are discussed. We find that a mixed Belarusian–Russian form of speech is widely used in the cities studied and that it is spoken across all educational levels. However, it seems to be predominantly utilized in informal communication, especially among friends and family members, leaving Russian and Belarusian to more formal or public venues.

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“We should keep what makes us different”: youth reflections on Turkish maintenance in Australia

作者

Zeynep F. Beykont

摘要

This article reports on a study of Turkish immigrants, a group that has resisted the rapid shift to English throughout their four decades in Australia. The study sought to identify the unique set of sociohistorical reasons for continued Turkish use and youth perspectives on Turkish vitality. Study participants were students and graduates of secondary Turkish programs in the state of Victoria (n = 16). Information on their language biographies, bilingual achievements, and language orientations were collected in large-scale surveys (n = 858) and follow-up interviews (n = 177). Participating youth expressed an overwhelmingly positive attitude toward Turkish maintenance yet were not confident in their Turkish skills. They recognized that the future of Turkish depended on their commitment to learn and use Turkish and pass it on to the next generation. Young people's assessment of the available Turkish language programs revealed that additional support is needed to sustain Turkish bilingualism beyond the second generation, including a relevant and coherent curriculum to teach Turkish as a second language, well-prepared bilingual teachers, and Turkish classes in universities to upgrade teachers' language skills.

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From trilingualism to monolingualism? Sicilian-Italians in Australia

作者

Francesco Cavallaro

摘要

Australia still has a vibrant linguistic heritage, both from its indigenous people and the people that have left their countries of origin to call Australia home. The Italian community in Australia is the largest non-English-speaking group. However, like all other established immigrant groups, the Italians have been showing a steady shift away from their Italian languages to the use of English only. An analysis of recent censuses and data, obtained through recordings in the home and by participant observation in a transactional domain, presented in this article makes it clear that there are little grounds for optimism on the maintenance of either Italian or any of the Italian regional varieties in Australia

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Hong Kong and modern diglossia

作者

Don Snow

摘要

This article examines the history of diglossia in Hong Kong, and goes on to argue that Hong Kong is similar to German-speaking Switzerland in that it is a rare example of diglossia in a highly modernized society. These two cases differ from most traditional defining cases of diglossia in the nature of their societies, the nature of their high (H) variety, the degree of stability in their diglossic patterns, the historical path through which their diglossic patterns evolved, and the forces that sustain their diglossia, especially the role played by identity issues. It is argued that these two cases should be viewed as a small but distinct subcategory of diglossia that I will call modern diglossia.

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Language purism in the Nordic countries

作者

Lars S. Vikør

摘要

This article is a condensed historical overview of the development and status of purism in the Nordic countries, concluding with the state of affairs at the start of the MIN project around 2000. It gives a typology of purism(s), a general overview of the earliest external influences in the prenationalist period and a country-for-country account of the development of standard languages and linguistic nationalisms, and the nature and function of purist movements during this process. A preliminary ranking of the countries according to their degree of purism concludes the article.

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English influence on the spoken language — with a special focus on its social, semantic and functional conditioning

作者

Ásta Svavarsdóttir ,Ulla Paatola,  Helge Sandøy

摘要

The data for the investigation presented in this article were collected by a questionnaire. A comparison with the corresponding results for written language shows the same overall pattern, with only minor differences: the highest adaptation rate (i.e. change away from English towards the national language) is found with speakers of languages on the periphery of the Nordic area, the lowest rate is found with Danes in the centre of the area. The mean percentage for “adapted” variants is about 60 in the investigation as a whole, but the ranking order of the communities differs for phonology and morphology. Social variables seem to have surprisingly little impact on patterns of adaptation    

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Conscious and subconscious attitudes towards English influence in the Nordic countries: evidence for two levels of language ideology

作者

Tore Kristiansen

摘要

The article reports on how the present-day influence from English is perceived and assessed in seven Nordic communities. The focus is on comparison, between the seven communities, and between two data sets obtained under different conditions of consciousness. The comparisons show that the populations reproduce the “purism level” of their own community's official language policy in their consciously offered responses to questions in a telephone survey, while the purism–laissez-faire ranking of the communities is turned upside down in a subconsciously offered data set obtained in a speaker evaluation experiment based on the matched-guise technique. In the same way, analyses of how the evaluative reactions correlate with social-group divisions show reproduction and non-reproduction of the stereotypically expected correlations, in the conscious and subconscious conditions respectively.

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Language attitudes and the ideology of the Nordic

作者

Jan-Ola Östman, Jacob Thøgersen

摘要

This article discusses the rise and the current standing of “Norden” (the Nordic societies) as an imagined community (Anderson, Imagined communities, Verso, 1991). The ideology of Norden as a coherent community rests on the one hand on the perceived mutual intelligibility of the Scandinavian languages, used as mother tongue or as lingua franca. On the other hand the ideology of Norden rests on a sense of historical unity. Historically, the ideology of the Nordic grew out of the era of national romanticism. The present study therefore addresses the pertinent question of how the ideology of the Nordic fares in late modernity where ideology is under threat from more “rational”, e.g., financial lines of thinking

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 The role of social factors in the shaping of language attitudes — with an evaluation of the concept of life style

作者

Inge Lise Pedersen

摘要

The standardization processes of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian display large differences with Denmark and Norway at the opposite ends of the scale and Sweden in the middle. A closer historical study reveals significant differences between the modernization processes (demographic developments, types of industrialization, and modernization processes within agriculture). These differences led to different class alliances, a fact that has had a bearing on language attitudes and language change. In late modern society the notion of class seems to be problematic, and life style analysis has entered the sociolinguistic scene and seems well suited to keep a balance between determinism and agency in a post-traditional world.

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Advances in the study of lexical, phonological and grammatical variation and contact in Spanish in New York

作者

Ricardo Otheguy

摘要

As the second most widely spoken language in the City after English, Spanish in New York has long been the object of scholarly attention. Recent publications have reported on work based on data from the Otheguy-Zentella corpus, one of the largest corpora of spoken Spanish ever gathered in the United States. The corpus provides the common thread for research in this issue, which addresses problems having to do with phonology, lexicon, and grammar in Spanish in New York. Some of the papers address issues of language contact, others look at Spanish in the City without reference to the influence of English. The data from the corpus consists of naturalistic speech samples obtained from both first- and second-generation speakers from a variety of Latin American origins. The papers deal with the relationship between loanwords and collocations, the role of efficiency in determining which patrimonial words are retained and which replaced by loanwords, the nature of suprasegmental variation in phonology, and the variable use of subject personal pronouns

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Efficiency in lexical borrowing in New York Spanis

作者

Naomi Lapidus Shin

摘要

One manifestation of a general drive for efficiency in communication is the tendency to shorten high-frequency words and phrases. In situations of language contact, the drive for efficient communication is intensified. The demonstration of efficiency hinges on the simple observation that not all the words of a receiving language are displaced, and on the detailed observation of which words are retained and which are replaced by loanwords. Many loanwords fill a conceptual gap, but many do not; this study focuses on the latter. It is proposed that these loanwords instantiate efficiency in language behavior, as the borrowing process replaces comparatively longer words with comparatively shorter ones. On average, the length difference between displaced native words and borrowed loanwords is much higher than that between retained native words and potential loanwords that were not borrowed. To investigate this process of selective borrowing driven by efficiency, English lexical insertions were extracted from the spoken Spanish of bilingual Latinos in New York and compared with two control corpora. These results indicate that the lexical borrowing process targets pairs of words that result in especially large savings in word-length and spares those where borrowing would produce little or no savings, demonstrating that efficiency is a significant factor in explaining borrowing behavior.

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 A multilevel statistical analysis of changes in language use among first-generation immigrants in a bilingual setting

作者

David Livert, Ricardo Otheguy

摘要

The subject pronouns of English (which are nearly categorical) have contributed to a cross-generational increase in occurrence rates of Spanish pronouns (which are variably overt or null) among second generation speakers in New York. But is the passage of time also associated with overt pronoun rate increases among first generation immigrants? Analysis of a large corpus of verbs (n = 51,478) revealed that first generation speakers who arrived in New York between the ages of four and 14 showed significantly higher rates of pronoun use than those who arrived as young adults or older. Among all three first generation age-of-arrival cohorts, the number of years spent in New York was associated with higher rates of pronoun use. A significant difference owing to region of origin among first generation cohorts was also evident: Caribbean speakers showed higher pronoun rates than Mainland speakers, with the difference between regional rates higher among early arrivers than later arrivers. Multivariate analysis employed a two-level hierarchical linear model which revealed that all three predictors (age of arrival, exposure to New York, and region of origin) made independent, statistically significant contributions to pronoun overtness. The regression also showed that region of origin is the strongest predictor of pronoun use, after taking into account exposure and arrival age.

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Subject pronoun placement as evidence of contact and leveling in Spanish in New York

作者

Rocío Raña Risso

摘要

This sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish overt subject pronouns examines their placement either before or after verbs in a corpus of interviews with Spanish-speaking New Yorkers. The variable placement of subject pronouns responds to a number of linguistic and speaker variables which have not been defined for any dialect of Spanish. In New York, this variability seems to be additionally influenced by English and by the contact of different dialects of Spanish. By analyzing the role that the speakers' socio-demographic characteristics plays on pronoun placement, I observe, for pronoun placement, the same processes of language and dialect contact documented in previous research with regard to the presence and absence of the pronoun, and I interpret them as supporting the hypotheses that language contact and dialect leveling are active forces shaping Spanish in New York. I further note that generative parametric theory can suggest an account of the concomitant changes observed in rates of preposing and overtness in Spanish in New York. My analysis also shows that, in the face of important contact and leveling changes taking place in the City, the speaker's region of origin continues to be the prevailing factor giving form to pronominal usage in Spanish in New York.

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Bilingualisms-in-practice at the meso level: an example from a bilingual school in Wales

作者

Nigel Musk

摘要

Bilingualism is to be seen as dynamic bilingualisms-in-practice, which are continually being “performed,” that is, shaped, valued, and constituted, both through discourses which (re)contextualize the notion, as well as through the everyday language practices of bilinguals. To shed light on bilingualisms-in-practice, primarily in the context of one bilingual school in Wales, a range of data is examined to identify prevalent discourses on bilingualism. It is argued here that the meso level of society, especially educational institutions, constitute a key site for the recontextualization of these discourses and thereby play an important mediating role between the micro and macro levels of society.

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“We did what we thought was best for our children”: a nexus analysis of language shift in a Kven community

作者

Pia Lane

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The loss of intergenerational language transmission can be seen, in part, as a choice parents make, but in reality they do not always have a choice. Their actions are influenced by large-scale social factors such as language policies and attitudes toward minority languages. Issues related to these factors are addressed by an analysis of language shift in Bugønes, a Kven community in Northern Norway. Data come from recordings of conversations and sociolinguistic interviews addressing language choice. Fifteen hours were recorded and transcribed. In order to analyze language shift a theoretical and methodological framework which allows for a historical perspective is essential since people, objects, mediational means, and discourses are seen as having a history and projecting a future (de Saint Georges, From anticipation to performance: Sites of engagement as performance, Routledge, 2005). The framework used here is nexus analysis, which emphasizes that discourses and individual social actors have a history and therefore cannot be analyzed without reference to the past (Scollon and Scollon, Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet, Routledge, 2004). Findings about language shift in Bugønes illustrate how large-scale discourses such as the language policies become internalized and later materialized in action through language choice.

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Sámi language mobility: scales and discourses of multilingualism in a polycentric environment

作者

Sari Pietikäinen

摘要

In a multilingual Lapland, globalization processes have various sociolinguistic effects. A good example is a change in the functions and values of the indigenous Sámi languages. The once solid community languages were pushed in the margins of the nation states in the early twentieth century. Today, Sámi linguistic and other semiotic resources are used not only for communication and building an indigenous community, but they function also as a commodity in global music markets and tourism, or as a resource for creative identity performance. This kind of a sociolinguistic change calls for an investigation that overcomes the macro–micro gap and concepts that address movements, diversity, and multiplicity in this multilingual situation. To this end, I fuse ethnographic and discourse analytical approaches in an attempt to track movements and conditions of Sámi resource mobility. The data examined in this article comprise multimodal discourse data (photographs, interviews, texts) and observations and recordings from ethnographic fieldwork in the North Calotte area of Lapland.

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  Minority language as identity factor: case study of young Russian speakers in LvivT5s.
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作者

Anna Wylegała

摘要

This article presents the results of qualitative research conducted among representatives ofyoungRussian-speaking intelligentsia in Lviv. After introducing the historical background and the current language situation of the city, it examines the role and status of the minority and majority languages in the language practices of the interviewees. Other issues addressed in this text are cultural and ethnic/national identifications, and their relationship with language practice and language identification. The results of the research illustrate that in this particular group of interviewees, there was a tendency to integrate into the majority Ukrainian culture, and in some cases, to change identification. For some, cultural identification was double and did not always correspond with an ethnic or national identification; however, another part of the group preserved both language and ethnic distinction. Also of importance was the existence of a group with a marginal identification, in this case those who felt neither Russian nor Ukrainian.

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 Languages for the market, the nation, or the margins: overlapping ideologies of language and identity in Zakarpattia

作者

Jennifer Dickinson

摘要

The Zakarpattia region in southwestern Ukraine is stereotyped as an area of great linguistic diversity, with a number of discrete ethnic groups speaking their eponymous languages, as well as a range of local Slavic varieties that are variably perceived as dialects of Ukrainian or deployed as evidence of long-standing links to another Slavic language, Rusyn. In this article, I focus on the ways in which different language ideologies mediate language use, and perceptions of that use by Zakarpattia residents. In the first half of the article, I focus on the conceptualization of language and ethnicity as being in natural alignment as one of the key ideological positions that unite differing political orientations toward the classification of languages in Zakarpattia. In the second half of the article, I describe a set of local language ideologies and consider how these ideologies govern the interpretation of everyday language use between members of groups that are variably defined as similar or different depending on context.

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Ideologies of language use in post-Soviet Ukrainian media

作者

Volodymyr Kulyk

摘要

The media is a crucial site of the articulation, contestation, and inculcation of beliefs about language, or language ideologies. In media discourse, these ideologies are not only represented in actors' and journalists' judgments about language matters, but also realized in the actual use of language. This article analyzes ideologies of language use which are articulated and embodied in contemporary Ukrainian media discourse. By examining both the presentation of language processes in society and the language practices of the media itself, I show how this discourse presents a rather ambivalent idea of the actual and appropriate language use in post-Soviet Ukraine. On the one hand, Ukrainian is assumed to be the only/primary language of the state and society, a symbolic marker of the nation, and a language that (all) citizens identify with; on the other, Russian appears to be an (equally) acceptable language of virtually all social practices. Thus the media both reflects an ambivalent normality that Ukrainian citizens inherited from the Soviet times and reproduces it in the interests of the dominant political and media elites.

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Language in the balance: the politics of non-accommodation on bilingual Ukrainian–Russian television shows

作者

Laada Bilaniuk

摘要

The practice of speaking one's preferred language, Ukrainian or Russian, regardless of the language spoken by one's interlocutor has become widespread in media and public life in Ukraine since independence. I refer to this practice as “non-accommodating bilingualism,” since for communication to occur the participating individuals are necessarily bilingual to some degree, but neither accommodates by switching to the language spoken by the other. In this article I investigate the prevalence, variety, and significance of non-accommodating bilingualism in Ukraine, with particular focus on television talk and game shows. I argue that while in some ways bilingual non-accommodation functions to defuse the contested issue of language choice, it can also perpetuate existing linguistic inequalities and tensions. Even in conversations where speakers are free to speak whichever language they prefer, the politics of Ukrainian and Russian language and ethnicity continue to be engaged.

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Conflicting abstractions: language groups in language politics in Ukraine

作者

Stanislav Shumlianskyi

摘要

This article is an analysis of the ongoing language debate in Ukraine. I assert that in Ukraine, unlike in Belgium or Canada to which Ukraine is often compared, the substance of language politics does not lie in opposition between language groups or between their representatives. In fact, due to the absence of clearly defined language groups, political discussions concerning language in Ukraine are not a symptom of the language structuring, but its main agent. The heated political debates regarding languages are not driven by divergent interests or group attitudes, but by conflicting agendas for the protection of languages. Therefore, in the article I emphasize the core positions of the discourses — the presentations of the language groups and their agendas. This includes both the Russophile and the Ukrainophile camps, in which one may discern various visions and action plans of the language groups that these camps claim to represent. As the analysis of their arguments shows, tensions in the language sphere lie not only in their conflicting agendas of language grouping from the standpoint of one language, Russian or Ukrainian, but in the competition concerning the very identity and even existence of the represented groups.

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The impact of ideologies on the standardization of modern Ukrainian

作者

Galina Yavorska

摘要

The contemporary trends in the processes of codification of Ukrainian are influenced by numerous different factors. Today's rise of activity in the sphere of language reform is an attempt to resolve rather old cultural and ideological conflicts. Ukrainian linguistic purism mostly manifests itself not in the elimination of lexical borrowings, but in a negative attitude toward bookish elements on a stylistic level. At the same time, in orthography, the struggle for language purity is concentrated on the transliteration of borrowings from Greek, Latin, and other European languages. Whether they focus on the redistribution of stylistic variants or variants of loanword spelling, the language ideologies discussed in this article symbolically underscore cultural distances. An analysis of cultural models and language ideologies associated with them bears witness to the particular role of the romantic and European models in the history of Standard Ukrainian. These models are aimed at reaffirming and consolidating the separatist, divergent function of Standard Ukrainian as one of the fundamental means of supporting the Ukrainian national identity.

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The diversity of multilingualism in education

作者

Jasone Cenoz, Durk Gorter

摘要

This article analyzes diversity as related to different types of multilingual education. Diversity in education is linked to different factors that can be classified as linguistic (language distance, different scripts, etc.), sociolinguistic status (minority, official, international, immigrant, etc.) and educational (school subjects, medium of instruction, age of introduction, methodologies). Language practices can be an important part of the make-up of language diversity among multilingual speakers at a micro level. The paper discusses the Continua of Multilingual Education as a tool to classify and compare different types of multilingual schools all over the world as a more efficient way to deal with diversity in multilingual education than traditional typologies. The advantages of the new tool can be shown by applying it to the case of multilingual education in the Basque Country in Spain, where Basque, Spanish, English and sometimes French, are the languages used by different actors in the education system. The paper also deals with diversity as linked to sustainable development and focuses on the advantages of multilingual education.

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Patterns of language use in polyglossic urban areas and multilingual regions and institutions: a Swiss case study

作者

Georges Lüdi, Katharina Höchle, Patchareerat Yanaprasart

摘要

Growing mobility of important parts of the world's population has led to a massive increase in multilingualism in post-modern societies and a lasting change from homoglossic to polyglossic communities with important “deterritorialised” linguistic minorities, mostly plurilingual to a variable degree. Ideologies and practices of communication in old and new multilingual contexts vary largely. The “solutions” for overcoming potential problems go from using a lingua franca (often English), inventing pidgin like emergent varieties, choosing the language of one of the interlocutors known (partially) by the others (namely in the case of immigrants), insisting on receptive competences (everybody uses his or her own language, e. g. in officially multilingual institutions), to various forms of mixed speech and, of course, to interpretation and translation processes. Drawing on extensive field work in bilingual institutions and multilingual companies in Europe, particularly in Switzerland, we propose to discuss various ways of mobilizing multilingual repertoires in situations of cross-linguistic and intercultural communication. The analyzed data will mainly consist of dyadic and polyadic oral interactions. It will also include written texts and signs that are part of the linguistic landscape. Our work is grounded in the assumption that multilingualism is no longer considered a marginal phenomenon, only of interest to specialists, but instead a characteristic of the majority of human beings.

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 Multilingualism in Taiwan

作者

Su-Chiao Chen

摘要

This study investigates the extent to which multilingualism has been practiced in Taiwan and the related factors that contribute to it. Taiwan is composed of various ethnic immigrants who usurped the lands of the existing Austro-Polynesian aboriginal populations. These ethnic languages provided the basis for the way in which multilingualism manifests itself in Taiwan, and were exposed to the impact of various language policies implemented throughout history. However, how those policies affected the development of multilingualism and to what extent is yet to be investigated. This study intends to do precisely this. First, it analyzes the contact situations among the ethnolinguistic groups and concurrent interventions of language policies. This analysis provides the background of the multilingual-make-up of Taiwan. Then, the vitality of languages in the current verbal repertoire is investigated in terms of Taiwanese people's language proficiency, language use in different domains, and language attitudes. The results show that the existing multi-ethnolinguistic community that developed from different waves of immigration in Taiwan has been subject to a high level of intervention by the Government's top-down language policies. The National Language Policy, which favors Mandarin at the expense of all Taiwanese ethnic languages, has led to the rapid shift of Taiwanese ethnic languages, but attempts to reverse language shift via the Mother Tongue Language Policy have not been effectively implemented. Issues of globalization have resulted in revisions to the English Language Policy, with English becoming strongly favored though not widely used. Other (ethnic) languages, although not officially restricted in use, appear to be in the process of rapidly losing capacity at the level of the expression of pragmatic functionality.

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Affordances and the diversity of multilingualism

作者

Larissa Aronin, David Singleton

摘要

With the advent of globalization and the consequent and concomitant establishment of a new linguistic dispensation, the diversity of multilingualism has increased exponentially. Unsurprisingly, such diversity has attracted the closest attention of researchers, as well as those involved in managing the practical ramifications of multilingualism, particularly, perhaps, in regard to issues relating to the ethnic diversity of multilingual populations, both indigenous and immigrant. In this contribution, we call attention to further numerous distinctions manifested in the diversity of multilingualism. We also discuss the recent emergence of new language nominations. Language nominations are terms which have been traditionally attached to languages used in society, such as mother tongue, heritage language and foreign language — as opposed to the proper names of particular languages (e.g. English, Turkish, Urdu, etc.). In addition to strong subjective connotations, language nominations advert to the value and role currently assigned to a given language by a given society/community.

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Languages, inequality and marginalization: implications of the double divide in Indian multilingualism

作者

Ajit K. Mohanty

摘要

Features of Indian multilingualism are discussed to show that, despite several positive forces favoring maintenance of minority languages, languages are subjected to inequality and discrimination. It is argued that multilingualism in India, as in other South Asian countries, is hierarchical in nature, characterized by a double divide — one between the elitist language of power and the major regional languages (vernaculars) and, the other, between the regional languages and the dominated ones. The nature and implications of this double divide are analyzed in respect of the relative positions of English, Hindi, regional majority languages and other indigenous/minority languages. The paper shows that, at the same time as hierarchical multilingualism has led to a general loss of linguistic diversity, the progressive domain shrinkage and the marginalization of the surviving indigenous and minority languages affect the dynamics of the relationship between languages and linguistic groups in contact and negotiation of linguistic identities. The chasm between policy and practice affecting the place of languages in society, it is argued, leads to educational failure, capability deprivation and poverty in the minority linguistic groups, particularly the tribal mother tongue speakers. Programs of multilingual education are briefly discussed in the context of recent attempts to deal with classroom language disadvantage of tribal children in India.

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 Voices from the diaspora: changing hierarchies and dynamics of Chinese multilingualism

作者

Li Wei,  Zhu Hua

摘要

The so-called Chinese diasporas, i.e. Chinese communities outside Greater China (China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), have traditionally been dialect dominant; that is, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants are speakers of (especially Southern) dialects. Cantonese and Hokkien are two of the most prominent dialects. With globalization and the rise of China as a world politico-economic power, the national, standardized variety, Putonghua, is gaining particular prestige amongst the Chinese diasporas. For example, all the Cantonese schools for British Chinese children in the UK now also teach Putonghua, but none of the Putonghua schools teach Cantonese. Using ethnographic interviews with and participant observation of Chinese people of different generations in various diasporic communities, this paper examines the changing hierarchies of varieties of Chinese, the implications of such changes for the education and identity development of the young, and the constitution of a (speech) community in the post-modern era. It focuses on language attitude and linguistic practices (including literacy practices). It also investigates the tensions between the competing ideologies and discourses on national and ethnic identities, nationalism, community relations and cultural values.