Suchergebnisse

The selected articles compiled in the present volume are based on contributions prepared for the 17th International L.A.U.D. (Linguistic Agency University of Duisburg) Symposium held at the University of Duisburg on 23-27 March 1992. The 13 papers in this book focus on problems and issues of intercultural communication. The first part is devoted to theoretical aspects related to the interaction of language and culture and deals with the issue from anthropological, cognitive, and linguistic points of view. Part II raises issues of language policy and language planning such as the manipulation of language in intercultural contact; it includes case studies pertaining to multilingual settings, for example in Africa, Australia, Melanesia, and Europe. The volume opens with a foreword by Dell H. Hymes.

This book contains 17 studies by leading international scholars working on a wide range of topics in Arabic socio-linguistics, divided into four parts. The studies in Part 1 address questions of national language planning in a diglossic situation, with a particular focus on North Africa. Part 2 explores the relationship of identity and language choice in different Arabic-speaking communities living both within and outside the Arab World. Part 3 examines language choice in such diverse contexts as popular preaching, humour and Arab women's writing. Part 4 contains 5 papers in which variation

This article analyses changes to the language policy in Russia in 2017, and their effects on the state (national) languages of Russia's republics within the education system. In July 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the Council on Interethnic Relations, addressing the language rights of the Russian-speaking population and stressing the existing limit of the power of Russia's 22 ethnic republics to introduce compulsory study of their official languages. The President's statements provoked widespread prosecutorial inspections in the republics' schools and a new round of public discussion about language policy. Public discontent in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Komi led to protests against both ethnic Russians and the native speakers of languages recognised as co-official with Russian ('state languages of the republics'). The authorities of some republics publicly disagreed with the position taken by the federal government. In other republics, however, the President's speech did not trigger any public discussion. In many republics, it looks like the regional authorities will ultimately accept the decision of the federal government and speakers of republican languages will not actively defend their languages. Effectively, the balance of rights of the federation and the republics for the establishment of state languages, achieved in the 1990s, was violated.

Must a viable nation be made up largely of one language group? If this is true, then there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of establishing a European political community. Recent events in India, Canada, Belgium, Nigeria and several other areas give one cause to think that there may be some basis for drawing that conclusion.

We model political contestation over school language policy, within linguistic communities where weak property rights protection leads to high decentralized expropriation. We show that improvements in governance institutions that facilitate property rights protection might exacerbate such language conflicts, even as they reduce the chances of persisting with educational indigenization, while, paradoxically, increasing the net social benefit from doing so. Our findings offer explanations of why languages and cultures of the colonizers continue to play a dominant role in the educational systems of most post-colonial developing societies, and why early post-independence attempts at cultural-linguistic indigenization were either reversed or slowed down subsequently. The main policy implication of our analysis relates to the connection it establishes between property rights protection and the welfare consequences of educational indigenization: such indigenization may improve social welfare when weak institutions lead to weak property rights protection, but reduce it otherwise.

As the colonial hegemony of empire fades around the world, the role of language in ethnic conflict has become increasingly topical, as have issues concerning the right of speakers to choose and use their preferred language(s). Such rights are often asserted and defended in response to their being violated. The importance of understanding these events and issues, and their relationship to individual, ethnic, and national identity, is central to research and debate in a range of fields outside of, as well as within, linguistics. This book provides a clearly written introduction for linguists and non-specialists alike, presenting basic facts about the role of language in the formation of identity and the preservation of culture. It articulates and explores categories of conflict and language rights abuses through detailed presentation of illustrative case studies, and distills from these key cross-linguistic and cross-cultural generalizations