La tipologia dei parlanti di lingue di minoranza: tradizionali, ereditari e neo-parlanti

In this part, we move beyond description and discussion of the dynamics of LM and LS to focus on the efforts, actions and initiatives of individuals, families, groups and the communities themselves to maintain their minority or heritage language and pass it on to future generations. Part III has two chapters. Chapter 8 is mainly occupied with documenting the kinds of activities and initiatives that minority and heritage language communities themselves are known to undertake in pursuit of LM. Sections 8.1 to 8.5 describe these efforts around the main domains of the home or family (Section 8.1), the community-based school (Section 8.2), religion (Section 8.3), secular community groups (Section 8.4) and the media (Section 8.5). In Section 8.6 we present some examples of how the majority or dominant community assists in LM in relation to schooling and the media. Inevitably, there is some overlap between Chapter 8 and Chapter 6 (to some extent, also Chapter 7) as they all deal with investigating the central question – Who speaks what language to whom, where and to what end? – and describing and analysing patterns of language use in relation to the key domains mentioned above. In Chapter 9 we tackle two questions pertinent to LM: Can LS be reversed? Here, we will draw upon Fishman's Graded Intergeneration Disruption Scale to seek a response. The other question – Should LS be reversed? – deals with a more controversial topic, at least for languages that will disappear or be lost, if they are not maintained. In the context of this book, this affects territorial minority languages rather than heritage languages in migrant settings. KEEPING THE HERITAGE OR MINORITY LANGUAGE GOING IN THE FAMILY Throughout this book and in line with the dominant opinions of LM scholars we have stressed the key role that the family plays in efforts to maintain and pass on the heritage or minority language to future generations. So what can or do families do to keep the heritage or minority language alive? In the next sections we discuss various strategies, initiatives and practices found in families living in situations where there are pressures to shift to the dominant language(s) of the nation.

I consider the optimal provision of public services when individuals' effective consumption of the services depends on their proficiency in the language they are provided in. A social planner chooses levels of provision in both a dominant and minority language which are financed by a linear tax on labor income. Minority language speakers make a costly investment to increase their proficiency in the dominant language. In doing so they increase their wage and, possibly, gain access to higher levels of public services provided in the dominant language. The planner faces a trade‐off between compensating minority language speakers for their lower wages and encouraging their integration by rewarding higher levels of dominant language proficiency. Under majority voting, it is possible that the level of public services is increasing in the relative size of the minority language community. This result contrasts with what is typically assumed in the literature on fractionalization and public good provision—that cultural heterogeneity decreases the level of public goods.

This paper interrogates the importance of minority languages in expressing symbols of national identity in Zimbabwe where minority languages have been officially recognised since 2013. The national symbol of focus is the national anthem. Using critical sociolinguistics, the study analyses responses from speakers of selected minority languages in Zimbabwe with regard to their language preferences, choices and limitations as they express national symbols. Selected groups comprise speakers of Sotho, Kalanga, Nambya and Tonga. Language activists and scholars have lobbied for the use of minority languages in every sphere of Zimbabwean life. The extent to which ordinary citizens advocate similarly is less understood as speakers of minority languages have different concerns in terms of the role played by their languages in fostering a Zimbabwean identity, especially through identity markers such as national anthems. This study seeks to fill that lacuna in the literature. Findings indicate ambivalent positions among speakers of minority languages as not all of them subscribe to the activist thinking. The group which fully embraces activist advocacy is the Tonga speakers who have historically exercised autonomy. Other groups’ identities are shaped by the speakers’ protracted experience with dominant languages and consequent attitudes towards dominant and minority languages.

Australia as a product of setter colonialism and of mass immigration is a society that is characterised by widespread multilingualism, although at the same time, it is also a society characterised by widespread monolingualism in the dominant language, English. It is thus a society in which many heritage language speakers are present but also one in which prevailing beliefs about the desirability and sufficiency of English language monolingualism have influenced how languages are understood and treated (Clyne, 2008). The presence of linguistic diversity and the dominance of English have shaped Australia’s educational responses to languages and its language-in-education policies. This chapter will explore how language-in-education policy has addressed the needs of heritage language learners who speak either indigenous or immigrant languages. Before beginning this discussion, however, there is a need to consider some of the terminological issues that exist in Australia around heritage language learning. The term ‘heritage languages’ is not actually a widely used term in the Australian context and languages are more usually referred to as ‘community languages’, meaning immigrant languages, which are contrasted with ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages’, ‘Australian languages’ or ‘indigenous languages’. The term ‘community languages’ has been preferred in Australia over ‘heritage languages’ because it does not imply that the languages concerned are being lost or associated with the past and so has a particular discursive resonance. At the same time, this terminology creates a division between speakers of types of languages, which is consequential for how Australia understands minority languages. In Australia the term ‘background speaker’ is often used to indicate a person who has a heritage connection with a language. This term typically refers to a speaker of an immigrant language and has a rather fluid definition ranging from those who acquire a language other than the dominant English language at home as a first language to those with a family connection to the language but who do not speak it. In this chapter I will use ‘immigrant languages’ and ‘indigenous languages’ to refer to the two distinct groups of languages and will break with Australian usage to use heritage languages, when it offers a convenient way to make connections across these categories, which could not be done easily using the more conventional Australian terminology. This chapter will examine government language-in-education policy for provision of education programs for immigrant and indigenous languages and trace the ways that these policies have evolved over time and how they interact with other aspects of language in education policy.

The current study investigates self-repairs in the speech of three groups of Russian speakers: monolingual controls (N = 12) residing in the Russian Federation, for whom Russian is their first dominant language (L1); bilingual Russian–Hebrew speaking participants (N = 12), who acquired Russian as their Heritage Language (HL) in contact with the dominant Societal Hebrew in Israel; and bilingual Russian–Chinese speakers (N = 12) residing in the Russian Federation at the time of testing, for whom Russian is their second language (L2). Picture-elicited narratives were coded for instances of self-repairs, split into Conceptualizer Repairs (C-repairs)—which imply pragmatic, semantic, or lexical changes—and Formulator Repairs (F-repairs), correcting different types of errors. In addition, self-repair initiators—such as cut-offs, hesitation pauses, and discourse markers—were annotated before each instance of self-repair. The results indicate that L2 speakers, in general, use self-repairs more frequently than L1 and HL speakers. L1 speakers hardly produced F-repairs, while HL and L2 speakers resorted to both C- and F-repairs. L1 speakers mainly used C-repairs for appropriacy, whereas HL and L2 speakers used C-repairs for rephrasing and lexical item change. As for F-repairs, HL speakers tended to change pronunciation and morphology, while L2 speakers implemented more morphological repairs. Lexical initiators of self-repairs were more common in L1 speech; however, in the L2 group we saw much more frequent cut-offs of repaired speech fragments. As such, varying self-repair strategies were employed by different speaker groups, shedding light on the underlying processes of language production. There was also evidence of cross-linguistic transfer of non-lexical self-repair initiators: HL speakers resorted to prolongations as initiators in HL-Russian (a strategy that is common in their dominant language, Hebrew), whereas L1 speakers used vocalized and silent pauses more frequently.

This chapter proposes a critical analysis of the types of discourse articulated by children involved in language revitalization programmes in two Western European contexts: Provence (south-eastern France) and southern Scotland. It focuses on how the minority language (Occitan and Scots) is described and what this means for how children categorize the language and speech communities within which they are being socialized. Of all the social actors involved in language revitalization programmes, and despite the central part they play, children are the only ones whose opinion on participation is never required. Children occupy a very ambiguous place in language revitalization movements. On the one hand, they are perceived as the embodiment of the future of the language, while, on the other hand, they are often accused of not speaking the language properly or of mixing minority and dominant languages. This seems to be a fairly widespread pattern in Europe, where ‘neo-speakers’ are generally viewed with mistrust.

Language planners are increasingly aware of the importance of new speakers (individuals acquiring a language outside the home, typically later-on in life) for the revitalisation of minority languages. Yet, little is known about new speakers’ activation (the process by which they become active and habitual minority language users). This article presents a questionnaire-based investigation of new speakers’ (n = 264) use of West Frisian in Fryslân, Netherlands—and the role traditional speakers play in new speakers’ activation. Qualitative and quantitative data show that participants use West Frisian only rarely; and when they do use it, it is mainly in the classroom. Minority language interactions outside the classroom, with traditional speakers, consist mostly of a few tokenistic words or phrases. The findings show to what extent different behaviours by traditional speakers discourage and/or encourage new speakers’ minority language use, highlighting how the complex dynamics between the speaker groups are hindering revitalisation efforts. The article discusses the implications of these findings for language planning to promote the activation of new speakers, and thereby the revitalisation of West Frisian.

A scientific discipline is defined by a set of research objectives, and a set of methodological principles, the latter in part derived from a metatheoretical worldview. From this perspective the study of minority languages as a coherent domain of research hardly exists. It seems to be more accurate to say that minority languages are approached from (a combination of) traditional disciplines such as sociology, psychology and linguistics. What these approaches share, is, may be, no more than their research objects. This makes it unavoidable, in my opinion, to discuss the theme of ‘comparative research and development of theories’ from the perspective of one or more of the disciplines just mentioned. My starting point will be linguistics, and more specifically, generative grammar. From a grammatical point of view, minority languages have, as natural languages, no special properties. Nevertheless these languages are of particular interest for the grammarian; more specifically, for the grammarian who is interested in the dynamics of natural language. The speakers of minority languages find themselves in a situation which puts all kinds of pressure on the use of its minority mother tongue. Changes occur within a reasonably short period of time. Minority languages are therefore well qualified for studying factors that are involved in language change. In this paper I would like to address the very old problem of grammatical borrowing. I will discuss this problem within the context of minority language studies. Is it possible that the grammatical system of a minority language changes by borrowing grammatical elements and/or grammatical principles from the dominant language? It seems to be natural to take the Dutchification of Frisian as an example. Three cases of grammatical borrowing of Frisian from Dutch that have been proposed in the literature will be critically discussed: 1. the borrowing of verbal endings that is supposed to be responsible for transition of verbs from the je class to the e class;2. the transition of the diminutive suffix ke to tsje; 3. changes in the word order of the Frisian verbal complex. I will conclude that the grammatical system of Frisian does not Dutchify. Furthermore this examination gives rise to some general conclusions concerning the ways in which minority languages can and cannot be influenced by dominant languages.

An increasing number of children in the UK and Ireland are growing up speaking more than one language. The many advantages of bilingualism are acknowledged; however, this increased linguistic diversity presents particular challenges for speech and language therapists (SLTs). The case is often more complex with speakers of minority languages such as Welsh and Irish, which are acquired almost exclusively in bilingual contexts. Lack of appropriate standardized assessments for bilinguals is a key issue for SLTs internationally; however, little is known about the practices, personal perspectives or wider challenges faced by SLTs in assessing minority language skills. We focus on SLTs working with English-Irish bilinguals across Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI) where status, use and exposure to Irish differ significantly. To investigate the perceptions and practices of SLTs in NI and the ROI in the assessment of bilingual English-Irish-speaking children. A 33-item online survey was distributed to SLTs working with children in community settings in NI and the ROI. A total of 181 SLTs completed the survey. The majority of respondents had bilingual English-Irish-speaking children on their caseloads; however, less than one-quarter had assessed Irish language skills. Responses indicate confusion as to whether best-practice guidelines applied in this particular context where the majority of speakers have English as their first language and limited domains of exposure to Irish outside of the education system. Resources available to assess Irish language skills were found to be limited. Informal analysis of language samples emerged as the most popular assessment tool. SLTs in the ROI had a significantly higher level of competence in the Irish language than SLTs in NI. This reduced the challenge of assessment. Many SLTs reported scoring assessments standardized on monolingual populations when assessing English language skills in bilingual English-Irish-speaking children. Our findings highlight the challenges faced by SLTs in meeting best-practice guidelines in the assessment of speakers of minority languages such as Irish. Further work is needed to ensure clinicians and other professionals have access to information and enhanced training on bilingual language acquisition in minority language contexts and implications for assessment and diagnosis. This study underlines the need for further research on the acquisition of minority languages as well as the development of alternative assessment tools to assist SLTs in meeting the needs of this population. What is already known on the subject Existing research indicates that SLTs face challenges in assessing bilingual clients. Lack of assessment resources is a global issue, particularly with respect to minority languages. Emerging research indicates that SLTs and other professionals are dissatisfied with current resources for assessing Irish-speaking bilinguals and are struggling to meet best-practice guidelines. What this paper adds to existing knowledge The status of the Irish language differs significantly between NI and the ROI, while English is the dominant language in both areas. This study provides the first exploration of current assessment practices for bilingual English-Irish-speaking children as reported by SLTs across both regions. The challenges of assessing bilingual clients in many other countries are mirrored by SLTs in NI and the ROI. The majority of children acquiring Irish are doing so in a specific context: the immersion education setting. This raises uncertainty for SLTs about whether the definition of bilingualism actually applies. Despite clinicians and clients sharing the same majority language, the complexity of minority language assessment remains. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? SLTs require specific support and resources to help them meet the assessment needs of bilingual English-Irish-speaking children. Ongoing education and training are required for clinicians and other professionals to facilitate understanding of the complexities surrounding bilingual speakers of minority languages and the application of best-practice guidelines. A greater understanding of the context in which children are acquiring Irish and the impact this may have on their acquisition of English would further support clinicians in identifying speech, language and communication needs in this population.

Assessing child development scores among minority and Indigenous language versus dominant language speakers: a cross-sectional analysis of national Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys

Between September and December 2023, Babylonia collected questions from parents regarding their children's language development. This article aims to answer the following questions: We are parents of two children (9 and 6 years old). At home, we do not follow an OPOL approach, but use both family languages flexibly based on communicative moments. The children almost always respond in their stronger language, which is also the dominant language in their environment. On one hand, we understand that this is normal; on the other hand, we feel that their skills in one of the family languages are not sufficiently developed. Should we adopt an OPOL approach? But how can we avoid constraints and frustrating impositions? If I speak to my child sometimes in Catalan and primarily in english , will I create confusion? I want her to acquire this language but it’s hard for me to stick to it 100%. My partner speaks only english to her We are an English speaking family living in the United States. My husband is a native French speaker, but has never spoken French to our boys who are now 5 and 8 years old. He would like to start teaching them now but they get easily frustrated and try to avoid engaging with him if he’s speaking in French. What’s his best bet for getting them to learn at this point? What can I do as an English speaker to help? [summary generated by Claude-3-Haiku-200k - we refer the reader to the article in PDF format for a complete answer] This article discusses the importance of cultivating the minority language to ensure children's bilingualism, in response to the questions from parents facing this challenge.Traditionally, the "one person, one language" (OPOL) approach has been recommended for raising bilingual children. However, recent research shows that this method is not always the most effective, especially when both parents speak the dominant language at home in addition to a minority language.In fact, for the child to truly develop skills in the minority language, it is necessary to maximize their exposure to and use of this language in daily life. When the dominant language of society is also present at home, the chances that the child will master the minority language decrease significantly.The author therefore recommends that parents "protect" the time spent using the minority language, even if this may feel less natural. They can use it in specific contexts while continuing to use the dominant language in other situations.Parents can also involve a relative who speaks only the minority language with the child or enroll them in an educational program that uses this language. Additionally, they should value bilingualism with their child so that they understand its importance.The author illustrates these strategies based on her personal experience of raising her two trilingual daughters. She and her husband have adopted the OPOL approach since birth, utilizing media and seeking a "community of practice" for their minority languages.While this may seem challenging, it is essential for parents to assess whether bilingualism is a priority for them and whether they are willing to adjust their family language practices. The goal is to enable a harmonious development of bilingualism that is beneficial for all.

About Translingual as Post-Monolingualism. Subverting the Dominating Mothertongue to Legitimize the Spanglish Minority
 The puertorican cultural identity was forged between American colonialism and the previous secular Spanish rule, but now Puerto Rico is a free state associated to the United States. The circular migratory flows between the two territories allowed the consolidation of a consistent Hispanic community in the surroundings of New York, the newyorican one, living at the crossroad between two ethnic groups, two languages. Thus, the prolonged contact of English and Spanish led to the development of a new linguistic code: Spanglish. This transcends the phenomena of bilingualism, diglossia and code-switching, placing the speakers in a linguistic continuum and eluding the notions of mother tongue and foreign language, dominant and minor language. Starting from the subversion of the concept of mother tongue, this essay explores the discursive and linguistic strategies by which the Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi in her "Yo-Yo Boing"! legitimates Spanglish. If mother tongue shapes the ontological identity from birth, language fluid contributes to the deconstruction of language as identity belonging. Language is a liquid object: polyphonic, dialogic and conative because it addresses to recipient, its arbitrariness makes it polyhedral and it is a representation of the multiple facets of identity. Our research, dealing with the geopolitical frictional context of the borderland between United States and Latin America, problematizes the location of a non-canonised literature employing linguistic hybridity as a marker of dominant identity. In fact, in-between linguistic politics is not bilingual, but translingual; it posits a post-national and post-conflictual ideology and transculture's linguistic porosity makes monolingualism obsolete, affirming translingualism as post-monolingualism. Post-monolingual being is the one who has freed himself from dependence on the "langue" making the "parole" the means of expression of his logos. Hybridity allows to make the dominant the dominated, that is why Giannina Braschi writes in her foreign language and not in her mother tongue, she writes in minor language in order to promote it, dominant language becomes the dominated one.

Heritage speakers (HS) have historically been attributed with what they cannot do or what they have lost; however while heritage grammars are inevitably different from the monolingual variety, investigating HS knowledge and abilities can reveal much about their capacity for retention. This article investigates Korean HS living in the U.S. and their receptive knowledge of Korean transitivity alternation, specifically, whether they are able to retain a phonologically reduced transitivity marker that is not reinforced in the dominant language, a previous unstudied area of heritage grammar and a feature that does not exist in the speakers’ dominant language, English. Participants (N = 20) rated their acceptability judgment of four sentence conditions on a self-paced online assessment. In a second task, other participants (N = 14) translated the four sentence conditions into English. Results revealed a significant effect of sentence condition for the HS on their acceptability ratings, Wald χ2(3) = 61.133, p < .001, indicating that participants’ judgments of test sentences were significantly influenced by which category of sentence they were given. The HS also demonstrated keen distinctions between sentences with and without the transitivity marker in their translations. Overall, the study shows that Korean HS are able to retain this the transitivity marker.

Because of limited language input, different dominant languages, and learners’ differing backgrounds, the acquisition of heritage languages is distinguished from the acquisition of L1 and L2. Few studies of Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) have explored whether students can acquire native-like sociolinguistic competence and language-specific variables with educational input. Based on a sociolinguistic variationist perspective, this study investigates the acquisition of variation between null and overt subject personal pronouns (SPP s) by heritage learners in an undergraduate-level Mandarin program. A total of 11,970 tokens were collected through classroom observation, sociolinguistic interviews, and narratives. Measuring mixed-effects logistic regression with Rbrul (Johnson, 2009), results show that the overall usage pattern of SPP s by CHL students largely resembled that in the input provided by the language program. Results also demonstrate that linguistic constraints including coreference, person and number, and verb type, and social factors such as discourse context, first languages, course level, and age of arrival had a significant effect on SPP expression by CHL learners. Implications for CHL development and variationist studies in heritage languages are discussed.

Osnovni cilj ovog rada jest utvrditi opće kretanje ukupnog broja stanovnika hrvatskog podrijetla i broja govornika hrvatskog jezika u Kanadi kako bi se dobila što cjelovitija slika o demografskim značajkama hrvatske iseljeničke zajednice u toj prekooceanskoj zemlji. Specifični cilj ovog rada jest ispitati očuvanost hrvatskoga kao manjinskoga ili nasljednog jezika te utvrditi obrasce njegove upotrebe kod različitih generacija govornika. U radu se analiziraju popisi stanovništva Kanade iz 1996., 2001., 2006. i 2011. s obzirom na podatke o brojčanom kretanju i dobnom sastavu stanovništva hrvatskog podrijetla te podatke o upotrebi i poznavanju hrvatskog jezika. Posebna pozornost posvećena je proučavanju lingvističkih popisnih podataka, pa se analiziraju podaci o broju i dobi govornika hrvatskog jezika, o materinskom jeziku kanadskih Hrvata te o jeziku kojim se najčešće govori u obitelji. Kako bi se ostvario specifični cilj rada i ispitala očuvanost hrvatskog jezika, popisni podaci nadopunjuju se podacima dobivenima terenskim anketnim istraživanjem provedenim među pripadnicima hrvatske iseljeničke zajednice u Torontu (N = 220). Pokazalo se da je hrvatski jezik u Kanadi relativno dobro očuvan zahvaljujući tome što je stariji naraštaj iseljenika uspio u prenošenju jezika na mlađi naraštaj. Pritom su bili jednako bitna uloga pojedinca (inzistiranje na upotrebi hrvatskoga u krugu obitelji) i djelovanje šire zajednice (dobro organizirana obrazovna i kulturna djelatnost). Nažalost, održavanje takva pozitivnog stanja u budućnosti će predstavljati ozbiljan izazov, osobito zbog smanjenja dotoka novih iseljenika.