Linguistic Shift Research Articles

Общие экстралингвистические факторы, усиливающие специфику чебоксарского региолекта русского языка

The study is devoted to the study of the conditions for the formation and functioning of the Cheboksary regiolect of the Russian language, which is distinguished by a number of stable linguistic parameters. The peculiar sound of the speech of the Cheboksary people has developed under the significant substrate influence of the Chuvash language, among the speakers of which there are currently active processes of a linguistic shift in favor of Russian. The work is written in the aspect of sociolinguistics and is based on the author’s long-term observations of the self-esteem of Cheboksary residents and their assessment by visitors. The purpose of the research is to expand the understanding of extralinguistic factors that do not directly affect the specifics of the speech of Cheboksary people, but at the same time enhance the impression of it from outside observers. The article deals with non-linguistic specific features inherent in the capital of the Chuvash Republic, including geographical, climatic, anthropological, technological and other components. Their presence greatly enhances the perception of the sound of the Russian speech of the inhabitants of Cheboksary and its agglomeration as a unique phenomenon of modern Russian culture. In turn, the specific conditions that support the Cheboksary regiolect are the result of a long historical and social process, including the mass migration of the population in the past, the mixing of different ethnic groups among themselves and the formation of modern peoples in their visually fixed physical features, anthropological impact on the ecumene, etc. in relation to the territory of Chuvashia and nearby regions.

“A new worker, for a new order, in a new era”: English, power and shifting ideologies of reflexivity in a Chinese global workplace

Abstract This paper offers a historiographic and ethnographic analysis of how reflexivity, as a communicative practice and valued personality trait, has been understood, regulated, legitimised and used to control Chinese workers from the planned-economy era to the present. Using a Shanghai-based multinational company as a case study, I document how and under what conditions English-mediated reflexivity, with its stress on self-entrepreneurship, came to replace former Mandarin-mediated reflexivity supporting a notion of collective workerhood. Special attention is paid to reflexivity’s changing roles in shaping, managing and evaluating workers and facilitating understandings of labour, power and agency. The paper argues that the emerging English-dominated reflexivity represents a required linguistic shift for the creation of a new worker type in the current globalised economy as it normalises managerial technologies of discipline, stratification and exclusion.

Content adaptations in English-medium instruction: Comparing L1 and English-medium lectures

While lecturers' teaching practices continue to be a focal point of English-medium Instruction (EMI) research, contrastive studies between EMI and L1 lectures remain extremely scarce. The present study addresses this research gap by analyzing five sets of matching L1 and English-medium lectures given in different disciplines at three Italian universities. Each set of lectures is given by the same lecturer, about the same topic. Thus, the study, closely examines the lectures’ content in order to investigate which changes, if any, accompany the linguistic shift from L1 to English-medium teaching. The investigation focuses mainly on quantity and organization of content; nonetheless, other variables (such as speech rate, questions, language alternation), which can play a relevant role towards the organization of the lecture, are also considered. The analysis reveals a high correspondence of the core topics addressed in the lecturers; however, significant differences in the way such knowledge is conveyed are also observed. Such differences are grouped into three categories: differences in content quantity, differences in content selection and differences in rhetorical devices used.

Language and Human Rights – Paradigm Shift

Language is a geographical, religious and cultural representation of a person on a global stage. The right to speak and write a language that one inherits and prefers to adopt as a means of communication is guaranteed by UN resolutions but very often this basic right of ethnic minorities is denied by the tyrannical majorities. When we consider the social mobilization of various groups within this framework we see that religion as a social resource equates with language. Religious affiliation assigned to a language is one among many other factors which lead people to commit atrocities against the marginalized social groups. In such cases, children are the biggest victims of all. Language is directly related to the idea of basic education as well. Linguistic victimization has affects schooling in many parts of the world. Additional problems are caused by the constant wars fought around the world in our age. War zones keep on emerging to displace people who then become victims of linguistic and economic harassment in the land of asylums. Those trapped in the war zones, like people currently in Ukraine and in Gaza, see total destruction of their educational institutions and consequently the destruction of their basic rights to life, property, geographical territory, culture and language. Our languages are social contexts of our cultural and economic viability. Cultural and economic forces contribute to language maintenance and also define its lexical shifts. Our education policies have largely failed because we prefer to counter the prevailing social forces and remain reluctant to assimilate them into our mainstream school curricula. Without the understanding of the linguistic shifts which are in turn political, as well as the cultural shifts, we cannot hope for peace in our war zones. Without peace there are no human rights. Keywords: UN Resolution, nationism, linguistic profiles, war zones, ethnic nationalism, Catalan linguistic policy, Basque Provinces, South Asia, Bangladesh.

The Phenomenon of Mitigation in The Contemporary Hail Dialect, a Lexicon of (Fasih Al-‘Ami in The North of Najd by ‘Abd Al-Rahman Al-Suwayda’) as a Model

Deletion is one of the most important means of mitigation in the Ha’il dialects, and the hamza in the Ha’il dialects is permissible in which three rulings are permitted: it be reduced, omitted, or replaced by Ya. Most of the deletion of the mitigation in the Ha’il dialects goes as far as deleting the hamza; Because it is from the extreme of the throat, and it is one of the strongest letters, and the substitution of the hamza ya or wawa in the chapter of mitigation is the second level of mitigation in the Ha’il dialects. The research revealed the confusion between the deletion of the hamza and its reduction in the lexicon (Faseh al-Ami in the north of Najd by Abd al-Rahman al-Suwayda). Aspects of mitigation appeared in the Ha’il dialect in five ways: 1- Deletion 2- Reducing the hamza 3- Facilitating the hamza 4- Substitution of a letter with a weaker letter such as ya and waw 5- Expansion of use in the spatial heart section 6- Elimination of convergence of homologous in the chapter on immersion 7- Substitution of a letter of the gender of another letter in the chapter on the heart The slur. This research proceeds according to the descriptive approach, which is based on the analysis of texts in the Hail region. Through the research, objectives emerged, including highlighting the cultural product of Hail, the most prominent linguistic shifts in it, and the reasons for that; And standing on the linguistic and cultural phenomena as a tributary of the tributaries that contribute to the realization of the vision of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2030.

Aromanian Cultural and Linguistic Shift to Greek

Aromanian-armân, (Weigand, 1895) is an oral Eastern-Romance language spoken by the Aromanians (armâni, or armãneashti), an ethnic group historically known for transhumance, dispersed over a wide area of the Balkans in what is present-day Peninsular Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Southern Romania, Serbia, and Albania. These people have been noted as Aromanians or Vlachs sometime since the eighth century AD. (Caranica, 1990). Their ethnicity (Eriksen, 2010) is controversial with Greeks believing them Latinised Greeks, Romanians considering them Romanian, others as Balkan natives from Wallachia (Ruzica, 2006). In Greek, the current word for Aromanian is in fact ‘Vlach’ believed to originate from the Latin terms Volcae, Volci (Volks, Wolks) referring to a Celtic tribe from Gaul that had learnt Latin and become Latinized. The Volks-Wolks were the closest neighbors to Germanic tribes in the area, which resulted in Germans referring to all Latin speakers as ‘Volks,’ the same way they did with their language. For clarification, in this study: Aromanian, Vlach (-) Aromanian and Vlach will all be used to refer to this ethnic group and language. The word Volci was adopted by Germanic speakers and took different forms over time: Walachen, Welchland, Wallis, Wallais, Wallons, Wales, Welschme etc. These terms are still visible in different European languages today and refer to ‘Latin speaker.’ The Slavic speakers borrowed the word from the Germans as: Olahy, Olahi, Valachi, Voloh, Vloh whereas the Byzantines borrowed it as ‘Vlachs’ (Tapanikos, 2020). Their isolated modus vivendi, between pastoral valleys and high mountains, confined them to hardship and socio-cultural periphery, and allowed relative immunity from major European conflicts and periods of unrest spanning short of a millennium. From 1975 when the modern Greek Republic is finally consolidated, the ideology of ‘one people, one language’ is an intrinsic part of Greek nationality and nationalism (Moschonas, 2004). Lacking written, standardized forms, Aromanian has been transmitted orally from generation to generation in the Epirus, Macedonia and Thessally regions of Greece. With profound socio-economic changes and rewards, Aromanians left their pastoral lifestyle in large numbers (Beis, 2000) attracted by prospects of a better future in Greek urban centers and Western European countries, USA, or Australia. In modern times, with Greek being the only language of instruction and communication in the wider society (Chomsky, 1971), the generational language-transfer cycle has been broken, and Aromanian is now endangered (Dinas et al., 2011). On the other hand, Aromanian folklore and traditional festivals are very much alive through associations like the Pan-Hellenic Federation of Cultural Associations of Vlachs, while many self-identified Aromanians do not speak a word of their ancestral language, by choice (Kahl, 2004). How did this (apparent) contradiction come to be? What drove Aromanians away from their language and led to the assimilation into Greek society, language, and culture so completely that it will lead to the death of Aromanian in Greece?

Crafting literary Urdu: Mirza Hatim’s engagement with Vali Dakhani

AbstractThe emergence in eighteenth-century India of literary compositions that used the elite registers of what was, at the time, called ‘Rekhtah’, and later defined as Urdu, is poorly understood. Conventionally, after an initial infatuation in Delhi with the works of Vali Dakhani,1 a mid-century break is assumed, exemplified by the revision of Zuhur ud-Din Hatim’s Divan as Divanzadah in the 1750s. Scholars have viewed this as a radical intervention in the creation of Urdu, which excised old vernacular models and embraced further Persianization. This article re-examines the evidence, combining methodologies from literary and historical studies. It points to the continuities present in Hatim’s revision, including sustained engagement with Vali, even as Hatim attempted to appeal to new audiences, incorporating new trends alongside older literary models. Foregrounding literary networks and arenas of poetic practice shows the limited impact of the proscriptions and literary criticisms voiced by Hatim’s critics. In studying the contested space of literary aesthetics and linguistic shifts against self-fashioning within changing networks, this article demonstrates that the relationship between the Persianate and vernacular sphere continued to be generative, rather than oppositional or hierarchical.

Conflits sur/dans la langue: perspectives linguistiques, argumentatives et discursives by Geneviève Bernard Barbeau, Franz Meier and Sabine Schwarze

Reviewed by: Conflits sur/dans la langue: perspectives linguistiques, argumentatives et discursives by Geneviève Bernard Barbeau, Franz Meier and Sabine Schwarze Samira Hassa Bernard Barbeau, Geneviève, Franz Meier, et Sabine Schwarze, éd. Conflits sur/dans la langue: perspectives linguistiques, argumentatives et discursives. Peter Lang, 2021. ISBN 978-3-631-83778-8. Pp. 232. This book offers ten chapters on French language controversies in contexts such as films, stores, Wikipedia, the media, and more. The first chapter, by Schwarze, diachronically analyzes the terminology used to describe linguistic debates, referred to as polémique, querelle, débat, and discussion. Schwarze notes that the term débat entered Old French in the twelfth century from the verb débattre and gained the meaning of dispute in the thirteenth century. Vanessa Wettengl analyzed more than 300 reactions published in the Québec press and on social media on the Québec French used in the film Mommy by Canadian director Xavier Dolan. She reports that supporters of Québécois criticized the use of French subtitles in the film because Québécois can be understood by all Francophones and the use of subtitles reinforces the hierarchical view of French from France as the standard, superior variety. Others criticized the variety of Québécois used in the film as exaggerated and not “authentic,” devaluing the language of Québec. Still in Québec, Bernard Barbeau and Chiara Molinari examined the bilingual greeting Bonjour/Hi used by store owners in downtown Montréal. The greeting was criticized by language authorities as a form of assimilation that aims to do away with French while others characterized it as a “charmant” (66) greeting that reflects the bilingual city of Montréal. Ideological views of French in Québec are also addressed in Meier’s chapter examining the call for a boycott of the sports brand Adidas after the manager, a Francophone Québécois, used mostly English in his speech at the opening ceremony of the Adidas store in Montreal. This was viewed as a lack of respect for Québec Francophones. The media debate around gender-inclusive grammar is discussed in Stefano Vicari’s chapter analyzing headlines in the French newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde. The author reports on the ongoing polemic on gender-inclusive writing in France, with some feminists perceiving it as a linguistic shift that could improve women’s status and rights while others see it as a “manœuvre d’intimidation idéologique” (148). Vicari found that 38% of headlines in Le Monde and 48% in Le Figaro are against gender-inclusive writing. Bettina Eiber and Ursula Reutner examine Wikipedia controversies, reporting that, although Wikipedia is a collaborative writing platform, insults are minimal at the site and discussions among contributors are often professional and engaging. This collection of chapters is worth reading, although some chapters devote too much [End Page 228] space to introducing the topic and to general information rather than providing more data and analysis of study results. Québec is given quite a bit of space, which is a positive change, as the focus is often on France. Including other Francophone countries would have rounded out the scope of the book. [End Page 229] Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

The Language Situation in the Eveno-Bytantaiskii National District of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)

Abstract The findings of this study relate primarily to the processes of globalization that directly affect linguistic shift and present a threat of extinction to the cultures and languages of the peoples of the world. The article is based on the results of sociolinguistic research conducted in 2021 by the authors in the Eveno-Bytantaiskii National District of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The aim of the research is to study the linguistic situation of a settlement of Tiugiasirs, where the Sakha, Russian (predominantly), and Even languages all coexist. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted, aimed at studying the linguistic biography of the informants, determining the degree of language proficiency, and assessing the linguistic situation in the study area. The survey results show that the Even language is undergoing a linguistic shift due to the assimilation of the Even language by the Sakha language.

International Health and Global Health: Reconfigurations of a Disputed Field

International health is an interdisciplinary field of knowledge, research, and action that deals with the health of populations beyond their national borders. Latin America established itself as a pioneer in international health during the 20th century, inducing an unprecedented dynamic in the field. In this sense, a process of analysis, reflection, and interpretation from a Latin American perspective is required to overcome its image as a mere replica of European health development. This article has the double objective of analyzing the historical development of the field of International Health and, secondly, reflecting on the concepts of International Health and Global Health, in the new regional and global geopolitics. Through a historical journey that begins in 1851, this analysis accounts for the disputes, tensions, and rivalries that have shaped the field of international health and some of its main organizations. Particularly, the World Health Organization -with the supremacy of neoliberalism- has been impacted by mercantilist interests of new non-health actors, such as the World Bank, the pharmaceutical industry, and philanthropic organizations. In this context, the passage/transition from the field of International Health to the denomination of Global Health represents - much more than a simple linguistic shift - a political-ideological shift. In Latin America, on the other hand, the influence of critical Latin American thought has pushed toward an understanding of International Health based on human rights and regional health sovereignty, implemented through more horizontal cooperation and emancipatory policies. The advent of the pandemic has shown that health is an unquestionable international issue, demanding coordinated and comprehensive policies. Instead, it occurs in a world fragmented by disputes and interests and, particularly in Latin America -with the dissolution of UNASUR- it arrives in a context of savage/wild health system reforms and at a time of marked weakness in some of its processes of integration. Consequently, there is an urgent need to discuss the architecture of global and regional health, its agenda, and to rethink international cooperation as an epidemiological policy that effectively addresses global inequities and responds to the urgent and persistent needs of our people.

Le tre fasi del discorso politico italiano in Twitter: una storia senza lieto fine?

The relationship between Twitter and Italian politicians started around 2010. Since then, it is possible to trace an evolution, and to identify three distinct phases that have characterised this relationship. This study describes some of the linguistic shifts that characterise the political discourse on Twitter, in its progressive move from the naive attitude to ʻbeing social’ of the beginnings, to the self-promotional monologue, up to the verbal excesses and forms of language aggression of the last three years. Through the analysis of corpora of tweets written by Luigi di Maio, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi, the focus is mainly on some of the lexical and discursive features that characterise this verbal aggression. The use of a rhetoric of simplification, through which politicians constantly tend to banalise and reduce reality to its extreme forms, strongly contributes to the diffusion of a highly polarised form of political discourse, as well as to our daily experience with social media.

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

Mapping Linguistic Shifts During Psychological Coping With the COVID-19 Pandemic.

How does language change reveal the psychological trajectories of people coping with a COVID-19 infection? This study examined writings on social media over 12 weeks from people who self-reported having tested positive for COVID-19. People used fewer words reflecting anxiety and distancing but more words indicating reinterpretation over time. The language patterns for describing the experience of COVID-19 infections differed from those for describing other unrelated topics. The findings reveal the temporal dynamics of psychological adjustment to an unfolding crisis.

Are Dutch and French languages miscible?

French and Dutch are two languages of different origins (Germanic vs. Romance) that coexist within the nation-state of Belgium. While they are mostly segregated throughout the Belgian territory, in Brussels they reach an actual cohabitation with a relevant bilingual population. The dominant language in Brussels shifted from Dutch to French during the late XIX century in a process known as the Francization of Brussels. The fractions of speakers of each language and of bilinguals over that time were recorded periodically until political tensions ended the censuses in the country. This relevant linguistic shift has been the object of sociopolitical studies, but the available empirical data have never before been analyzed using a theoretical mathematical model that would allow us to quantify causal factors behind the observed dynamics. Here we carry out such study for the first time, measuring effective values of perceived interlinguistic similarity and language prestige, among others. This modeling and quantification allows us to speculate about possible trajectories of fractions of speakers over time—specifically, whether Dutch and French tend to be languages that can coexist in the long term. We find that there is an overall tendency of both tongues to grow segregated over time, suggesting, in physics terms, that Dutch and French are not miscible. The scenarios that would allow for language coexistence would often see a starkly dominating language. Notwithstanding, we also discuss the costs of attempting to sustain the cohabitation despite a natural tendency to the contrary.

To Whom to Pray?

Abstract The article discusses Booranticha, a sacrificial ritual among Oromo and some Amhara for the well-being of the family, its herds, and possessions, which is performed once a year by husband and wife in many farming households of central Ethiopia. During the ritual, food offerings are made and a higher spiritual being, also called Booranticha, is addressed in prayer. Contestation through monotheism, particularly by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, however, has led to some major linguistic and performative shifts concerning which divinity is being addressed in the offering, and how the ritual is performed. The article suggests that competition in religiously pluralist settings may constitute a major initializing and catalyzing factor for new exegetical propositions about the nature of the divine. Such conceptualization of contestation as a “trigger” for change invites a closer look at the relationship between religiously pluralist settings, the shaping of moral discourses and the evolvement of new hermeneutic interpretations in sacrificial performances.

Русская классика XIX века и проблема лингвистического комментария (на примере Героя нашего времени Лермонтова)

This article discusses the language of world-famous nineteenth-century Russian texts from the perspective of a linguist. The main source material is ‘Fatalist’, the final part of the novel A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. ‘Fatalist’ is analyzed in a broader context of data provided by the Russian National Corpus, which spans the whole period of the development of Russian literary language and is not limited to one writer. It is shown that the Russian language of the early nineteenth century, usually regarded as comprehensible and rather “modern”, has become so distant from contemporary Russian that in many cases linguistic commentaries are required. The article illustrates this issue with four fragments of ‘Fatalist’ that might not be lucid enough for speakers of twenty-first-century Russian and are therefore likely to be misinterpreted. It is not merely a matter of lost realities of the past, but of fundamental changes within the language – word formation, syntax, lexicon, and constructions. These linguistic shifts are gradually alienating nineteenth-century literature from new generations of readers.

How Spanish speakers express norms using generic person markers

Language is one powerful vehicle for transmitting norms—a universal feature of society. In English, people use “you” generically (e.g., “You win some you lose some”) to express and interpret norms. Here, we examine how norms are conveyed and interpreted in Spanish, a language that—unlike English—has two forms of you (i.e., formal, informal), distinct generic person markers, and pro-drop, allowing for an examination of underlying conceptual tendencies in how the structure of language facilitates the transmission of norms. In Study 1a-b (N = 838) Spanish speakers used informal generic-you and the generic person marker “se” (but not formal-you) to express norms (vs. preferences). In Study 2 (N = 300), formal you, informal you, and impersonal “se” had persuasive force over personal endorsements (e.g., “I”), informing Spanish speaker’s interpretation of unfamiliar norms. Our findings add to a growing literature on how subtle linguistic shifts reflect and influence cognitive processes.

Social ties in the Congo Basin: insights into tropical forest adaptation from BaYaka and their neighbours.

Investigating past and present human adaptation to the Congo Basin tropical forest can shed light on how climate and ecosystem variability have shaped human evolution. Here, we first review and synthesize genetic, palaeoclimatological, linguistic and historical data on the peopling of the Congo Basin. While forest fragmentation led to the increased genetic and geographical divergence of forest foragers, these groups maintained long-distance connectivity. The eventual expansion of Bantu speakers into the Congo Basin provided new opportunities for forging inter-group links, as evidenced by linguistic shifts and historical accounts. Building from our ethnographic work in the northern Republic of the Congo, we show how these inter-group links between forest forager communities as well as trade relationships with neighbouring farmers facilitate adaptation to ecoregions through knowledge exchange. While researchers tend to emphasize forager–farmer interactions that began in the Iron Age, we argue that foragers' cultivation of relational wealth with groups across the region played a major role in the initial occupation of the Congo Basin and, consequently, in cultural evolution among the ancestors of contemporary peoples.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Tropical forests in the deep human past’.

Extralinguistic features of the development of modern English in New Zealand

The purpose of the study is to determine the trends of linguistic development in the territory of the New Zealand region within the framework of the redistribution of ethnosociogroups, as well as to assess the linguistic prospects of the southern and northern island parts in a comparative analysis. The article reveals the main extralinguistic factors influencing the linguistic space of the south and north of New Zealand, which provoke evolutionary linguistic shifts with the formation of new variations of the language. The most important comparative characteristics of ethnolinguistic groups are identified and described on the basis of a statistical assessment of their redistribution over the past few years, taking into account covid realities. The subject of the study is the New Zealand language space at the present stage of development. The scientific novelty of the study is to present the current language situation in New Zealand based on a comparison of the changing ethnic and sociolinguistic conjuncture of the southern and northern islands. Official statistical data on the New Zealand region, as well as a socio-ethnic atlas with forecasting up to and including 2038, were used as materials. The study provides a justification for the linguistic shift in the territory of New Zealand, and also presents a summary table of comparative data on the ethnic composition and linguistic groups of the southern and northern regions with an assessment of possible scenarios for future language development in the context of ethnosociolinguistics.

Kedourie, nationalism, Islamism, and the umma

Sylvia Kedourie, in a 1955 piece, analysed the ideological point of contact between Arab nationalism and Islam, in so doing highlighting the distinctions between watan and umma in linguistic patterns and ideological significance. In this piece, using the starting point of Kedourie's prescient examination, I trace the ways in which such a linguistic shift from umma to watan has followed a broader pattern towards the localization of Islamist factions, perhaps best illustrated by the example of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arabian Peninsula.