Dutch immigrants in New Zealand

1992 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetske Folmer

Abstract This article contains a report of a case study on language shift and language loss in three generations of a Dutch immigrant family in New Zealand carried out in 1990/1991 (Folmer 1991). Language shift refers to the shift from Dutch to English and language loss to the loss of the mother tongue Dutch. In addition to language shift and loss, the personal linguistic history of the subjects and their (language) attitudes were examined; these topics are only discussed indirectly in this article. One first generation member, five members of the second generation and two third generation children took part in the investigation. The instruments used were an analysis of letters, an interview, a domain questionnaire, an editing test and a correction test. It was found that language shift increases with each generation. The factors education, exogamy, (language) attitudes and age also proved to be important. Furthermore, the type of domain or activity made a difference. In both the first and the second generation the degree of language loss in Dutch was rather low. Some trends in the loss process were established and certain word classes turned out to be more problematic than others.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-66
Author(s):  
Bo Hu

Abstract This paper presents a qualitative case study of a Chinese Australian family’s multilingual experiences in Melbourne. Couched in the framework of family language policy, I examine language shift patterns and mother tongue attitudes and analyse reasons and consequences. The findings show that the first generation uses Mandarin for general family communication, while relegating regional Chinese to functions that are, typically, private and familial and for use with older generations. The second generation uses English the most. While their Mandarin use is enhanced through community-based schooling and can be activated depending on the communicative environment, regional Chinese does not play an active role. This nested, hierarchical ecology of language shift with two dominant language constellations causes parental confusion about the children’s mother tongue and problematises grandparent-grandchild communication with a possible decrease of family intimacy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alexander Gordon

<p>Through a specific historical case study, Another Elderly Lady to be Knocked Down applies discourse theory and the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) to the context of urban built heritage in Aotearoa New Zealand. Previously, only limited work had been done in this area. By examining an underexplored event this dissertation fills two gaps in present literature: the history of the event itself and identification of the heritage discourses in the country at the time. Examination of these discourses in context also allows conclusions about the use of the AHD in similar studies to be critically examined.  In 1986 the Missions to Seamen building in Wellington, New Zealand, was threatened with demolition by its government owners. In a remarkable display of popular sentiment, individuals, organisations, the Wellington City Council (WCC) and the New Zealand Historic Places Trust (NZHPT) worked together to oppose this unpopular decision. This protest was a seminal event in the history of heritage in New Zealand.  This study relies upon documentary sources, especially the archival records of the Historic Places Trust and the State Services Commission, who owned the building, to provide the history of this watershed moment in New Zealand’s preservation movement. The prevalent attitudes of different groups in Wellington are examined through the letters of protest they wrote at the time. When analysed in context, these discourses reveal the ways in which heritage was articulated and constructed.  The course of this dissertation has revealed the difficulty of identifying an AHD in this context. The level of collaboration between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ heritage perspectives, and the extent to which they shaped each other’s language, creates considerable difficulty in distinguishing between discreet discourses. To better explore the ways that heritage meaning is constructed and articulated, heritage must be recognised as a complex dynamic process.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 255-271
Author(s):  
Francesco Goglia

This chapter presents a discussion on the role of English in the linguistic repertoires of the second generation of onward-migrating families from Italy to the UK. Participants reported on their language use, language maintenance, and language attitudes, both in their early life in Italy and in the UK. The second generation maintain Italian with same-age peer friendships and older siblings. They view the language as linguistic capital to enhance their future career prospects in the UK or support a return to Italy. Italian is also maintained in conversations with parents often in the form of code-switching. Parents struggle with English after a long period of residence in Italy and children are not fluent in the heritage languages. English is considered the most important language and, together with a British education to improve their children’s life chances, is the main pull factor for families in the decision to migrate onward. Onward migration allows these families to restart language shift towards English (which was interrupted during the years of stay in Italy) in a parallel way to language shift towards English taking place in their countries of origin.


1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Rubino ◽  
Camilla Bettoni

Patterns of language use by Sicilians and Venetians living in Sydney are here presented with particular attention to the maintenance of Italian and Dialect under the impact of widespread shift to English. Data gathered by questionnaire self-reporting are analysed according to four main variables: domain, linguistic generation, gender and region of origin. Results suggest that the original Italian diglossia between the High and the Low languages is well maintained, as Italian occupies the more public, formal and regionally heterogeneous space in the community, and Dialect the more private, informal and homogeneous one. Among the subjects’ variables, generation predictably accounts for the greatest variation, as both languages are used most by the first generation and least by the second. However, the original diglossia holds well also among the second generation. With regard to gender and region of origin, it would seem that, compared to men, women maintain both languages slightly better, and that, compared to men and Sicilians respectively, both women and Venetians maintain slightly better the original diglossia. We conclude that the position of Italian, although more limited, seems somewhat more solid than that of Dialect, and suggest some reasons for it.


Multilingua ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania M. Ka’ai

AbstractInspired by Joshua Fishman’s lifetime dedication to the revitalisation of minority languages, especially Yiddish, this paper presents my personal story of the loss of the Māori language in my family in New Zealand/Aotearoa and our attempts to reverse this decline over several generations. The paper includes a description of several policy reforms and events in Aotearoa/New Zealand’s history and the impact of colonisation on the Māori language, which, as seen in other colonised peoples around the world, has contributed to the decline of this indigenous language. The paper also presents the mobilisation of Māori families and communities, including my own family, to establish their own strategies and initiatives to arrest further language decline and to reverse language loss in Māori families in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article, combining story and history, should be read as a historiography of the Māori language, based on the author’s acknowledgement that other indigenous minority communities, globally, and their languages also have experienced the effects of colonisation and language loss. This article, much like a helix model, weaves together a narrative and history of Māori language loss, pain, resilience, and hope and seeks to establish that no language, because it contains the DNA of our cultural identity, should be allowed to die. A table of key landmarks of the history of the Māori language also is included.


2020 ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Кринка [Krinka] Видаковић-Петров [Vidaković-Petrov]

Transgenerational Memory: From Pre-Holocaust to Post-YugoslaviaThe study focuses on Fanika as an example of documentary writing by firstand second-generation survivors, i.e. women in the mother-daughter relationship (Hanna Altarac/Fanika Lučić and Branka Jovičić), both from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. The timeline of the life story of Hanna/Fanika, born in 1922 in a Sephardic family from Sarajevo, coincides on the macro level with the history of Yugoslavia (the establishment of the state and the interwar period, World War Two and the Holocaust, the postwar socialist period, the break-up of the country and post-Yugoslavia), which is important for the contextualization of the narrative. We have analyzed the motivation of first-generation survivor Fanika Lučić to present her memories of the Holocaust, highlighting the importance of communicative memory as an instrument of their transmission to a second-generation survivor as well as the process involved in their transfer from private to public narrative. Further analysis refers to the generic frames of the narrative, its hybrid character, and its liminal position at a point where biography and autobiography meet and interact. Mediation is a key procedure in Fanika, so attention has been dedicated to determining the degrees of mediation, their variation throughout the narrative and their impact on the substructures (narrative segments). Finally, we have identified, interpreted, and contextualized several gender markers appearing at various levels of the text. In conclusion, the book was designed not only to transmit the Holocaust testimony of Fanika Lučić, but also to provide a biographical account of her life in socialist Yugoslavia, her experience of the war in Bosnia, and the final phase of her life as a Canadian immigrant. Transgenerational memory and gender play a key role in the hybrid structure of this book, which is a welcome contribution to Yugoslav Holocaust literature. Pamięć międzypokoleniowa: od czasów przed Holokaustem do okresu postjugosłowiańskiegoArtykuł analizuje książkę Fanika jako przykład prozy dokumentalnej, autorstwa dwóch kobiet należących kolejno do pierwszego i drugiego pokolenia ocalałych z Holokaustu. Są to pochodzące z Sarajewa matka i córka – Hanna Altarac/Fanika Lučic i Branka Jovičic. Ramy czasowe historii życia Hanny/Faniki (ur. 1922 w sefardyjskiej rodzinie) zbiegają się z historią Jugosławii (powstanie państwa i okres międzywojenny, II wojna światowa i Holokaust, powojenny socjalistyczny okres, rozpad kraju i okres postjugosłowiański), co stanowi istotny punkt wyjścia dla kontekstualizacji narracji. W artykule poddano analizie zarówno motywację ocalałej z pierwszego pokolenia Faniki Lučić do przedstawienia swoich wspomnień z Holokaustu, podkreślając znaczenie pamięci komunikacyjnej jako narzędzia służącego do przekazywania wspomnień ocalałemu z drugiego pokolenia, jak i proces transferu wspomnień z narracji prywatnej do publicznej. Dalsza analiza odnosi się do ogólnych ram narracji, jej hybrydowego charakteru i jej pozycji liminalnej w punkcie, w którym biografia i autobiografia spotykają się i współdziałają. Ponieważ mediacja jest procedurą kluczową w Fanice, zwrócono uwagę na określenie stopnia mediacji, jej zmienności poprzez narrację, a także jej wpływu na narracyjne podstruktury (segmenty narracyjne). Wreszcie zidentyfikowano, zinterpretowano i osadzono w kontekście kilka wyznaczników płci pojawiających się na różnych poziomach tekstu. Podsumowując, książka miała na celu nie tylko przekazanie świadectwa o Holokauście Faniki Lučić, ale także przedstawienie biograficznego opisu jej życia w socjalistycznej Jugosławii, jej doświadczeń wojny w Bośni i ostatniej fazy jej życia jako imigrantki w Kanadzie. Pamięć międzypokoleniowa i płeć odgrywają kluczową rolę w hybrydowej strukturze tej książki, która wnosi istotny wkład do jugosłowiańskiej literatury Holokaustu.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 177-182
Author(s):  
Larissa A. Kozlova

The book reviewed in this article is the result of many years of historical-sociological and historical-biographical studies conducted by B.Z. Doktorov. It contains generalizations of certain results of analyzing biographies, while also introducing the reader to the methodology and procedure of the historical-sociological pursuit. The book was written, in the words of the author himself, in the form of a “mental dialog” with the characters of the biographical narrative; it contains methodological clarifications, as well as descriptions of the creation of the texts included within the book. It contains the author’s previously published work, dedicated to American scientists who conducted studies of public opinion (G. Gallup, H. Cantril, D. Ogilvy), as well as Russian sociologists belonging to the four eldest generations (B.A. Grushin, V.A. Yadov, T.I. Zaslavskaya, Y.A. Levada, A.N. Alekseev, V.B. Golofast, G.S. Batygin). The early activity of the first generation is associated with a period of rebirth (second generation) for Russian sociology during the 1950’s and 1960’s. This review describes the origins of B.Z. Doktorov’s interest towards the research problems; a short summary of the book is given; described is the research methodology of a generational approach; also revealed is the importance of B.Z. Doktorov’s work when it comes to the history of Russian sociology and historical-biographical studies.


2018 ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
Bhim Lal Gautam

This paper explores the patterns of language shift in Newar, the ethnic indigenous language community living in the Kathmandu Valley. The research focuses on language contact situations in different domains viz. social, cultural, personal, and official as well as media related activities where the informants are asked to use different languages along with the use of their own mother tongue i.e. Newar. This socio-ethnographic research aims at providing some clues as to how the discovery of a minority language triggers changes in representations and attitudes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9s6 ◽  
pp. 61-89
Author(s):  
Adrian Howkins ◽  
Stephen Chignell ◽  
Andrew Fountain

This article uses the history of New Zealand�s Vanda Station in Antarctica as a case study of the inseparability of human history and environmental change in the age of the Anthropocene. Vanda Station was built in the late 1960s to promote New Zealand�s sovereignty claims to Antarctica and to promote scientific research in the predominantly ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys region. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the levels of the nearby Lake Vanda rose dramatically, and in the early 1990s the decision was taken to close the station. Rather than seeing the closure of Vanda simply as a consequence of the rising lake levels, this article suggests instead that it was the result of a number of interconnected social, political, scientific, and environmental factors. Although the concept of the Anthropocene is not unproblematic, a biographical approach to the history of Vanda Station can add depth and nuance to our understanding of the geological age of humans. In the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the �birth�, �life� and �death� of Vanda Station helps to demonstrate how the political status quo maintained itself through a partial adaptation to the new realities of the Anthropocene. This political adaptation, however, relies on maintaining human-nature dichotomies and resisting the full implications of viewing the region as an eco-social system.


1997 ◽  
Vol 171 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Hutchinson ◽  
N. Takei ◽  
D. Bhugra ◽  
T. A. Fahy ◽  
C. Gilvarry ◽  
...  

BackgroundIt has been suggested that the increased rate of psychotic illness among African–Caribbeans living in Britain is due to an excess of pregnancy and birth complications (PBCs).MethodWe therefore compared the frequency of PBCs in a group of White psychotic patients (n=103) and a comparable group of patients of African–Caribbean origin (n=61); the latter consisted of 30 first-generation (born in the Caribbean) and 31 second-generation (born in Britain) individuals.ResultsWhite psychotic patients were more than twice as likely to have a history of PBCs as their African–Caribbean counterparts (odds ratio=2.34, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.88–6.47, P=0.062). The same trend was observed among patients with a DSM–III diagnosis of schizophrenia (odds ratio=l.65, 95% CI 0.56–4.97, P=0.32). The rate of PBCs was similar among the first- and second-generation Caribbean psychotic patients.ConclusionsThe increased rate of psychotic illness that has been reported among the African–Caribbean population in Britain is not due to an increased prevalence of PBCs.


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