Full Description
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781138125124, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This volume addresses a crucial, yet largely unaddressed dimension of minority language standardization, namely how social actors engage with, support, negotiate, resist and even reject such processes. The focus is on social actors rather than language as a means for analysing the complexity and tensions inherent in contemporary standardization processes. By considering the perspectives and actions of people who participate in or are affected by minority language politics, the contributors aim to provide a comparative and nuanced analysis of the complexity and tensions inherent in minority language standardisation processes. Echoing Fasold (1984), this involves a shift in focus from a sociolinguistics of language to a sociolinguistics of people.
The book addresses tensions that are born of the renewed or continued need to standardize 'language' in the early 21st century across the world. It proposes to go beyond the traditional macro/micro dichotomy by foregrounding the role of actors as they position themselves as users of standard forms of language, oral or written, across sociolinguistic scales. Language policy processes can be seen as practices and ideologies in action and this volume therefore investigates how social actors in a wide range of geographical settings embrace, contribute to, resist and also reject (aspects of) minority language standardization.
Contents
Introduction: Standardising Minority Languages: Reinventing peripheral languages in the 21st century?
James Costa, Haley De Korne, and Pia Lane
Basque Standardization and the New Speaker: Political Praxis and the Shifting Dynamics of Authority and Value
Jacqueline Urla, Estibaliz Amorrortu, Ane Ortega, and Jone Goirigolzarri
On the pros and cons of standardizing Scots: Notes from the North of a small island
James Costa
Legitimating Limburgish: The reproduction of heritage
Diana Camps
Negotiating the standard in contemporary Galicia
Bernadette O'Rourke
Language standardisation as frozen mediated actions - the materiality of language standardization
Pia Lane
Language standardization in the aftermath of the Soviet Language Empire
Lenore Grenoble and Nadezhd Ja. Bulatova
Standardization of Inuit languages in Canada
Donna Patrick, Kumiko Murasugi, and Jeela Palluq-Cloutier
"That's too much to learn": Writing, longevity, and urgency in the Isthmus Zapotec speech community
Haley De Korne
Orthography, Standardization, and Register: The Case of Manding
Coleman Donaldson
Beyond Colonial Linguistics: The Dialectic of Control and Resistance in the Standardization of isiXhosa
Ana Deumert and Nkululeko Mabandla
Visions and revisions of minority languages: Standardization and its dilemmas
Susan Gal
