Prestige Language Research Articles

Translating Soviet Moldova’s Language Politics: Observations on Tatiana Ţîbuleac’s The Glass Garden in Spanish Translation

Grădina de sticlă (The Glass Garden) is the second novel by the prize-winning Moldovan and Romanian author Tatiana Ţîbuleac. Set in Soviet Chişinău towards the end of the communist era, the book is narrated by a Moldovan-speaking young girl who has been adopted by an elderly Russian-speaking woman. Language and identity play key roles in the book, as the child is encouraged to forgo the Moldovan language and to learn how to speak Russian, the language of Soviet prestige and power. This personal struggle occurs against the background of the major sociopolitical and linguistic changes of perestroika and beyond, including the independence of Moldova, and is reflected by the fact that the text of the novel itself (though originally written in Ro-manian) is sprinkled with words and phrases in untransliterated Russian. Accordingly, noting that this complex linguistic situation could conceivably pose a challenge for translators of the novel into other languages, this study contrasts the original with its Spanish version, El jardín de vidrio. The aim is to show how, as part of the legacy of Soviet rule, the enduring complexities of Moldova’s linguistic and socio-political situation can be rendered through translation. Focussing initially on how the Spanish translation deals with the general features of Moldova’s language situation, it then moves to detailing how the novel’s frequent usage of Russian and the Cyrillic script is accommodated in the translated version. Lastly, selected aspects centring on the interplay between languages (e.g. differences in script and lexis, wordplay, misspellings) are scrutinised.

Multilingual Habitus and Language Prestige: Value Profiles of Croatian, English, German, and Italian in Croatia

In a multilingual world, languages represent various forms of capital in society and gain or lose prestige depending on how transferable they are perceived to be into social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capital. The dominance of the English language and social media content in the Information Age affects people’s language worldwide. In many countries, there is a significant trend toward diglossia, where the national language is used alongside English, leading to the marginalization of all other languages. In Croatia, an EU member state, the most popular foreign languages are English, German, and Italian. However, due to the linguistic dominance of English, foreign languages other than English have experienced a loss of status. This shift implies that people’s perceptions of the types of capital those languages represent are changing and that there is a movement from multilingualism toward diglossia. This goes against the strongly promoted idea of multilingualism in the EU, where language variety is considered a valuable form of symbolic and cultural capital. Within that framework, this study aims to examine the attitudes of multilingual speakers in Croatia toward the four languages included in the study. The goal is to determine whether they perceive a language to represent a form of social, cultural, economic, or symbolic capital. Furthermore, based on the results, it will be concluded whether multilingual language practice is affected and whether there is a clash between the desired multilingual habitus of European citizens and their perceptions of language values, which determine their language choices.

Language attitudes: sociolinguistic aspect

Language attitudes are pivotal in shaping spheres of language use, impacting language change and policy. They reflect how communities perceive and value languages, influencing language choice, education, and social interactions. Studies on language attitudes explore preferences in language instruction, societal perceptions, and the potential for language discrimination. Positive attitudes can elevate language prestige, while negative ones may contribute to language decline. Loyalty to a language or a variety can resist influences from a dominant language, especially if a minority language prestige is high. The article comprises reviews on ‘language attitudes’ as a term, an overview of the history of research on the perceptions of a language, analysis of related changes occurring among speakers. The objective of the article is to provide a forecast for the future fate of Karelian, Kalmyk, and Yakut languages by analyzing language attitudes. The focus of the study was on the perceptions of a language held by members of a speech community, i.e., those who have no command of the studied language, as these perceptions were deemed highly significant. When the overall sentiment toward a language is positive, and speech community members recognize the importance of having at least a basic proficiency in it, the prospects for the language's growth appear promising. Such favorable attitudes may lead speech community members to actively encourage language study among their children or grandchildren or even decide to learn the language themselves later in life, creating a potentially fertile environment for a language to flourish.

Indonesian Twitter Users’ Language Attitude Towards English-Indonesian Code-mixing

Social media users need language as a tool to communicate, both in verbal and written form. Over time, the language used in social media also shows some significant growth. Talking about language in social media, there is an interesting phenomenon recently on social media that can be reached within the internet, namely the code-mixing of Indonesian and English (which in Indonesian are also popularly known as Jaksel language, Keminggris, Kemlondo, Indoglish, Englonesian, or Bahasa Gado-gado). This study is aimed to find out the attitudes of 500 Indonesian Twitter users towards English-Indonesian code-mixing with a questionnaire. This study uses a descriptive-quantitative approach. For the result of each aspect, it shows a quite positive indication: Cognitive aspect 2.92, Affective aspect 2.75, and Conative 2.79. If the three aspects being summed up, also indicated a quite positive attitude towards the code-mixing with point or score 2.82. The attitudes come from many reasons and factors, such as the need for understandability in communication, language prestige, prepossessing or attracting attention, confidence, and language aptitude.

Socio-Economic Status and Language Prestige in the Linguistic Landscape of the U.S.-Mexico Border

ABSTRACT This study explores language choice in the public signage of a bilingual border city where the co-existing languages, Spanish and English, have unbalanced power and prestige. We analyzed 1400 signs around El Paso, Texas to investigate Spanish-English bilingualism, whether the signs reflect the demographic characteristics of the speech community, the vitality and prestige of both languages and the relationship between sign location and language choice. The results reveal that the use of English in signs is over-represented (63%) in a city where most of the population speaks Spanish at home (67%). Proximity to the border with Mexico and lower socio-economic status are strong predictors of Spanish use in signs, as are certain business categories.

“Well-educated people speak English,but better educated people speak Frenchas well”

Abstract With the possibility to enroll in courses in nineteen different languages, the free university of Brussels (ULB) has opted for a linguistic offer that reflects the city’s highly multilingual character. In the faculty of languages and literature, students interact in and with multiple languages on a daily basis. In a study which interrogated these students on their linguistic representations, representations related to prestige were shown to be an important part of the collected responses. This paper aims to provide an overview of the different manifestations and interpretations of the ‘language of prestige’ linguistic representation in this sample of participants regarding the languages taught at the faculty. It also explores various implications that this representation has for language learning, as well as questions raised by the possible interpretative bias of the researcher trying to observe and study linguistic representations. In addition, this paper written in English relating research conducted in French addresses the issue of ‘epistemological translation’ and the challenges it poses.

Komi – Russian and Karelian – Russian Code-Switching

Introduction. The language situation in Russia is unique with a fair number of languages spoken on its territory and all of them having different status and scope of use. This implies the relevance of the study that focuses on the analysis of code-switching in the spoken language of the bilinguals speaking Komi and Russian and Karelian and Russian. The novelty of the study is implied by the analysis of the code-switching in the language pairs mentioned above. This contributes to the development of the code-switching theory.Methodology and sources. The methods of language data collection and processing are sociolinguistic methods of interviewing, questionnaire, observation, quantitative and descriptive methods. The research material are scripted dialogues with bilinguals as well as the “Komi mu” and “Parma gor” 2022 issues.Results and discussion. The study of the Komi-Russian and Karelian-Russian code-switching was conducted using P. Muysken’s topology of code-mixing. P. Muysken sees code-switching as alternation, insertion, and congruent lexicalization according to the degree of the foreign word assimilation in the matrix language. The features of the spoken language of the Komi-Russian bilinguals are the frequent use of Russian discursive and introductory lexical items and adverbs; the nouns and the adjectives usually following the grammatical rules of Komi; the respondents giving preference to Russian versions when using numerals. For the spoken language of the Karelian-Russian bilinguals it is typical to address to Russian vocabulary, especially when mentioning dates, numbers, and using introductory words and phrases; Russian words are also being quite easily transformed according to the Karelian grammar through its case system.Conclusion. Spontaneous speech of the bilingual interviewees contains a great number of code-switching, that could be a convincing demonstration of the language shift and is conditioned by a number of extralinguistic and linguistic factors, such as language prestige, language functionality, language situation, the native language of the interlocutor, and the willing of the respondent to use a certain language.

Modeling language ideologies for the dynamics of languages in contact.

In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in contact often overlook the influence of language ideologies. Language ideologies play a crucial role in understanding language usage within a cultural community, encompassing shared beliefs, assumptions, and feelings toward specific language forms. These ideologies shed light on the social perceptions of different language varieties expressed as language attitudes. In this study, we introduce an approach that incorporates language ideologies into a model for contact varieties by considering speaker preferences as a parameter. Our findings highlight the significance of preference in language shift, which can even outweigh the influence of language prestige associated, for example, with a standard variety. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the degree of interaction between individuals holding opposing preferences on the language shift process. Quite expectedly, our results indicate that when communities with different preferences mix, the coexistence of language varieties becomes less likely. However, variations in the degree of interaction between individuals with contrary preferences notably lead to non-trivial transitions from states of coexistence of varieties to the extinction of a given variety, followed by a return to coexistence, ultimately culminating in the dominance of the previously extinct variety. By studying finite-size effects, we observe that the duration of coexistence states increases exponentially with the network size. Ultimately, our work constitutes a quantitative approach to the study of language ideologies in sociolinguistics.

Educational Planning in Context of Yakut, Kalmyk, and Karelian Languages

This article examines one component of language planning — educational planning. The main elements and indicators of this type of planning were identified. The authors discuss issues related to educational planning in three republics of the Russian Federation. The study was conducted based on the materials of the Kalmyk, Karelian, and Yakut languages. The aim of the research was to analyze educational planning as a set of existing opportunities for language learning. One of the objectives was to determine the scope and directions of activity in educational language planning. The second objective was to provide an overview of educational planning based on the materials of the Karelian, Kalmyk, and Yakut languages in synchrony and diachrony. The third objective was to analyze educational language planning according to our identified criteria and clarify the prestige of languages in the perception of speakers as a motivational factor for their study. To achieve this, the results of field research conducted in the three republics in 2021-2022 were analyzed. As a result of the study, it was concluded that the ethnic self-awareness of respondents is at a high level, and the symbolic significance of national languages is significant. However, there is a tendency towards a decrease in the number of individuals interested in studying their native (national) language in school education.

English in Singapore, a city of migrants: Standard dialect ideology and attitudes towards Singlish

Singapore is a city state whose location and history as a trading post and a British colony has made it a wealthy multiethnic and multicultural country. The history and current trends of migration have resulted in four official languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. In addition to Standard English Singaporeans use an informal code known as Singlish, which is generally based on English but draws on lexical, grammatical and phonological resources of multiple languages spoken by Singaporeans. This paper investigates negative attitudes towards Singlish expressed by government-related sources such as websites and educational campaigns held in the late 2010’s. It begins with defining language prestige and prescriptivism. Then, it describes the sociolinguistic context of English in Singapore, the local Standard English and selected features of Singlish. The main part of this paper is the analysis of texts and videos expressing prejudice against Singlish. The discussion attempts to explain the sources of linguistic ideology in Singapore by referring to ethnolinguistic vitality, historicity and so-called purity. The paper concludes that Singlish is a unique mode of expression for Singaporeans.

Visuals to Ideologies: Exploring the Linguistic Landscapes of Mindanao State University Marawi Campus

The research demonstrated the linguistic landscapes of the Mindanao State University Marawi Campus in the Southern Philippines, known as the “Melting Pot of the South”, where multilingualism, multiculturalism, and multimodality were quite situated. Linguistic Landscape (LL) encompassed and manifested the range of language use in society. Under the theoretical lens of linguistics, the research aimed to qualitatively and descriptively illustrate the linguistic tokens that marked the context of the school community. The needed data were photographed and collected inside the university premises and analyzed in terms of the number of languages used, language choice, and types of signs. The research reveals a sociolinguistic paradox: the multilingual realities of the school community and the prevalent exhibitions of monolingual English on its linguistic landscapes, which consequently seems to dishearten the status, propagation, promotion, and/or effectivity of multilingual policies and education in the Philippines. Furthermore, the research provides theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, it shows another lens of the notion of presumed language prestige and hierarchies. Furthermore, practically, it aids the deepening of knowledge and understanding of language use, and its implications, in public spaces. Finally, the research suggests revisiting and recalibrating the exhibition of multilingualism in the country by simply considering the status of language use in their environments, as they do not just reflect or manifest languages but also propagate and promote them.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

The visibility and salience of languages in an Indian agglomeration: A case study

ABSTRACT Linguistic landscaping (LL) is an emerging field of Sociolinguistics exploring the language in its textual form in public sphere. This paper investigates the visibility and prominence of languages in the public space of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India. A total of 10 city neighborhoods are chosen for the study. The corpus of the study is collected by using diversity sampling method, and the data corpus compiled for the study comprised 700 top-down and bottom-up signs, photographed at the main busiest streets of the chosen neighborhoods. The data have been categorized concerning distributions of languages and language/script combinations used on signs and the pattern of language distributions across the domains of the LL. The findings indicate that Hindi, being the first official language of the state and English, the lingua franca of the globalized world and the language of power, status and prestige dominate the linguistic landscape of the city. However, other majority languages spoken in Bihar are ignored in public spaces. Using the approach of language and symbolic power, the study explicates the hegemony of Hindi language and deprivation of regional languages in the LL of Bihar.

Gilaki: From Language Regimes into Minoritizing

The effects of language contact depend on many different factors, such as language prestige, government and community support, people’s preference, linguistic proximity of the languages, among other things. As such, while there are some broad potentially predictable outcomes in situations of language contact, it is important to analyze each language contact situation in its own context. The aim of this study is to examine the maintenance and social function of Gilaki in the city of Lahijan located in the province Gilan, Iran. This study also poses the question whether Gilaki is at risk of becoming an endangered language. The participants (N=395), students at a language center and their families, completed a questionnaire with 36 questions. The participants were grouped according to gender, age, educational background, occupation, and spouse’s mother tongue based on a self-reported data collection style. The questionnaire, inspired by Parasher’s model (1980), examined the participants’ language use and preference in six social domains of family, friendship, neighborhood, transaction, education, and administration. The findings show statistically significant differences in the participants’ preference toward Persian in all six social domains. This study contributes to the body of work in language contact of lesser analyzed languages and sheds light on the trajectory of minoritized languages.

Bottom-Up Approach to Language Policy and Planning in Kazakhstan

National and world news is constantly accompanied by inter-group dramas which are permeated by the dynamics of language use and attitudes. Conflicts can arise between the state insisting on an official language and the family and community who may support the preservation or revitalisation of heritage languages. Kazakhstan is an example of how languages (official Kazakh, the language of communication Russian and international English) coexist peacefully. Language policy and planning depend on the ability and willingness of individual members of the speech community to adopt a language. Language planning is often seen as a top-down, government-controlled activity. This paper shows that language planning can also be carried out from below. Here, we analyze the main initiatives of grassroots movements in promoting the status of the Kazakh language and the emergence of new bottom-up approaches facilitated by the Internet and present sociolinguistic survey results regarding the roles, importance and prestige of languages for the people of Kazakhstan. The focus of the study reported in this article is to monitor the transformative character of bottom-up approaches to language-policy study in Kazakhstan.

To describe or to make a description: How Uzbek verbal morphology handles borrowings

In the field of contact linguistics, how susceptible certain lexical categories are to borrowing is a major topic of discussion. Verbs, in particular, have been a subject of controversy for several decades. This study seeks to add to that discussion by consulting Uzbek as a test case. As a Turkic language with agglutinating morphology and a language that has been subject to influence from several prestige languages, Uzbek has a wealth of borrowed vocabulary available to be analyzed and a verbal system that allows for relatively easy dissection to see which processes borrowings may need to undergo in order to function as verbs in the target language. Using two online Uzbek-English dictionaries, verbs that included various derivational morphemes were obtained and analyzed to see if there was evidence of verbs being borrowed into the language. Upon completion of this analysis, it was determined that Uzbek does not borrow verbs. Instead, its rich derivational morphology allows for a highly productive system of transforming adjectives and nouns into verbs, meaning that there is no reason to borrow verbs themselves.

Leo cie lo ... A Series of Artefacts from the Near Future

The article centres on the analysis of a speculative (non)fictional text written in the Queer language Damiá by Dogai Bor (a.k.a. Chris Gylee), Second Speaker of the first Damiá speech community, with translation notes, a fictional frame in Finnish, a phonetic transcription, and a link to an online dictionary. Chris has been learning the constructed Queer language Damiá since January 2020, but in external communications and the various artworks that have been produced since, it has mostly fallen to Aslan, as First Speaker, to explain the functions and origins of the language and to lead on writings and translations. This text marks a turning point where Chris speaks directly, as Second Speaker, by writing a new text in Damiá using the skills he has attained over his initial years of study and creation in the language. As the Second Speaker takes the position of writing from a speculative future, what do they have to say about Damiá and the speech community from their unique position? How does their specific knowledge relate to notions of Queerness and Queer separatism? Do their words offer any map towards an alternative future? The text becomes a speculative (non)fiction lens that blends truth and sci-fi by writing back from a future moment in which a Queer, Damiá-speaking, separatist community is thriving. Imagining this moment provokes a confrontation of the gap between this position of thriving and our current state, as well as possible paths between the two. The text is written entirely in Damiá without translation, but includes access notes to the reader and a link to the online Damiá dictionary. This text functions opaquely, and does not offer easy accessibility in English (or any other prestige languages.) What does this perceived opacity offer? In what ways does the text and the gaps in understanding resonate with the reader as they undertake the (perhaps daunting) process of decoding and translating using the basic tools provided?

"ЛІНГВІСТИКА МОДИ": ТРЕНДОВІ НАЦІОНАЛЬНО МАРКОВАНІ МЕТАФОРИ (НА МАТЕРІАЛІ МОВИ ГАЗЕТИ)

The socio-psycho-linguistic phenomenon of fashion draws considerable linguists’ attention: one can trace the methodological foundations of this phenomenon study being dynamically developed, the formation of a corresponding metalanguage, as well as the formation of research aspects and domains, which makes it possible to justify the emergence of "fashion linguistics" as a new linguistic direction. One of the tasks of "fashion linguistics" is the study of trendy metaphors in the media style as the most popular in today’s discursive space. The newspaper language is considered to be the source that attests to the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian language progress, demonstrates its development peculiarities, as well as its corresponding trend changes. In recent years, the journalistic style has changed, which is related to extralinguistic factors – democratization of society, Russia’s invasion, increasing the Ukrainian language prestige, Ukrainian culture and history presentation, etc. The newspaper images is based on a metaphor, which is skillfully modeled by speakers, realizing various formulas, including traditional and innovative, trendy ones. One can currently view the renewal of the Ukrainian metaphor fund, which generally expands the scope of national metaphors given the specificty of Ukrainians’ mentality, the precedent expressions manifestation, as well as precedent situations for the successful creation of a language game, original meanings modeling. In journalistic style texts, we fix the fashion for so-called phytonyms, created in accordance with the Ukrainian natural philosophy principles, such as: "pumpkin metaphor", "garlic metaphor", "bean metaphor". Thus, Ukrainian media discourse demonstrates a fashion for national, a fashion for language creativity, which is embodied in Ukrainian linguistic culture. The perspective of the research is in tracking and studying the so-called fashion trends in language, in particular fashionable metaphors, in the possibilities of creating a national fund of metaphors, as well as in paying attention to the development of the terminology of fashion linguistics.

IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE IN AN ARCTIC CITY: THE CASE OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN DUDINKA

In our study, we explore the identity constructions of indigenous peoples living in Arctic urban environment. The choice of topic is justified by the fact that studies of indigenous peoples living in urban settings in the Arctic have focused on cities outside of the Russian Arctic. The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary overview of Arctic urban indigenous peoples in terms of their identity and language use. Important issues are urbanization processes and the position of indigenous peoples in the Arctic. Comparing the eight Arctic countries, the largest gaps in research on northern urban communities can be found in the Russian Federation. The migration of ethnic minorities to urban settlements has been particularly rapid under the conditions of globalization and industrialization. It should be emphasized that moving to the city may be one of the appropriate ways for these minorities to survive in Siberia. In the urban settlements surveyed, ethnic groups are trying to establish their own minority organizations and groups to preserve minority culture, language, and identity. The starting point of the study is the activities of the organizations, the current multifaceted language situation, patterns of language use, and the study of language attitudes specific to these urban minorities. In this article, we analyze the current situation of indigenous peoples in Dudinka in light of the research questions. The findings are based on recent literature and field research conducted in 2008, 2016, and 2019. We conclude by saying that although the language is disappearing, its value remains important to the community. We also think it is important to investigate the city in terms of language use because, contrary to previous expectations, urbanization does not simply mean the disappearance of small languages. On the one hand, new, highly efficient and independent scenes of language use are opening, and on the other hand, the decline in language use is not at all accompanied by a decline in language prestige, which can also be a justification for revitalization. In addition to language, other elements of identity become important.

The rural linguistic landscape of Banat

Abstract While the main body of linguistic landscape (LL) research still focuses on urban areas, more recent works have broadened the scope and conceptualisation of LL to include rural spaces. However, these works almost exclusively examine the Global North or the Global South. Suspended somewhere between the Global North and the Global South, the so-called Global East, to which Southeast Europe belongs, is for the most part excluded not just from notions of globality, but also from LL studies. The aim of this paper is to redirect the focus of LL research to a rural area in the Global East, namely, the village Ečka in the Serbian Banat, a region with a specific and lengthy history of multilingualism. We hold that the typologies used for the study of urban LL cannot yield relevant results if applied to rural LL. Our study is based on data collected in 2020 and 2021 during six field trips to Ečka which resulted in more than 300 photographs containing inscriptions in different languages and scripts. Furthermore, we conducted participant observation by recording interviews and collecting walking narratives from locals in Serbian or Romanian. Our study confirmed that there is a gap between the official multiculturalism and multilingualism policy as declared and implemented by top-down agents and the gradual transition to monolingualism and monoscriptalism at the bottom-up level. Therefore, instead of the classical top-down and bottom-up distinction, we propose seeing the village space from a two-fold perspective: the synchronic LL, which mirrors the current use of languages, language prestige and language policies, and the memorial LL, which is a chronicle of the multilingualism of past generations and welcomes a diachronic perspective of LL.