Linguistic Struggles Research Articles

Dialect polishing and solidarity with ‘the others’: merchants as language creators in the 19th century

Abstract In this article, the linguistic choices of a group of young merchants and merchants’ sons are discussed. Living in Bergen in the second half of the 19th century, they wrote Danish and spoke a dialect marked by centuries of dialect and language contact. Most of them had some competence in German, some also in English and French. When Romanticism and nation building became dominating ideas in Norway, the merchants’ European culture and their mixed dialect did not seem appropriate. These men therefore turned their backs on both city culture and city language and started studying Old Norse and rural dialects as part of a movement promoting a language called Landsmål. They formed an organization called Vestmannalaget ‘The Association of Westmen’ in 1868, with the aim of helping to create a new Norwegian standard. In other places in Norway, those working for this new standard language usually had a rural background, and their mission was to promote pride in and the use of their own dialects and their own culture. The Association of Westmen however, aimed to learn a refined version of the dialects of the less privileged classes. This was controversial in the social class to which they belonged, and most of them did not linger on in the Landsmål movement as adults. They were young radicals who paved the way so that others, with closer ties to rural Norway, could take over the linguistic struggle.

Foreignisation and resistance: Lawrence Venuti and his critics

This article evaluates whether Lawrence Venuti’s translation approach of “foreignisation” is likely to achieve his stated goal: translations that can resist cultural dominance. This is assessed in light of criticism of his approach from other translation scholars also concerned with cultural encounters and power relations: Maria Tymoczko, Mona Baker, Tarek Shamma and Michael Cronin. The article concludes that it is problematic to identify foreignisation and predict its effect. In spite of this, Venuti’s focus on the dangers of a one-sided privileging of fluent translation strategies is important and valuable, not least in the perspective of the internal cultural and linguistic struggles that will take place within the target culture.

The Linguistic Struggle and Volunteering to Serve the Arabic Lan Eguage - Highlights on Distinguishedxperiences [In Arabic

This research, tagged with: “The Linguistic Struggle and Volunteering to Serve the Arabic Language - Highlights on Distinguished Experiences,” strives to monitor multiple, overlapping issues that are of great importance in our time; In the first part, it deals with a number of issues related to linguistic pride and identity in the era of globalization. As for the second part of the research; The researcher presents a set of successful experiences in the field of dictionaries, dictionaries and linguistic maintenance.

Orthography beyond belief. A case of Stanisław Baczyński

The article deals with the use of majuscule in religious terms in the context of editing the unfinished typescript of Stanisław Baczyński’s Propozycje. Nowa kultura – nowa cywilizacja. The author spelled the words such as Kościoł (as an institution, a population of worshippers), Boży, Chrystusowy (as possessive adjectives) inconsistently – once in uppercase, once in lowercase (the latter more frequently). The author of the article (and the editor of Baczyński’s work) analyzes orthographic norms, both present ones and those contemporary with Baczyński, and on this basis decides to leave unchanged the spelling inconsistencies in religion-related words. These inconsistencies are considered a result of the clash between the atheist worldview and the repressive function of orthography, and at the same time a proof of the author’s linguistic struggle, telling a lot not only about the creative process, but also about the idea of the work.

Labor and Botmäßigkeit: Marx’s Duel with the Liberal Tradition

The tradition of Liberalism has been at odds with a Marxist analysis of society since Marx's own critique of bourgeois society as early as his writing of The Poverty of Philosophy. However, there remains a piece of conceptual scaffolding often unscathed in its deconstruction: Sovereignty. In this article, the problematization of a Marxian critique of Sovereignty, as a form of abstract right, is analyzed in order to illuminate Marx's conceptual and perhaps linguistic struggle with the German term The Poverty of Philosophy. We see this struggle most clearly in his chapter on ‘The Labour and the Valorization Process' in The Poverty of Philosophy, and in this article, we undertake a painstaking close reading of a central passage in The Poverty of Philosophy to then relate it to the complete body of Marx's work. Ultimately, by investigating Marx's complicated use of The Poverty of Philosophy, we will be able to differentiate the political dimension of Marx's labor process from the Liberal tradition. In doing this, we will show the inadequacy of the Liberal tradition to ground a theory of subjectivity in nature and in human society, and reveal Marx’s desire to reconcile the relation between the human society and nature through the labor process.

Māori ways of speaking: Code-switching in parliamentary discourse, Māori and river identity, and the power of Kaitiakitanga for conservation

ABSTRACT While colonial worldviews and practices continue to cast a long shadow, indigenous efforts to reflect and protect their humanature relationships mark a striking form of political resistance within modern legal contexts. One particularly revealing case is that of Aotearoa New Zealand during the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) Settlement Bill in 2017, where Māori parliamentarians successfully advocated—after decades of struggle—for the granting of rights to a natural entity through nuanced code switching strategies between English and Te Reo Māori (the Māori language). Drawing on cultural discourse analysis (CuDA), we showcase how their code-switching practices highlighted cultural differences, built identities, and advocated for kaitiakitanga (the Māori worldview of guardianship). By looking at code-switching through CuDA's discursive hubs, we found that speakers relayed complex humanature worldviews and navigated the linguistic, colonial, political, and environmental struggles experienced within them. Speakers performed culturally distinct practices counter to Western derived hegemony, with regard not only to its depictions of the environment, but across its designations of what a culture should encompass regarding humanature relations within an intercultural setting such as Parliament.

Dream, Bliss, and the Shaping of Emotional Meaning in Beowulf

<i>Dream</i>, <i>Bliss</i>, and the Shaping of Emotional Meaning in <i>Beowulf</i>

Cultural and linguistic struggles and solidarities of Emirati learners in online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented shifts in higher education worldwide, with some nations more adversely affected than others. Since the onset of the crisis, almost all education abruptly moved to ‘emergency remote teaching and learning’. While the United Arab Emirates has been praised for its swift and effective responses, unique cultural and linguistic dynamics in this region present additional challenges for teaching and learning. This article presents empirical data from a qualitative phenomenological case study investigating female Emirati university students’ (n = 69) perspectives on the use of video cameras and microphones in online classes. Students’ reflective writing and researcher observations in autumn 2020 revealed discomfort using video cameras and microphones due to a range of cultural and linguistic factors. Such factors include Islamic beliefs relating to modesty, home as a gendered space, noise considerations, concerns about privacy, struggles with language in their English-medium instruction university and fear of judgement from peers. Data are interpreted thematically using intersectionality together with Goffman’s theories of everyday interaction, stigma and relative deprivation, through which complexities of learner identities are explored. Practical suggestions are made on ways to adapt online learning to better suit the cultural and sociolinguistic realities of periphery and Global South contexts. It is argued that greater efforts need to be made toward inclusion of marginalized learners during the COVID-19 period.

Cultural and linguistic experiences of immigrant youth: voices of African immigrant youth in United States Urban Schools

ABSTRACT This study explores experiences of 50 culturally and linguistically diverse African immigrant students attending public urban middle and high schools in the US. Drawing on in-depth interviews, and through constant comparison analysis, emerging findings highlight pedagogical, linguistic, and curricular variation struggles in the classroom; transitional contextual challenges; cultural mismatch; miscommunication, and stereotypes. In light of these experiences, African immigrant urban youth draw on familial, navigational and aspirational capital to resist stereotypical assumptions and to develop resilient skills necessary to navigate the inherent challenges. Findings underscore the importance of appreciating ways of knowing that deviate from the host country knowledges as instrumental to meeting the instructional needs of African immigrant students in United States schools.

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Language Politics and the Constitution of Racialized Subjects in the Corinthian Church

This study examines the phenomenon of speaking in tongue(s) in the Corinthian church from the point of view of the politics of language. Instead of seeing tongue(s) as a problem of unintelligible-ecstatic speech, it reconsiders this phenomenon as a linguistic struggle. Tongue(s), in this sense, is a multilingual social dynamic that Paul perceives as chaotic. Special attention is given to the role of language as one of the crucial markers of the ancient Greeks’ collective identity. The barbarians are their imaginative and discursive ‘others’ who do not share their language. It is within this sociopolitical context that the employment of the term βάρβαρος in 1 Cor. 14:11 can be understood as a performative act of constituting racialized subjects. Such discourse is Paul’s political strategy of bringing a monolingual order into the Corinthian church.

Governing multicultural Brussels: paradoxes of a multi-level, multi-cultural, multi-national urban anomaly

ABSTRACTUpdating our earlier work on Brussels as the paradigm of a multi-level, multi-cultural, multi-national city, and in the context of Brussels’s recent troubled emergence as the epicentre of violent conflict between radical political Islam and the West, this paper sets out the paradoxical intersection of national (i.e. Flemish and Francophone), non-national and ethnic minority politics in a city placed as a multi-cultural and multi-national ‘urban anomaly’ at the heart of linguistic struggle of the two dominant Belgian communities. Brussels is one of the three Regions of the Belgian federal model alongside Flanders and Wallonia. It is also an extraordinarily diverse and cosmopolitan city, in which a mixed language Belgian population lives alongside very high numbers of resident non-nationals, including European elites, other European immigrant workers, and immigrants from Africa and Asia. After laying out the complex distribution of power and competences within the Belgian federal structure, we explore whether these structures have worked over the years to include or exclude disadvantaged ethnic groups. To better understand these processes, we introduce our view of the multi-level governance perspective.

Linguistic Anthropology in 2016: Now What?

In this review, I extend the ideological and discursive insights on prejudice and racism offered by Jane Hill in her work The Everyday Language of White Racism to consider the potential of linguistic anthropology to address social injustice. In a year marked by the global rise of right-wing politics, 2016 cannot simply be viewed as business as usual, but rather calls for a reevaluation of the potential of linguistic anthropology in light of what it can do now. The essay is thematically organized to focus on the production of value and the reproduction of inequality over a wide range of modalities and research contexts. I begin with the “Metrics of Analysis” to review conceptual frameworks through which ethnographic analysis has been undertaken, such as temporality, scale, multimodality, technology, discourse studies, and others. The sections that follow expand upon these themes across three broad headings. The first, “Participation and Social (In)Justice,” addresses the complex agendas and institutional processes that mediate linguistic struggles for equality in settler colonial and indigenous contexts, political language, racism and social justice, and the affordances and limitations of language for young people. The second, “Global Ethnonationalism,” builds on a language ideology framework to examine the study of minority languages, the language of right-wing religiosity, and the contradictions of national branding. The third explores “Epistemologies of Value” via performativity, embodiment, sound, materiality, ontology, and media. The essay concludes with potential directions for linguistic anthropologists to address the worldwide “alt-” realities that have come into clearer view. [ethnonationalism, language ideology, race, semiotics, social justice]

“Wall of Words”: Fakir Mohan Senapati, Premchand, and The Language Controversies in Late Colonial India

Abstract Linguistic controversies in one particular region of India often get treated as discrete units, as if such controversies have never had any bearing on other languages and regions in the subcontinent. I attempt a corrective to such insular approaches by juxtaposing various linguistic identity-based struggles in nineteenth-century India to demonstrate that there are several common players who operate across various linguistic zones and who are often inconsistent in their views and analyses. This essay examines the various linguistic controversies by organizing them along three broad axes with overlaps: the specialist, the instrumentalist, and the literary. The first set of controversies was conducted in jargon-ridden scholarship within newly emerged disciplinary practices such as philology, pedagogy, and linguistics. The secondary set of controversies was the concerns of intellectuals, missionaries, educationists, and scholars who were engaged in discharging juridical–administrative responsibilities. At the tertiary level, the controverters comprised the practitioners of literary culture. The essay shows how the cultural expressions within different linguistic groups inherit and share these derivative discourses while employing linguistic strategies as part of their linguistic–identitarian aesthetics. The essay, finally, argues for a need to evolve a more integrative methodology to “do” comparative literature in South Asia.

Ideologizing age in an era of superdiversity: A heritage language learner practice perspective

Abstract SLA research on age in naturalistic contexts has examined learners’ ultimate attainment, while instructed research has emphasized the rate of learning (Birdsong 2014. Dominance and age in bilingualism. Applied Linguistics 35(4). 374–392; Muñoz 2008. Symmetries and asymmetries of age effects in naturalistic and instructed L2 learning. Applied Linguistics 29(4). 578–596). However, both streams of research, which view age as a biological construct, have overlooked this construct through an ideological lens. To address this gap, and in keeping with Blommaert’s (2005. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) call to examine language ideologies and related ideologies in an era of superdiversity, our paper explores the ideology undergirding age-based research and examines it in conjunction with the practice-based approach to better understand the use of Burmese as a heritage language, a language characterized by a hierarchical and an age-determined honorific system. Drawing on data from a larger ethnographic study involving Burmese migrants in the US, analyses of the bilingual practice of address forms of generation 1.5 Burmese youth demonstrated that age was relationally constructed. While these youth strategically adopted ‘traditional’ linguistic practices ratified by Burmese adults when interacting with their parents, such practices were invoked and subverted in interactions involving their siblings and other Burmese adults less familiar to them. In focusing on the social and linguistic struggles encountered by these transnational multilingual youth, this paper also addresses the complexities surrounding heritage language learning.

College Persistence and Engagement in Light of a Mature English Language Learner (ELL) Student’s Voice

An interview study at a community college in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States reveals factors in the persistence of English language learners (ELLs) starting from their courses in English as a second language (ESL) through to their graduation or transfer to 4-year institutions. The results form a narrative of a day in the life of a mature ELL woman and continue by reporting the primary reasons that ELLs either remained in or left the community college. Students talked about 3 main obstacles to remaining enrolled: full-time jobs, family obligations, and lack of finances, all of which are common factors for community college students. But particular to ELLs were their feelings of marginalization at the college because of their multilingual identities and linguistic struggles in their ESL and subject classes. The study closes with suggestions on ways for everyone at the college to assist ELLs in succeeding along their college trajectories. Community college faculty and administrators can work together to create a more welcoming atmosphere for ELLs with an emphasis on imparting the curriculum and college procedures that ELLs need to know in order to complete their college goals.

Linguistic struggles within and beyond the Southern African Development Community

This paper argues that the linguistic struggles faced by the Southern African Development Community (the SADC) represent common linguistic struggles found in Africa and the world where some languages are accused of dominating, stifling and suppressing others. However, the language situation within the SADC is interesting because it offers us a rare opportunity in which we can observe two types or stages of a linguistic struggle at the same time; the first one involves a clash between European languages (English, French and Portuguese) that the SADC recognizes as its working languages and the second one involves a struggle between these European languages and the African languages spoken in the SADC region. But when all is said and done, linguistic struggles of this nature demonstrate to us that from a socio-political point of view, as opposed to a linguistic point of view, languages are not equal and they do not exist in a vacuum. Once placed next to each other, certain characteristics of each language (and its speakers) such as their economic, political or mobility power begin to emerge. The paper, therefore, sees the linguistic struggles within the SADC (the organization) and its region as all-encompassing and therefore in need of broad-based solutions that go beyond the SADC and Africa.

The making of Irish-speaking Ireland: The cultural politics of belonging, diversity and power

This paper is about linguistic justice issues in the post-colonial context of an Irish-speaking region in the south-west of Ireland, drawing on a study of political mobilization around the Irish-medium education policy of the region’s secondary school. I explore how the incipient Irish state was involved in a nationalizing project of developing strategies to constitute the Irish polity into a particular nation bound by an language of ‘archaic belonging’. Ithen examine how this nationalizing project was disrupted by structural shifts in the economic and demographic basis for the Irish-speaking communities on the Irish western seaboard. It is in this historical context that the Irish language emerges as a necessary nodal point around which political identity is formed. Local linguistic struggles are conceived as attempts to impose particular kinds of order on a field of meaning.

Teaching Other Tongues

Language-the words we use, our syntax and our grammar-is always deployed in a context. We might refer to a collective group as y'all in one context (casually, among friends) but simply as you in another. When students enter our library instruction classrooms, they also enter a new discursive context, this one marked by Boolean syntax, arcane controlled vocabularies, and Aristotelian classification structures that divide the universe of knowledge in ways foreign to the naive user. For example, nothing about using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or SocINDEX database descriptors is natural, nor is the use of and and or as formal structures. Students who seek use of library resources inevitably must learn to navigate these strange new linguistic worlds.Library instructors must balance the demand to teach students how to search successfully in these formal linguistic contexts against a desire to respect the languages and modes of thought students bring from elsewhere into the classroom. As advocates for equity of access to materials, librarians must negotiate the realities of dominant, standard structures of language and organization-often our discursive homes-with the diversity of linguistic and cognitive approaches of our students. These politically and ethically impelled negotiations require us to teach library research as a context in which language struggles take place, rather than as an arena where some words and phrases are simply and acontextually Indeed, when students are taught that only one language variety is correct, instructors consciously and unconsciously reinscribe systems of linguistic dominance that allocate access, opportunity, and reward unevenly among social groups.Composition Studies has long explored this difficult balancing act. In the pages that follow, this article articulates the work done by composition scholars to understand and politicize the problem of multiple discourses in the classroom, as well as conceptualize a potential solution. Rather than arguing for or against the use of different language varieties, Composition Studies has used the concept of the contact zone to imagine the classroom as a space of dialogic struggle where no single language is or correct. Instead, the classroom and the blank page become sites of interpretive struggle for meaning.Following this discussion of the contact zone in the writing classroom, I suggest that teaching librarians might re-conceptualize the contact zone in our own field. Library advocacy work on the problem of standardized language has primarily worked to perfect and change that standard language so that it better reflects a pluralist embrace of the language of our users. While a vital part of an ethical linguistic practice, the focus on correcting library language reinscribes the idea that any language can ever be outside the context of its use. Curiously, the library field has paid less attention to conceptualizing the concrete spaces in which these linguistic struggles take place: the search boxes inside our databases and OPACs. Particularly when we teach students to grapple with their own vocabulary and the controlled vocabularies of library resources, we are already teaching in a contact zone. By articulating and conceptualizing a concept of the database search interface as a contact zone, this article suggests that teaching librarians might work to interrupt the power of dominant language and knowledge schemes rather than re-inscribe them as correct through our teaching practice. In deploying a critical approach to the contact zone, library instruction can be a site of productive struggle between our users and the dominant discursive systems we might all seek to change.Language Varieties in the College ClassroomStudents entering college for the first time are entering more than just new physical facilities. They also enter new discursive communities. One of the primary roles of college teaching is to introduce students to these particular discourses. …