Minority Language Communities Research Articles

Follow the leaders: reconciling identity and governance in Quebec's Anglophone population

Resolving matters related to identity, leadership, and governance has represented a considerable challenge in the community-building process of Quebec's English-speaking population. Despite a strong institutional network in the Montreal region where the majority of English speakers reside, there have been important debates about how and by whom political advocacy and representation are conducted on behalf of the minority language community. Organizations delivering education, health and social services to Montreal's English-speaking population have assumed near complete responsibility for representing their concerns to government, thereby forcing the once influential language-based advocacy bodies to rethink their objectives. Problems of governance and leadership in organizations defending the concerns of Quebec English speakers have also been challenged by the need to define a constituency which is in a state of demographic flux. It is contended that under certain conditions, being institutionally complete does not lead to community vitality and may result in some disengagement from the broader society. It is further argued that no study of the institutional completeness and governance of Canada's language minorities can be complete without properly evaluating the role of government as principal stakeholder and, as such, examining its influence on identity formation of the country's language minorities.

Book Review: JOHN GIBBONS AND ELIZABETH RAMIREZ. Maintaining a minority language. A case study of hispanic teenagers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. x, 240. Hb $129.95, Pb $46.95.

Gibbons and Ramirez’ book discusses the complex inter-relatedness of the many social, political, and personal factors involved with minority language maintenance in the heavily monolingual environment of Sydney, Australia. While acknowledging the ‘predatory’ effects world-Englishes have on minority languages (Hornberger, 1997) and the often debilitating effects Australian language policies have had on a multitude of its minority languages (Bullivant, 1995; Gibbons, 1995), this book ‘weights’ (to borrow the authors’ metaphor) the scale positively for one minority language community. This nuanced depiction of a Spanish-speaking community, the practices, attitudes and beliefs within which facilitate maintenance of their language provide a solid contribution to the literature on bilingualism. The book can be divided into two major sections: first, their research articulates the linguistic complexities involved in achieving and maintaining a high level of bilingual proficiency; second, Gibbons and Ramirez explore a vast array of mitigating factors that contribute to the maintenance of a minority language. Although the many quantitative tables can at times be daunting for some, they are consistently balanced by, and reinforced with, illustrative qualitative data from their teenage informants. This book’s first chapter highlights the difficulties in linguistic and cultural maintenance for minority languages, contextualizes their study within the larger field of bilingualism and language proficiency, language policy and locates itself amid Sydney’s Spanish-speaking community. Importantly, as the majority of Spanish-speaking Australians have immigrated from Chile, they contrast both sets of Australian findings with Chilean-based research of a similar demographic, contextualizing their findings nicely in the aspects of a global language other than English. The data from subsequent chapters is taken from relatively recent (19971998) interviews and closed questionnaires from 106 teenage informants.

Language Development and Social Uses of Literacy: A Study of Literacy Practices in Cameroonian Minority Language Communities

In Northwest Cameroon, the emergence of literacy in the mother tongue is providing minority language communities with new alternatives for learning and communication. To some extent, these alternatives are shaped by existing literacy practices in English, as English is the language of formal education. However, new spaces are also emerging in society for the use of literacy in the mother tongue. This paper examines the impact of mother-tongue literacy on attitudes towards, and uses of, written text in the Bafut, Kom and Nso' language communities of North-west Cameroon. The paper is based on qualitative case study research conducted in these communities in 2002–2003. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future of mother-tongue literacy in the Bafut, Kom and Nso' language communities.

Bilingualism/Second-Language Research and the Assessment of Oral Proficiency in Minority Bilingual Children

This article discusses some of the challenges that researchers working in the fields of bilingualism and second-language acquisition (SLA) and in the field of language testing face in developing comparable and culturally and cognitively appropriate data collection and language assessment tools for bilingual children from rural minority-language communities with low levels of literacy. These challenges include defining language proficiency in a bilingual continuum, avoiding cultural biases, and attaining cross-linguistic validity. Using evidence from oral proficiency and aural comprehension tasks developed for bilingualism and SLA research and for the assessment of language proficiency in Quechua–Spanish and Aymara–Spanish bilingual students in the public schools of Peru, I illustrate recent attempts to develop appropriate tests to probe into bilingual students' linguistic competence.

Language policy in the European Union

This article analyses some of the potential language policy scenarios in a democratic, integrated European Union. It examines how a functional multilingual, democratic, ecological language policy in the European Parliament may ensure equal participation in, and benefit from, democratic processes for both majority and minority language communities. How multilingualism is managed and language policy is formed will be crucial in creating the identity of a future European Union, which the author discusses through a reinterpretation of what the EU might stand for; summarised in the notions of an English Union, an Elite Union, an Equal Union or an Esperanto Union. Language policy issues are especially important with regard to education, as multilingual education could be viewed as a democratic tool safeguarding active citizen participation in an intergovernmental forum such as the EU. Based on a three-language model it is possible to sustain a secure ethnic identity or identities via teaching through the mother tongue(s), as well as by acquiring at least one lingua franca and additional languages through carefully planned and well-organised multilingual education. The article concludes, in the long term, that the optimal language policy alternative would be one employing a planned language (such as Esperanto) as lingua franca, as a relay language and as an internal working language for the EU institutions.

Bridging the Gap: The Development of Appropriate Educational Strategies for Minority Language Communities in the Philippines

There are more than 6000 languages spoken by the 6 billion people in the world today – however, those languages are not evenly divided among the world’s population – over 90% of people globally speak only about 300 majority languages – the remaining 5700 languages being termed ‘minority languages’. These languages represent the ethnolinguistic diversity of our world and the rich cultural heritage embedded within cultural communities. Within the Philippines, language-in-education planning reflects issues associated with the needs of a culturally and linguistically diverse nation. This paper examines language policy and planning at national level as it relates to elementary education for ethnolinguistic minorities. It includes a case study of one innovative community based approach being implemented by a northern Philippines language community to provide multilingual education using the first language of the learners as a foundation for quality language education in the national and international prescribed languages of instruction in the Philippines.

COLIN H. WILLIAMS (ed.). Language revitalization: Policy and planning in Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. 388 pp. £35 ($69.95)

By the end of the twentieth century, Wales had become a hotbed of language planning. The sharp decline experienced by the Welsh language in the first half of the century had given way to a state of “level maintenance.” The Welsh Language Act of 1993 has brought about marked improvements in the language's profile and in people's attitudes toward bilingualism. Language planning in Wales has created significant interest in other parts of Europe and around the world in other minority language communities hoping to achieve something of the Welsh successes of recent years. Nevertheless, if there have been important accomplishments, much still remains to be done to turn Wales into a truly bilingual society. The edited collection Language revitalization is an excellent, state-of-the-art volume by top specialists who analyze in detail what has been accomplished and identify remaining challenges.

Developing Curriculum Materials for Endangered Language Education: Lessons from the Field

With the gloomy prospect of massive language extinction over the next 100 years, efforts by applied linguists, educational anthropologists, and multilingual educators to reverse the trends in language loss are increasing. Education in minority languages seems to be a key to maintaining endangered languages and cultures. One often cited challenge to effecticve minority language education in multilingual settings is the difficulty of developing curriculum and instructional material in many languages. In this paper, current efforts in minority language education are described and patterns analysed. Minority language communities themselves are a major source of what is necessary – but rarely sufficient – educationally. Endangered language communities cannot go it alone. The author suggests several key collaborations between the minority communities and outside organisations and agencies. In addition, a generalised curriculum development resource is suggested as facilitative of community-based education programmes that result in effective, culturally appropriate instruction.

2. RECENT RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE

From its beginnings to the present, research in the field of language maintenance and shift has advocated the preservation of ethnic minority and immigrant languages. This review of current published literature, which continues that advocacy, focuses on a narrow time frame (approximately 1998–2002) in order to provide broad, worldwide coverage of different language contact situations. The discussion largely excludes questions of language policy and planning, but includes studies that use traditional as well as newer methodologies to illuminate how educational institutions, the media, ethnic language literacy, family relationships, and friendship networks—to name the more significant factors in maintenance—can be employed to encourage maintenance and language revitalization. After considering recent theoretical and critical works, this review surveys various countries in which research within ethnic and minority language communities illuminates language maintenance, or shift, or revitalization for that group. Current research suggests that use of the ethnic language in the family and friendship networks and its transgenerational transmission are still of crucial importance, as are the conditions in the greater society that provide support for its linguistic viability as a means of communication within and outside the immediate community.

Beetsma, Danny (Ed.). (2002). Trilingual Primary Education in Europe. Inventory of the provisions for trilingual primary education in minority language communities of the European Union. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy (138 pages). [Rezension

Rezension zu: Beetsma, Danny (Ed.). (2002). Trilingual Primary Education in Europe. Inventory of the provisions for trilingual primary education in minority language communities of the European Union.

Attitudes towards Incipient Mankurtism among Kazakhstani College Students

This article examines the attitudes of prospective Kazakhstani parents towards the language in which their children would be raised, based on a survey of 857 Kazakhstani college students. “Mankurtism” is the russification of the elite of non-Russian nationalities. This article examines linguistic mankurtism in light of one goal of Kazakhstani language policy, that all citizens master Kazakh. Results indicating the desire to raise children in Kazakh include male gender, rural residence, and Kazakh as maternal language. The gender and residence results may indicate that urbanites, in particular young couples, will demonstrate mankurtism. Given the primacy accorded mother tongue, the relative disinclination among young Kazakh women to raise their prospective children in Kazakh,which parallels patterns of language choice among women in minority language communities in Austria, Brittany, and East Sutherland,poses a challenge to the spread of Kazakh.

Waking the Sleeping Giant: Engaging and Capitalizing on the Sociocultural Strengths of the Latino Community

Putting together the language minority community's initiatives and talents into educational programs awakens the community's “sleeping giant” and untaps powerful resources for our school systems. Adopting a sociocultural perspective and using Arlington's Empowering Families Through Literacy as a case, this article analyzes an example of an educational project designed and implemented in an increasingly diverse, multicultural, and multilingual community by a group of grassroots organizations. Implementing lessons learned from research, theory, and standards for an effective pedagogy, and recognizing and building upon the students' first language and culture, this study exemplifies the conscious efforts of immigrant communities to join efforts to academically succeed in America.

Sociolinguistic discontinuity in minority language communities

We discuss the Labovian view of the speech community against the backdrop of data from research on variation in minority languages. While members of the same speech community normally share a set of norms for social and stylistic constraints on variation and normally share a common grammar, a number of researchers have noted that some speech communities include subgroups of speakers that are unlike the rest of the community in that they observe different rules or constraints on variable usage. We provide an overview of the main types of discontinuities in variable usage which have been attested both in majority and minority languages and discuss twelve cases of discontinuity which have been documented in the speech of Franco-Ontarian adolescents residing in minority Francophone communities. We also attempt to account for the existence of these discontinuities and consider their implications for the concept of the speech community.

Sociolinguistic Discontinuity in Minority Language Communities

We discuss the Labovian view of the speech community against the backdrop of data from research on variation in minority languages. While members of the same speech community normally share a set of norms for social and stylistic constraints on variation and normally share a common grammar, a number of researchers have noted that some speech communities include subgroups of speakers that are unlike the rest of the community in that they observe different rules or constraints on variable usage. We provide an overview of the main types of discontinuities in variable usage which have been attested both in majority and minority languages and discuss twelve cases of discontinuity which have been documented in the speech of Franco-Ontarian adolescents residing in minority Francophone communities. We also attempt to account for the existence of these discontinuities and consider their implications for the concept of the speech community.*

Operationalising Academic Language Proficiency in Bilingualism Research

Since minority languages are used mainly in the home and in the minority-language community,there are limited opportunities to develop register aspects of literacy which develop through schooling. This means that minority language maintenance often becomes problematic in the area of linguistic aspects of literacy,discussed here in terms of academic register. Given the limited opportunities, it is important to discover the extent to which academic register develops in minority-language children. To do so, we need first to describe the academic register of the minority-language, and then to develop instruments to measure its development. This paper looks at the means that we developed to accomplish these two tasks of description and instrument development, in a study of Spanish-English biliteracy in Australia. The task of description was performed by comparing school textbooks from early primary and mid-secondary schooling. The task of instrumentation was accomplished by developing register-sensitive multiple-choice cloze tests.

Mother-tongue literacy in the Cambodian Community of Philadelphia

In the present article mother-tongue literacy in the Cambodian Community in the United States will be dealt with. A report will be given on a longitudinal ethnographic study of literacy in two language-minority communities in the United States to describe the literacy practices and the attitudes toward Ll literacy in the Cambodian Community. On the basis ofearlier studies it is assumed that individuals develop and use their language and literacy skills in response to the environmental pressure acting on them in the particular contexts of their daily lives. The present article explores to what degree there are monoliterate or biliterate contexts that require or encourage Ll literacy use in the daily lives ofmembers ofthe Cambodian Community in the United States. The occurrence of mother-tongue literacy events in a range of Community contexts is documented. The experiences of individuals with and attitudes toward Ll literacy are also recorded. In this way the influences that appear to be affecting Ll literacy maintenance in this Community are assessed.

Development, dependency and the democratic deficit

By focusing on structural changes which have influenced the development of Welsh and English in modern Wales, this paper will examine several lessons to be gleaned from the construction of a comprehensive bilingual social order. The argument will incorporate evidence from a variety of sources and agencies concerned with language and cultural reproduction. It will survey those features which increase the dependency of the less numerous language group on the local state and conclude with a discussion on the dualism involved in simultaneously transforming the range of social domains wherein the Welsh language is used and seeking greater group autonomy so as to influence the construction and direction of those domains. The central thrust of the argument will be to ask to what extent our interpretation of democratic accountability within minority language communities will have to be reinterpreted as the price to be paid for a fully functional bilingual society in Wales.

Ausbau sociolinguistics and the perception of language status in contemporary Europe

Minority language communities may suffer from many different types of disadvantage. One problem that they may face is the failure or refusal of majority communities to recognise their language as a language rather than a dialect. The degree to which minority languages are vulnerable to this kind of attack depends to a considerable extent on their linguistic characteristics. In investigating this kind of vulnerability, it is helpful to consider Kloss's distinction between Abstand and Ausbau languages. This distinction is also helpful in achieving a better understanding of other political and cultural problems concerning language vs. dialect status in modern Europe.

On coming to our census: A layman's guide to demolinguistics

Abstract In this paper, I will provide a layout of a demographic approach to the study of linguistic minorities (now in somewhat esoteric circles known as demolinguistics). After the specification of a conceptual framework, I will discuss the main analytical issues, particular data needs and research possibilities. On the basis of empirical results from Canada and Finland, I will illustrate the potential of the demolinguistic approach for the study of second‐language acquisition, language maintenance and shift pertaining to linguistic minorities. Finally, I will show how this approach can assist us in assessing the relative contributions of fertility, mortality, nuptiality, migration and language shift to the survival or decline of minority language communities.

How Long? A Synthesis of Research on Academic Achievement in a Second Language

To expand the current theoretical base in second language acquisition, this article proposes nine generalizations on optimal age, L1 cognitive development, and L2 academic achievement. These generalizations summarize the author's and others' research on second language acquisition for schooling purposes. In this synthesis, relationships among the following variables are considered: first language acquisition, second language acquisition, student age at the time of exposure to a second language, academic achievement (as measured by standardized tests in all subject areas), membership in a language majority or language minority community, and language(s) of instruction in school. The five new generalizations presented at the end of the article, which are based on research on academic achievement in a second language, merit additional research to validate and refine them.