scholarly journals IDENTITY AND DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF FRIULIANS AND SLOVENES IN THE PROVINCE OF UDINE, ITALY, IN RECENT DECADES.

Author(s):  
Danila ZULJAN KUMAR

In the past, Slovene spoken in the Province of Udine and Friulian, mainly spoken in the Provinces Udine, Pordenone and Gorizia of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy, were limited to the private sphere, but recently, they are becoming more seen and heard in public life, i.e. outside their traditional communication situations. The change can be attributed to the changes in the perception of their mother tongue in the Slovene and Friulian communities themselves in relation to the prevailing Italian language, the use of which implied a more prestigious position in society in the past, as well as to the change of attitudes towards the two minority languages among the majority population. Changes of discursive practices are occurring hand in hand with changes in identity practices. The paper presents a qualitative study on the topic in which 22 sociolinguistic interviews with the speakers of Friulian and the Slovene were carried out.

Author(s):  
Helena Stranjik

There are numerous national minorities in Croatia supported by the state in their maintenance of minority languages, cultures and traditions. And many of these minorities with songs, dance and customs cherish their own literature, meaning poetry, prose, and drama written by their members in minority languages or in Croatian. These works are mostly known among members of the minorities, but sometimes it is difficult to find the way to readers of the majority of the population. An example of such a minority literature with a long tradition is literary creation of the Czech, who have been living in today’s Croatia for over two hundred years. Nowadays regularly or occasionally there are about thirty authors who write mostly in Czech, but to come to the readership, some of them have been translating their work into the Croatian language lately or leaving their mother tongue and starting to create in Croatian. Are Croatia’s minority works known and to what extent? What are the possibilities of writers using minority languages to publish their works? Why are minority literary works important, what can they offer to a broader readership and in what way can they enrich Croatian literature? How could they reach the majority population and could they wake up the interest beyond Croatian borders? And what difficulties do minority writers encounter? In the presentation, we will use the example of Czech minority literary works in Croatia to answer these and other issues related to minority literature emerging in Croatia, but remaining unknown to the Croatian public.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-199
Author(s):  
Sabina Halupka-Rešetar ◽  
Eleonóra Kovács Rácz

Abstract Vojvodina, an autonomous province in northern Serbia, is a historically multilingual and multicultural area where multilingual education forms a cornerstone of linguistic, educational and social policy and practice: in addition to the majority language, five minority languages are also in official use and speakers of these languages may receive education in their L1. However, such a situation does not warrant positive attitudes toward the majority language. In fact, attitudes toward the majority population have been shown to be less positive among minority group members who receive their education in their L1 (Veres 2013). In addition to this, the effect of environment (compact vs. diffuse) has been shown to interact with attitudes. The paper examines the language attitudes of 423 Hungarian L1 grammar school pupils towards (1) their (minority) mother tongue (Hungarian), (2) Serbian as the majority language and (3) English as a foreign language, based on their value judgements and taking into account numerous variables which might prove to interact with their attitudes. The results of the research are expected to add to the study of language attitudes in a multilingual context, to help us understand better language situations in areas where bilingualism is promoted and to aid the implementation of coherent language policies.


Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr

Recent times have seen resolute efforts seeking to reconcile Asian traditions with democracy, specifically by bending some hierarchical features of the past in the direction of the qualitative equality and relationality demanded in our age. The chapter concentrates on debates in several Asian countries, including China, about the compatibility of Confucian teachings with the democratic requirement of equal citizenship. The chapter distinguishes between a minimalist, a maximalist, and a balanced approach. In the first case, Confucian teachings are restricted to the purely private sphere removed from public life. This model robs Confucianism of the crucial element of social relationality. In the second type, Confucianism is elevated to a dominant creed, in violation of the constitutive openness (or emptiness) of the democratic public space. The last version rejects this totalizing ambition, but without abandoning Confucianism’s educational and socializing qualities, thus arriving at a social-democratic vision.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Tomás Espino Barrera

The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-130
Author(s):  
Ha Ngan Ngo ◽  
Maya Khemlani David

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. e20200042
Author(s):  
Alan Gordon

Historic monuments are the most public and recognized forms of commemoration. In Canada, as around the world, many monuments have come under fire recently for celebrating a vision of the past that is no longer palatable to large segments of the population. The heroes and events they enshrine have been denounced by many as tributes to racism, yet they are valued by others as aspects of our collective history and a celebration of our national heritage. Both these positions gloss over the complexity of the historical act of raising monuments and interpreting their historical meanings. Monuments in Canada, like all forms of commemoration, are reflections of the historiographical and methodological trends contemporary to the discipline of history at the time of their creation. Changes in methods and interpretations have thus also affected their meaning over time. Thus, monuments are not straightforward representations of history but, instead, layered expressions of historiography in physical form. Ascribing to them singular meanings obscures the complexity of the societies that constructed them and simplifies their connections to public life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (03) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
Anatoly Kononov ◽  
Lyudmila Standzon ◽  
Elena Emelyanova

The administrative reform that has been permanently carried out in Russia over the past decade, as well as the ongoing efforts to eliminate administrative barriers in business, lead to increased interest in the historical experience of solving issues of optimizing public administration in various spheres of public life and the economy of the country. An important place among them is occupied by the issue of improving licensing and permitting activities. The article examines the historical experience of the formation and development of the licensing and licensing system in Russia, and suggests the author’s periodization of this area of history. The author analyzes the social and economic conditions in which the formation and development of this state institution took place, examines the content of normative legal acts adopted at different stages of national history.


Author(s):  
Zhongwei Zhao

China constituted one of the earliest civilizations in the world. During most of the past two millennia, China was also one of the most advanced economies and the home of around a quarter of the world’s population. By the start of the first millennium, the Chinese population was already about sixty million. In the next two thousand years, China’s population growth and economic development significantly influenced the world’s population changes and history. Partly for these reasons, in the study of population and social history, China’s historical population growth, demographic regimes, marriage patterns, and household formation systems are frequently used as examples in the discussion of population changes, microsocial structure, and their relationships with natural resources and economic development in past times. Population changes were one of the key components of Chinese history. The size and density of the population, the rise and fall of fertility and mortality, and the increase and decrease of population movements were not only related to demographic factors such as age structure. They were also strongly affected by political and economic conditions, social institutions and cultural traditions, and natural and social environments. Therefore, studies of demographic history, those conducted recently in particular, often shed new light on economic, political, social, and environmental changes in the past. This bibliography, through reviewing major works published in Chinese and English, provides an introduction to China’s main historical population data sources, major research questions, and debates in the study of Chinese population history. It also introduces recent advances in Chinese historical demography and important research findings made by these developments.


Author(s):  
Mariya Vynarchyk

The scientific article explores the problem of developing multilingualism skills in the European educational context. For this purpose, the task was to analyze the conditions and ways of realizing the problem of multilingualism in the modern educational field and to study the features of European multilingualism in the context of cultural diversity. The methodology of the study is based on the coverage and analysis of cognitive and practical multilingualism skills. European education policy is analyzed. Addressing the issue of multilingualism is one of the most important activities of the Council of Europe, the European Commission and is covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and in numerous resolutions of international conferences and symposia. It is established that one of the main goals of education in a democratic society is not only respect for human rights, but also the development of knowledge, skills and abilities of students, their preparation for life in civil society. Research has shown that multilingual people in Europe have advantages over monolinguals. More than half of all Europeans say they speak at least one language other than their mother tongue. The study showed that multilingualism is beneficial for people who are supporters of intercultural and linguistic interaction based on tolerance and humanism. Modern European educational policy is aimed at developing multilingual skills. This demonstrates the importance and timeliness of solving the problem in the educational environment with the active support of students and teachers, the financial capacity of European educational programs and projects of governments of leading European countries. As part of this task, it is important to actively support the mobility of students and teachers, to develop scientific cooperation, cultural interaction. Thanks to the intensive development of multilingual skills, it is possible to achieve the required level of language competence of students as a basis for their further learning and self-improvement. Since the modern educational community is focused on the highest human values, the personal development of schoolchildren and students is considered a priority for the functioning of European educational institutions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei S. Markovits ◽  
Joseph Klaver

The Greens' impact on German politics and public life has been enormous and massively disproportional to the size of their electoral support and political presence in the country's legislative and executive bodies on the federal, state, and local levels. After substantiating the Greens' proliferating presence on all levels of German politics with numbers; the article focuses on demonstrating how the Greens' key values of ecology, peace and pacifism, feminism and women's rights, and grass roots democracy—the signifiers of their very identity—have come to shape the existence of all other German parties bar none. If imitation is one of the most defining characteristics of success, the Greens can be immensely proud of their tally over the past thirty plus years.


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