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Exploring the Dynamics of Multilingualism
This book addresses the meanings and implications of multilingualism and its uses in a context of rapid changes, in Europe and around the world. All types of organisations, including the political institutions of the European Union, universities and private-sector companies must rise to the many challenges posed by operating in a multilingual environment. This requires them, in particular, to make the best use of speakers’ very diverse linguistic repertoires. The contributions in this volume, which stem from the DYLAN research project financed by the European Commission as part of its Sixth Framework Programme, examine at close range how these repertoires develop, how they change and how a...
The Tyranny of Writing
This book examines the powerful role of writing in society. The invention of writing, independently at various places and times in history, always stood at the cradle of powerful civilizations. It is impossible to imagine modern life without writing. As individuals and social groups we hold high expectations of its potential for societal and personal development. Globally, huge resources have been and are being invested in promoting literacy worldwide. So what could possibly be tyrannical about writing? The title is inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's argument against writing as an object of linguistic research and what he called la tyrannie de la lettre. His critique denounced writing as an...
Multilingual Practices in Language History
Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisi...
The Politics of Multilingualism
This book proposes a multidisciplinary assessment of the impact of complex diversity on language politics and policies, analysing how the legacies of the old interact with the challenges of the new. Its main focus is on the interplay of multilingualism on the one hand, and the dynamics of transnationalism, globalisation, and Europeanisation on the other. This interplay confronts contemporary societies with unprecedented questions, as they face the need to come to grips with increasingly varied and pervasive manifestations of linguistic and cultural diversity. This volume develops an integrative approach that identifies the key social and political dimensions at hand, offering an innovative contribution to the ongoing conversation on the manifestations and management of multilingualism.
Past, Present and Future of a Language Border
This volume revisits the issue of language contact and conflict in the Low Countries across space and time. The contributions deal with important sites of Germanic-Romance contact along the different language borders, covering languages such as French, Dutch, German, and Luxembourgish. This first monograph in English on the topic broadens our understanding of current-day issues by integrating a historical perspective, showing how language contact and conflict operated from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the 18th and 19th centuries, and into the 20th and 21st centuries.
Positioning the Self and Others
Though positioning has been addressed in social psychology and in identity construction, less attention has been paid to the specific linguistic markers which are drawn upon in discourse to position the self and other(s). This volume focusses on address terms, pragmatic markers, code switching/choice and orthography, the indexicalities of which are explored in different communicative activities. The volume is unusual in: i) the range of languages which are covered: Bergamasco, Brazilian Portuguese, English, Finnish, French, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Latin, Russian, Spanish and Swedish; ii) the inclusion of different communicative settings and text-types: workplace emails, everyday and institutional conversations, interviews, migrant narratives, radio phone-ins, dyadic and group settings, road-signs, service encounters; iii) its consideration of both synchronic and diachronic factors; iv) its mix of theoretical and methodological approaches. The volume illustrates some of the linguistic means speakers draw on to position themselves and others and hopes to stimulate further research studies in this vein.
Literacy Skills as Local Intangible Capital
This book studies the ”grey area” of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people’s libraries in one area of Central Finland. The study explores the influence of social, cultural, geographical and economic phenomena, such as the spread of revivalist movements, on the reading habits of the local population and reveals interesting reasons why the establishment of elementary schools and popular libraries and the growth of functional literacy did not automatically increase the informational capital of the common people of remote regions or lead to their social advancement. This study represents a methodological experiment in describi...
English in Business and Commerce
This volume fills an important gap in exploring English in the domains of business and commerce through the prism of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, as opposed to analyzing business genres or taking a linguodidactic approach. It expands the regional coverage of English in Europe, with several studies based in Central Europe, and also considers contexts which interact with Europe even though they are physically outside of it (Asia, Africa). It addresses English as just one of several languages at play in the ecology of the countries. It focuses not only on the position of languages as declared in documents of various organizations, that is, language policy, but also everyday l...
Human and Minority Rights Protection by Multiple Diversity Governance
Human and Minority Rights Protection by Multiple Diversity Governance provides a comprehensive overview and critical analysis of minority protection through national constitutional law and international law in Europe. Using a critical theoretical and methodological approach, this textbook: provides a historical analysis of state formation and nation building in Europe with context of religious wars and political revolutions, including the (re-)conceptualisation of basic concepts and terms such as territoriality, sovereignty, state, nation and citizenship; deconstructs all primordial theories of ethnicity and provides a sociologically informed political theory for how to reconcile the functio...
Negotiating Linguistic Plurality
Cultural and linguistic diversity and plurality are seen as markers of our time, linked to discourses about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the context of economic globalization in the late twentieth century. It is often monolingualism, however, that informs understanding and policies regulating the relationship between languages, nations, and communities. Grounded by the idea of language as lived experience, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality assumes linguistic plurality to be a continuing human condition and offers a novel transnational and comparative perspective on it. The essays featured cover concepts and praxis in which linguistic plurality surfaces in the public sphere through insti...
