Language Regimes Research Articles

Parents’ and grandparents’ views on home language regimes: Language ideologies and trajectories of two multilingual families in Sweden

ABSTRACTThe authors investigate the sociolinguistic dynamics in multilingual families from the point of view of speakers’ linguistic trajectories, ideologies, and repertoires. Drawing on interview data from intermarried couples of different generational and linguistic profiles of two families in Sweden, the authors examine how speakers’ lived experience with different languages shapes their stance toward bi- and multilingualism and how that particular stance in turn produces a series of effects and helps constructing specific language ideological frameworks from where speakers in that given context operate. From our analysis, it appears that an ideology of the native speaker as the legitimate and authoritative type of speaker is strongly present; the native speaker is in turn the one responsible for transmitting his or her language to the children. This is problematized by the reported language mixing that occurs in the home environment and the resulting nonobservance of the one person–one language strategy. More important than that, we argue that speakers’ ideological viewpoint in a social environment takes place dialogically and discursively. This has important consequences individually, for the speakers involved in that context, and collectively, for the type of framework that emerges.

Legal and Practical Challenges in the Application of the European Investigation Order : Summary of the Eurojust Meeting of 19–20 September 2018

After implementation of Directive 2014/41 by the EU Member States (bound by the Directive) in 2017 and the first half of 2018, the European Investigation Order (EIO) has become the core instrument for obtaining evidence located in another EU Member State. The EIO simplifies and accelerates cross-border investigations, but practical and legal challenges remain. Such challenges as well as first experiences and best practices in the application of the EIO were discussed among practitioners at a meeting organised by Eurojust in September 2018. This article summarises the main results of the meeting. Participants acknowledged the need to interpret national law in light of EU law, in line with the principles of mutual recognition and mutual trust, but also underlined the challenge of constantly searching for legally sound and practically feasible solutions between different national legal systems. They agreed on the importance of an overall pragmatic and flexible approach. Views diverged on several topics (e.g. the speciality rule, costs in the context of the proportionality test), but coincided on many others. Recommendations relate inter alia to the scope of the EIO, the use of the forms, the language regime and time limits. Participants envisaged that the support of Eurojust in relation to EIOs will probably be higher, when compared to the MLA regime, as more consultations are foreseen in the EIO Directive. Whilst participants acknowledged that “direct contact” amongst judicial authorities is the core principle of the Directive, they strongly believed that, in bilateral cases, Eurojust’s bridge-making role can facilitate communication between the judicial authorities involved if one of the consultation procedures is triggered and that, moreover, in complex multilateral cases Eurojust has a unique and important coordinating role.

Language regimes and corporeal practices of ‘making known’: Speech action, collective assembly, and the politics of recognition in India

The language regime that imposed an alien standard on the more economically and socially disadvantaged communities and regions of India where Telugu is spoken would likely not have had as large an impact if it had not occurred along with another, even more significant shift in communicative regimes that has been much less documented. This paper argues that over the course of the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individual speech action, the voice of the autonomous individual, and new forms of oral deliberation and debate began to be valorized in ways that diminished the power and legitimacy of collective, corporeal forms of communication and mediation. The new expectations placed on speech are exemplified by the Telugu ‘Spoken Language Movement’ of the early twentieth century. This essay uses the movement as one illustration of the impact of transformations in local ideologies of language and the interests that have supported and benefited from these ideologies.

Regimes of language, whiteness and social class: The negotiation of sociolinguistic privileges by British migrants in rural France

This ethnographic study of British migration in rural Brittany (France) reveals that the British benefit from positive attitudes towards their language, opening opportunities for them to access resources in English – a rare exception to the local monolingual ideology. The paper argues that the English language owes its specific place not only to its supranational status, but also to the consubstantial articulation of whiteness and class categorizations by migrants and the local population. Here, white privilege is built on the sharing of ideologies concerning language, ‘integration’ and otherness, enabling rearrangements of the language regime.

Multilingual interaction and construction of knowledge in higher education

ABSTRACTThis article aims at a better understanding of the role played by multilingualism and language in general in the process of scientific knowledge construction. By analysing various cases of multilingual communication in different universities and subjects (marketing, physics, law), we propose to focus on two parameters: the language regime and the participation regime. Language regime is envisaged through different modes: language contrast (languages referred to for developing some topics in the subject) vs. language alternation (languages used as a medium of communication). An additional dimension is related to the fact that multilingualism occurs not only in oral interaction but also in writing. Participation regime is approached through the general opposition of monomanagement (teaching-oriented) and multimanagement (learning-oriented). In multilingual settings, generating a major process of negotiation is likely to stimulate the use of different languages and even to contrast languages in order to elicit some content issues. At the end of the article, we introduce the notion of didactic regime, which represents the way participants articulate language/multilingual resources and (more or less) collaborative formats in order to build up the subject knowledge. Such a regime might be decided through negotiation, proposed by the teacher or imposed by the institution.

Multilingual examinations: towards a schema of politicization of language in end of high school examinations in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT In many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the release of each year’s results for the end of high school examinations heralds an annual ritual of public commentary on the poor state of national education systems. However, the exoglossic/monolingual language regime for these examinations is infrequently acknowledged as contributing to the dismal performance of students. Even less attended to is the manner in which the language of examinations, through shaping students’ performances, may be exacerbating social inequalities. This article politicizes the language of examinations in the region in the hope of generating policy and research interest in what is arguably an insidious source of inequality. The article makes three arguments. Firstly, it is argued that current exoglossic/monolingual practices in these examinations constitute a set of sociolinguistic aberrations, with demonstrable negative effects on students’ performance. Secondly, it is argued that the gravity of these paradoxical sociolinguistic disarticulations is better appreciated when their social ramifications are viewed in terms of structural violence and social inequality. Thirdly, in considering how to evolve a more socially equitable examination language regime, it is argued that the notion of consequential validity in testing positions translanguaging as a more ecologically valid model of language use in examinations.

Studying the sociolinguistics of cities. Considerations and methods

This article lays out ways to study communication patterns in cities. It starts by explaining the aspects of urban communication that make the city a relevant object of study. It does so by pointing out the role that urban investigations can play in theorisation on human communication in diverse settings, and it explains how the data of such research can be used towards the solution of practical communication problems. It explains how phenomena such as liminality, language regimes, rituals, and political correctness have been understudied and could enlighten our perspective on how communicative tools are used in urban communication. Finally, examples of insightful urban research are presented.

Are traditional minority languages a bench marking for the rights of migrant languages in the European Union?

In this paper a normative position will be defended. We will argue that minimal territorial minority language rights formulated in terms of the personality principle referring to traditional minority languages granted in the framework of the European Union (EU) are a benchmark for non-territorial linguistic rights. Although territorial minority languages should be granted collective rights this is in large parts of Europe not the case. Especially in the Central and Eastern European Member States language rights granted to territorial languages are assigned on the basis of personal language rights. Our argumentation will be elaborated on the basis of a comparative approach discussing the status of a traditional territorial language in Romania, more in particular Hungarian spoken in the Szeklerland area with the one of migrant languages in the Netherlands, more in particular Turkish. In accordance with the language hierarchy implying that territorial languages have a higher status than non-territorial languages both in the EUs and Member States’ language regimes nonterritorial linguistic rights will be realized as personal rights in the first place. Hence, the use of non-territorial minority languages is conditioned much as the use of territorial minority languages in the national Member States. So, the best possible scenario for mobile minority languages is to be recognized as a personal right and receive full support from the states where they are spoken. It is true that learning the host language would make inclusion of migrant language speakers into the host society smoother and securing a better position on the labour market. This should however be done without striving for full assimilation of the speakers of migrant languages for this would violate the linguistic rights of migrants to speak and cultivate one’s own heritage language, violate the EUs linguistic diversity policy, and is against the advantages provided by linguistic capital in the sense of BOURDIEU (1991).

State Traditions and Language Regimes ed. by Linda Cardinal and Selma K. Sonntag

State Traditions and Language Regimes ed. by Linda Cardinal and Selma K. Sonntag

Language Planning and Policy, Law and (Post)Colonial Relations in Small Island States: A Case Study

Language planning and policy (LPP) in postcolonial island states is often strongly (co)determined by the former colonizer’s state tradition. Comparable to the examples of the development of LPP in Cabo Verde (Baptista, Brito, & Bangura, 2010), Haiti (DeGraff, 2016), and Mauritius (Johnson, 2006; Lallmahomed-Aumeerally, 2005), this article aims to illustrate and explain in what way the current situation of the dominance of Dutch in governance, law and education in Aruba (and Curaçao) can only be explained through path dependency and state tradition (Sonntag & Cardinal, 2015) in which, time and again, critical junctures, have not led to decisions that favour the mother tongue of the majority of the population (Dijkhoff & Pereira, 2010; Mijts, 2015; Prins-Winkel, 1973; Winkel, 1955). In this article, three perspectives on LPP in small island states are explored as different aspects of the continuation of the former colonizer’s state tradition and language regime. The first part will focus on the (non-)applicability of international treaties like the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) on the challenges of small island states. The point will be made that international treaties, like the ECRML, do not (currently) provide sufficient basis for the protection of languages in former colonial islands and for the empowerment of individuals through language rights. The second part explores the meaning of fundamental legal principles and specific demands, deduced from international treaties. The point will be made that the structure of the Kingdom of the Netherlands brings with it several limitations and obstacles for the autonomous development of LPP. The third part will focus on the way in which current Aruban legislation reflects the dominance of Dutch in governance, the judiciary and education. While bearing in mind that choices for legislation on language for governance, the judiciary and education are rooted in very diverse principles, a critical reading of existing legislation reveals an interesting dynamic of symbolic inclusive legislation and exclusive practices through language restrictions that favour the Dutch minority language. Recent research, however, demonstrates that law/policy and practice are not aligned, as such creating an incoherent situation that may call for a change in legislation and policy.

Fostering Social Inclusion through Multilingual Habitus in Estonia: A Case Study of the Open School of Kalamaja and the Sakala Private School

After the restoration of independence in 1991, Estonia continued with a parallel school system with separate public schools operating for Russian- and Estonian-speaking children. Seen as a developmental ‘growing pains’ of a transitional state, during the last 27 years the separate school system has contributed to infrastructural difficulties, educational injustice, and societal segregation. This article investigates the role of private schools in addressing this injustice from the analytical angle of new institutionalism, structuration and intergroup contact theories. How do these institutions challenge and aim at changing the state language regime or path dependency in the language of education? Two case studies are presented in this article: The Open School, established in 2017 for children with different home language backgrounds and targeting trilingual competences; The Sakala Private School, established in 2009, offering trilingual education with Russian as a medium of instruction. During this period of nation-state rebuilding and globalization, we investigate whether developing a multilingual habitus is a way to address the issue of social cohesion in the Estonian society in. So far, no other studies of private initiatives in Estonian language acquisition planning have been done.

Standardizing Diversity: The Political Economy of Language Regimes. By Amy H. Liu. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 264p. $69.95 cloth.

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Russian and the Making of World Languages during the Cold War

AbstractThis essay uses the case of Russian, in its relation to other languages, to look at the ways in which the architects of internationalism in the aftermath of World War II established a new hegemony of world languages, responding to the challenge posed by the rise of Russian as a scientific and political language. What was initially a campaign by the Soviet delegation at UNESCO for one cause—recognition of the status of the Russian language within the organization—was turned by other delegations into a campaign for a different cause—multilingualism. Rather than establishing Russian on a par with English and French, the Soviet intervention helped to create a new triumvirate of world languages—Russian, Spanish, and Arabic—as these were recognized by international organizations such as the United Nations and UNESCO. The case of the rise of Russian as a language of science and politics helps to underscore the complexities and the ambiguities involved in the negotiation of the language regime, in which p...

Kib’eyal taq ch’ab’äl: Mayan language regimes in Guatemala

AbstractHaving survived a 36-year genocidal war, as well as 500 years of colonial and neocolonial domination, the Maya of Guatemala have developed strong and explicit strategies to maintain their languages and to define their own language communities. In this article, I explore how these language ideologies have changed over time from precontact interactions, colonial and republican eras into the early 1930s, through the violence of the civil war, into a period of paragovernmental interaction, and finally into a dichotomous era of standardization/revitalization and language shift. I explore the dynamic tensions between the national promotion of Mayan languages, through the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala, and the neoliberal regime’s emphasis on economic advancement and social simplification. These national trends are compared with more local grassroots language movements, their ideologies, and language regimes.

On language regimes in the Americas: Mexicano illustrations

AbstractIn this article several heteroglossic expressions of language regimes will be presented. To this end, I will succinctly discuss a series of (socio) linguistic issues related to the use of one of the major Indigenous languages in Mexico – namely, Mexicano (Nahuatl) – in its political, ideological and pragmatic arenas. This includes a consideration of Mexicano political economies, entailing a dispute over the politics of representation of Mexicano verbal culture in different ambits in which language plays an outstanding role. Comparing different linguistic politics of interpretation will allow an understanding of antagonistic voices regarding competing (e.g., ethnographic, linguistic) approaches, including different linguists’ and anthropologists’ descriptions vis-à-vis varying actors’ contradictory perspectives on the same or similar facts. These will encompass political, ideological and pragmatic uses and ideologies, in both historical and contemporary domains, including the written and oral worlds.

Introduction: Indigenous language regimes in the Americas

Introduction: Indigenous language regimes in the Americas

Indigenous Tewa language regimes across time: Persistence and transformation

AbstractThis article attempts to trace and understand the historical development and transformation of the regimes of language Indigenous to the Village of Tewa (northeastern Arizona). It examines the social institutions and cultural practices that first cultivated a particular set of language ideologies and linguistic practices in the precolonial period. It also tracks more recent transformations involving contemporary Tewa adaptations to inclusion in the federally recognized Hopi Tribe and to the hegemony of the larger nation-state. Critical to my argument is the role of theocratic institutions and Indigenous social organization (e.g., clans and moieties) in providing a foundation for ideological production and elaboration. This account provides a better analysis of Tewa linguistic resistance to Spanish colonization than that of Edward Dozier, who attributed language contact outcomes to the historical circumstances of Spanish colonial oppression rather than to the expression of Indigenous language ideologies, including their regimes of temporalization and the crossing of temporal borders in subjective history.

Children’s drawings as part of School Language Profiles: Heteroglossic realities in families and schools

AbstractChild language development occurs in a given environment, complete with explicit and implicit regulations, intervening actors with their coherent or contradictory intentions, and specific resources for speakers. The main research question of this contribution is: What can drawings as parts of School Language Profiles tell us about the multilingual environments of bilingual families and schools? The analytical framework of spatial and language practices provides a means to talk about how and why certain expressions are chosen and which influences are mentioned in relation to school and family. In particular, the focus is on how heteroglossic spaces are constructed through local/spatial/language practices and how these constructions are represented in the drawings of children. The drawings were collected in a bilingual school in Austria, with Slovene and German as languages of instruction. Children’s drawings present a fine-grained perception of their multilingual surroundings and we see how children refer to home/school in their drawings and distinguish language realities. Findings indicate that language regimes and goals of families and school are in close relation to each other, have influence on each other but do not necessarily always complement each other. This means that in analyzing heteroglossic realities, both cannot be regarded as separate (or separable) spaces.

Introduction: The Politics of Language from Multiple Perspectives: Latinidad and Indigenidad

Introduction The Politics of Language from Multiple Perspectives:Latinidad and Indigenidad Serafín M. Coronel-Molina, Issue Editor (bio) The field of politics of language intersects with language policy and planning, language of politics, language politics, language revitalization, linguistic rights, language laws, and language regimes.1 This means that politics of language cannot be completely separated from the above-mentioned fields, since they are interconnected in various ways. In addition, it is fundamental to delve into the notion of politics of language not only from disciplinary and multidisciplinary angles, but also from interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. The politics of language takes place in a mosaic of contexts constituted by real and virtual communities of speakers, and in diverse communicative events and discursive practices. It can be grounded in any number of disciplines and fields—including sociology, political theory, political science, history, linguistics, sociolinguistics, identity politics, gender politics, sociology of language, literature, critical discourse analysis, the semiotics, pragmatics and semantics of political discourses, political economy, linguistic anthropology, philosophy, raciolinguistics, translingualism, folklore, communication and media studies (print and digital), language education, literacy studies—as well as in a wide range of creative works and semi-otic resources, such as in iconicity and imagery. Methodologically speaking, the politics of language is studied qualitatively and quantitatively, though the dominant research paradigm is the qualitative approach. Political speeches and political discourses—with both a capital D and a small d (Gee, 2012)—intersect with discourses that are linguistic, cultural, gender, power, identity, ideological, scientific, or economic in nature. Orality, translinguality, interdiscursivity, transdiscursivity, intertextuality, and transtextuality are considered cornerstones for understanding and defining the politics of language from [End Page 6] micro and macro dimensions, and from multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. Languages in the United States and Latin America The United States is a multilingual, pluricultural, and multiethnic country where, without a doubt, English is the dominant and the only de facto official language. To a certain extent, Spanish is another commonly spoken language. According to the United States Census Bureau (2016), the United States’ Hispanic population numbers 56.6 million, or 17.6% of the total population, thus constituting the country’s “largest ethnic or racial minority.” It is estimated that by 2050 there will be 138 million Spanish speakers in the United States, “making it the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on Earth, with Spanish the mother tongue of almost a third of its citizens.” It is obvious, then, that the presence of Spanish in the United States is solid, since persons of Hispanic origin make up the largest minority group. In addition to Spanish, Indigenous languages and their many linguistic hybrid forms are present and robust in the United States and in Latin America: Recent U.S. Census data place the number of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians at approximately 6.4 million, or 2.1 percent of the total population (Hixson, Hepler, & Kim, 2012; Norris, Vines, & Hoeffel, 2012). The U.S. Census also reports 169 Native American languages spoken by 370,000 people (Siebens & Julian, 2011). … Although smaller in overall numbers, Native Americans reside in every U.S. state and territory, representing more than 560 federally recognized tribes, 619 reservations and Alaska Native villages, and 62 Native Hawaiian homelands. In the USA, the Indigenous language situation is characterized by diverse sociolinguistic ecologies and growing threats to that diversity reflected in twin movements to make English the nation’s official language and to circumscribe the teaching of Indigenous and other minoritized languages in school. Population estimates for Latin America place the number of Indigenous peoples at 40 to 50 million or 10 percent of the population (King, 2008; Lopez & Sichra, 2008). … The intermingling of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and Europeans produced other varieties such as Carib Pidgin-Arawak in the Caribbean and Garifuna in Central America. Latin America encompasses 20 nation-states, nine dependencies, and a population of 568 million spread out across South, Central, and parts of North America (Garcia et al., 2010, pp. 353–354). With the exception of Uruguay and some Caribbean polities whose original peoples were decimated by colonization, significant numbers of Indigenous peoples reside in every Latin American country (King, 2008; Lopez & Sichra, 2008). (Coronel-Molina...

Standardizing Diversity: The Political Economy of Language Regimes, Amy H. Liu. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century Series, 2015, 264 p.

Standardizing Diversity: The Political Economy of Language Regimes, Amy H. Liu. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century Series, 2015, 264 p.