scholarly journals Dynamics of linguistic and social change: Minority languages in Hungary and the sociolinguistic situation of Serbian

2009 ◽  
pp. 331-357
Author(s):  
Marija Ilic
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Language Ideology ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
The Past ◽  
Language Research

Over the past decades, minority languages and processes of language shift/maintenance have become an important scholarly concern. This paper aims to describe in brief the sociolinguistic situation of the Serbian minority language in Hungary with special attention paid to the relation between language ideology and processes of language shift/maintenance. The first section of this paper presents the current socio-political framework for protection of minority languages in Hungary. The second paper's section provides an overview of the main sociolinguistic surveys of the minority languages in Hungary that have had many centuries of contact with Serbian i.e. German, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Croatian. Finally, the paper provides a quick recapitulation of the Serbian language research in Hungary, and depicts the current sociolinguistic situation of Serbian.

Endangered minority and regional languages (‘dialects’) in Italy

Modern Italy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Coluzzi
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Expert Group ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
The Past ◽  
Regional Languages ◽  
Italian Dialects ◽  
Local Languages

The Italian linguistic situation is characterised by a remarkable number of language varieties, although the development of Italian in the past 150 years has been the cause of a language shift from local languages to Italian. The degree of endangerment suffered by so-called ‘Italian dialects’ is shown using the Major Evaluative Factors of Language Vitality drawn up by a UNESCO ad hoc expert group in 2003, and the data offered by the 2006 ISTAT survey on language use. The debate in Italy on the vitality of ‘dialects’ and their future has done little to activate mechanisms and strategies to reverse the worrying language shift that both minority languages and ‘dialects’ are undergoing.

scholarly journals Languages and language varieties: Comparative research on the linguistic attitudes in four bilingual minority communities in Hungary

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-56
Author(s):  
Anna Borbely
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Research ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Advanced Stage ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Positive Attitudes

A central issue of this paper is to study the patterns invariation of attitudes toward minority language varieties in four minority communities from Hungary: German, Slovak, Serb and Romanian. This study takes part from the research which focuses on how to obtain significant information about the mechanism of the language shift process concerning autochthonous minorities in Hungary. The results demonstrate that in the course of language shift communities at an advanced stage of language shift have less positive attitudes toward their minority languages than individuals from communities where language shift is in a less advanced stage. In Hungarian minority groups speakers’ attitudes toward minority language varieties (dialect vs. standard) are the symptoms of language shift.

scholarly journals Language extinction and linguistic fronts

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (94) ◽  
pp. 20140028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neus Isern ◽  
Joaquim Fort
Keyword(s):  
Language Shift ◽  
Reaction Diffusion ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Language Diversity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Welsh Language ◽  
Language Competition ◽  
Area Of Influence ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Good Agreement

Language diversity has become greatly endangered in the past centuries owing to processes of language shift from indigenous languages to other languages that are seen as socially and economically more advantageous, resulting in the death or doom of minority languages. In this paper, we define a new language competition model that can describe the historical decline of minority languages in competition with more advantageous languages. We then implement this non-spatial model as an interaction term in a reaction–diffusion system to model the evolution of the two competing languages. We use the results to estimate the speed at which the more advantageous language spreads geographically, resulting in the shrinkage of the area of dominance of the minority language. We compare the results from our model with the observed retreat in the area of influence of the Welsh language in the UK, obtaining a good agreement between the model and the observed data.

Romani in the Czech sociolinguistic space

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (238) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Eckert
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Language Ideology ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Economic Disadvantage ◽  
Standard Language ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Standard Language Ideology

AbstractThe study was prompted by the question of whether Romani, the language of the dominant and traditional minority, is acceptable as a language in the profile of a bilingual living in the Czech Republic. It outlines the situation of Romani in the Czech sociolinguistic space and argues for its rehabilitation so that it could be studied, taught, maintained in a community, and used to represent its speakers. This is necessary in order to raise its prestige, positively affect its speakers’ identity and in turn stimulate an attitudinal shift and social change. Obstacles to Romani rehabilitation are related to it being framed by Czech culture, which is driven by a standard language ideology rendering Romani a stigmatized language. Romani speakers distance themselves from Romani dialects and the ethnolect as expressions of social and economic disadvantage. Recent research has established that Romani has shown signs of language shift.

Language Shift

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lenore A. Grenoble
Keyword(s):  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Language shift occurs when a community of users replaces one language by another, or “shifts” to that other language. Although language shift can and does occur at the level of the individual speaker, it is shift at the level of an entire community that is associated with widespread language replacement and loss. Shift is a particular kind of language loss, and differs from language attrition, which involves the loss of a language over an individual’s lifetime, often the result of aging or of language replacement (as in shift). Both language shift and attrition are in contrast to language maintenance, the continuing use of a language. Language maintenance and revitalization programs are responses to language shift, and are undertaken by communites who perceive that their language is threatened by a decrease in usage and under threat of loss. Language shift is widespread and can be found with majority- or minority-language populations. It is often associated with immigrant groups who take up the majority language of their new territory, leaving behind the language of their homeland. For minority-language speaker communities, language shift is generally the result of a combination of factors, in particular colonization. A nexus of factors—historical, political, social, and economic—often provides the impetus for a community to ceasing speaking their ancestral language, replacing it with the language of the majority, and usually politically dominant, group. Language shift is thus a social issue, and often coupled with other indicators of social distress. Language endangerment is the result of language shift, and in fact shift is its most widespread cause.Since the 1960s there has been ever-increasing interest across speaker communities and linguists to work to provide opportunities to learn and use minority languages to offset shift, and to document speakers in communities under the threat of shift.

The dilemmas of ‘saving’ a dying language

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-286
Author(s):  
Silvia Dal Negro
Keyword(s):  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
Standard Variety ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Funding Support ◽  
Italian Context ◽  
Administrative Domains

Abstract Walser German is a prototypical example of ‘extreme’ minority language, the survival of which appears at present extremely critical, at least in the Italian context. From a sociolinguistic point of view, Walser German is dispersed in a discontinuous territory and subject to language shift, language attrition and demographic shrinkage. Linguistically, it is part of a dialect continuum that stretches north of the Alps; yet, the dialects spoken in Italy have developed independently from each other and from their Swiss counterparts, with the result that they are now mutually unintelligible, and structurally too distant from Standard Modern German for this variety to be eligible as their Dachsprache. Given this background, the effects of a law protecting and promoting minority languages were foreseeable: Walser German is not a language under any sociolinguistic respect and could neither be protected or promoted by encouraging its use in administrative domains or developing a standard variety. However, what actually happened was not foreseeable either. Legal and funding support fostered documentation activities creating or enhancing local expertise in various domains; in addition, communities started to feel legitimised of a cultural and linguistic ‘otherness’ that could be exploited as a commodity, especially in the domain of tourism.

Moving Figures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Kai Nelson Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sixth Generation ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Raymond Williams

This book examines how the films of the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke evoke the affective “felt” experience of China’s contemporary social and economic transformations, by examining the class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in the films. Each chapter analyzes a figure’s socio-historical context, its filmic representation, and its recurring cinematic tropes in order to understand how they create what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” – feelings that concretize around particular times, places, generations, and classes that are captured and evoked in art – and charts how this felt experience has changed over the past forty years of China’s economic reforms. The book argues that that Jia’s cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social change, but also as an effort to engage the audience’s emotional responses during this period of China’s massive and fast-paced transformation.

Overseas Development Administration. A Guide to Social Analysis for Projects in Developing Countries. London: HMSO. 1995. viii+248 pages. Hardbound. £18.95.

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-190
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Economic Perspective ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Overseas Development

This book, hereinafter referred to as the Guide, has been developed for those social analysts (e.g., anthropologists, sociologists, and human geographers) who have had little or no practical experience in applying their knowledge as development practitioners. In the past, development projects would be analysed from a narrow financial and economic perspective. But with the evolution of thinking on development, this narrow financial and economic aspect has now been broadened to include the impact on society as the very meaning of development has now come to symbolise social change. Thus, development is not restricted only to plans and figures; the human environment in its entirety is now considered for analysis while designing and implementing development projects.

Language Use and Sustainable Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Policy-Makers and Educators in Northeast Vietnamese Areas

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-130
Author(s):  
Ha Ngan Ngo ◽  
Maya Khemlani David
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Positive Attitudes ◽  
The Status ◽  
Wedding Songs

Vietnam represents a country with 54 ethnic groups; however, the majority (88%) of the population are of Vietnamese heritage. Some of the other ethnic groups such as Tay, Thai, Muong, Hoa, Khmer, and Nung have a population of around 1 million each, while the Brau, Roman, and Odu consist only of a hundred people each. Living in northern Vietnam, close to the Chinese border (see Figure 1), the Tay people speak a language of the    Central    Tai language group called Though, T'o, Tai Tho, Ngan, Phen, Thu Lao, or Pa Di. Tay remains one of 10 ethnic languages used by 1 million speakers (Buoi, 2003). The Tày ethnic group has a rich culture of wedding songs, poems, dance, and music and celebrate various festivals. Wet rice cultivation, canal digging and grain threshing on wooden racks are part of the Tày traditions. Their villages situated near the foothills often bear the names of nearby mountains, rivers, or fields. This study discusses the status and role of the Tày language in Northeast Vietnam. It discusses factors, which have affected the habitual use of the Tay language, the connection between language shift and development and provides a model for the sustainability and promotion of minority languages. It remains fundamentally imperative to strengthen and to foster positive attitudes of the community towards the Tày language. Tày’s young people must be enlightened to the reality their Tày non-usage could render their mother tongue defunct, which means their history stands to be lost.

The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Helen Keller ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Biographical scholarship provides a means by which to understand the past. Disability biography writes disabled people into historical narratives and cultural discourses, acknowledging power, action, and consequence. Disability biography also analyzes the role of ableism in shaping relationships, systems of power, and societal ideals. When written with skilled storytelling, rigorous study, nuance, and insight, disability biography enriches analyses of people living in the past. Disability biography makes clear the multiple ways by which individuals and communities labor, make kinship, persevere, and both resist and create social change. When using a disability analysis, biographies of disabled people (particularly people famous for their disability, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Helen Keller) reveal the relationality and historically embedded nature of disability. In an ableist world, such acts can be revolutionary.

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