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.

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 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.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

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.

scholarly journals Metaphors of migration over time

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199215
Author(s):  
Charlotte Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Emigration And Immigration ◽  
Emigrants And Immigrants ◽  
Economic Resource ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
Perception Of Control ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Metaphor Use ◽  
The Uk

This paper aims to cast light on contemporary migration rhetoric by integrating historical discourse analysis. I focus on continuity and change in conventionalised metaphorical framings of emigration and immigration in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800 to 2018. The findings show that some metaphors persist throughout the 200-year time period (liquid, object), some are more recent in conventionalised form (animals, invader, weight) while others dropped out of conventionalised use before returning (commodity, guest). Furthermore, we see that the spread of metaphor use goes beyond correlation with migrant naming choices with both emigrants and immigrants occupying similar metaphorical frames historically. However, the analysis also shows that continuity in metaphor use cannot be assumed to correspond to stasis in framing and evaluation as the liquid metaphor is shown to have been more favourable in the past. A dominant frame throughout the period is migrants as an economic resource and the evaluation is determined by the speaker’s perception of control of this resource.

MONARCHS, TRAVELLERS AND EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC'S AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Global History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
A Site

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.

scholarly journals Vulnerable bodies and invisible work: The Covid-19 pandemic and social reproduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 135822912110313
Author(s):  
Ellen Gordon-Bouvier
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
The State ◽  
Family Unit ◽  
State Response ◽  
The Past ◽  
Invisible Work ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The restrained state has always sought to devalue socially reproductive work, often consigning it to the private family unit, where it is viewed as a natural part of female relational roles. This marginalisation of social reproduction adversely affects those performing it and reduces their resilience to vulnerability. The pandemic has largely shattered the liberal illusions of autonomous personhood and state restraint. The reality of our universal embodied vulnerability has now become impossible to ignore, and society’s reliance on socially reproductive work has therefore been pushed into public view. However, the pandemic has also exacerbated harms and pressures for those performing paid and unpaid social reproduction, creating a crisis that demands an urgent state response. As it is argued in this paper, the UK response to date has been inadequate, illustrating an unwillingness to abandon familiar principles of liberal individualism. However, the pandemic has also created a climate of exceptionality, which has prompted even the most neoliberal of states to consider measures that in the past would have been dismissed. In this paper, it is imagined how the state can use this opportunity to become more responsive and improve the resilience of social reproduction workers, both inside and outside the home.

How do junior doctors spend their time in an Acute Medical Unit?

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-60
Author(s):  
Eirini V Kasfiki ◽  
◽  
Mamoon Yusaf ◽  
Jivendra Gosai ◽  
Makani Purva ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
General Practice ◽  
Hospital Admission ◽  
Postgraduate Training ◽  
Junior Doctors ◽  
Bed Occupancy ◽  
Medical Unit ◽  
Admission Rates ◽  
The Past ◽  
Acute Medical Unit ◽  
The Uk

In the UK, postgraduate training for doctors has undergone significant changes over the past decade general practice, etc. During this period, hospital admission rates and bed occupancy have also increased.

Cuba and the Covid-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Bob Oram
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Health System ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Universal Health

For the UK struggling to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, the experience of Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health over the past six decades provides the clearest case for a single, universal health system constituting an underlying national grid dedicated to prevention and care; an abundance of health professionals, accessible everywhere; a world-renowned science and biotech capability; and an educated public schooled in public health. All this was achieved despite being under a vicious blockade by the United States for all of that time.

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