scholarly journals Understanding Language Death in Czech-Moravian Texas

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 147-163
Author(s):  
Kevin Hannan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Wave Theory ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Language Death ◽  
Symbolic Function ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The Social

Based on several decades of personal interaction with Texas speakers of Czech, the author’s article attempts to correlate social change with some specific stages of language obsolescence and language death. Many instances of language change in that community, as well as cultural and social change, may be explained by the linguistic model known as the wave theory. One hundred and fifty years passed between the introduction of Czech and the death of that language in Texas. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the Czech-Moravians represented a closed community in which individuals defined their identity primarily by the Czech language, ethnicity, and culture. In the final five decades of the twentieth century, as the social template representing Texas speakers of Czech disintegrated, spoken Czech ceased to function as a living language, and much of the ancestral culture connected with the language was lost. Today some among the elderly, described as semi-speakers, terminal speakers, or ‘‘rememberers’’ of language, retain a limited knowledge, but the ancestral language now has only a symbolic function.

Community, dialect and urbanization in the Arabic-speaking Middle East

1995 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Holes
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Everyday Communication

The purpose of this paper is to explain how changes in the social structure of the countries of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are being reflected in new patterns of dialect use. The last 30 years have seen an enormously increased interest in Arabic as a living mode of everyday communication, reflected in many dialectological, typological and sociolinguistic studies. As a result, we now have a much clearer overall picture of the dialect geography of the eastern Arab world, and the beginnings of an understanding of the dynamics of language change. Inevitably, the focus of many studies has been geographically specific, so that the area-wide nexus between social change and linguistic change has not always been seen in a sufficiently broad context. By examining three case studies documented in the literature, I aim to point up similarities in the dynamics of change which are often obscured by distracting local particularities.

scholarly journals Communication, Differentiation and the Evolution of World Society

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Boris Holzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This chapter uses a systems theory perspective to examine how the globalization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affected social contacts, societal groups, and social change. It looks at developments and changes that took place in the nineteenth century that point to both continuities and ruptures with earlier epochs and their further consolidation and elaboration throughout the twentieth century. It also discusses a sociological perspective on a 'long twentieth century' and discernible transformations of the social world, which provided the foundation for a global modernity and popularized the aspiration towards it. The chapter implies an interest in fundamental sociological concepts, namely communication, differentiation, and evolution. It investigates the integral part of a long-term transformation that is developed by fundamental or societal revolution.

scholarly journals Cowboy Jurists and the Making of Legal Professionalism

2008 ◽  
pp. 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Wesley Pue
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Project ◽  
Regulatory Powers

This article discusses the novelty of the concept of lawyers’ professionalism in the twentieth century. The author discusses the evolution of the structure of legal professionalism in the early twentieth century, outlining the social context in which these changes occurred. Significant reforms were implemented, affecting such matters as the qualifications of lawyers, education and admission to the profession, professional ethics, and the regulatory powers of the professional organizations. The author concludes that twentieth-century professionalism in Canada emerged as a cultural project, undoubtedly influenced by political and social change, as opposed to pure market-based motivations.

Wave Theory ~ Social Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-326
Author(s):  
Stefan Helmreich
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Wave Theory ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Social Agencies ◽  
Sociological Explanation

This article offers a history of the wave metaphor in social theory, examining how waves became rhetorical forms through which to think about the shape of social change. The wave analytic—“waves of democratization,” “waves of immigration,” “waves of resistance”—wavers between high theory and popular model, between objectivist sociological explanation and hand-waving sociobabble, between vanguardist predictions of social revolution and conservative prognoses of political inevitability, between accountings of formal change and claims about material transubstantiation. The article examines usages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that techniques of inscription—graphical, numerical, diagrammatic—have produced formal claims about rising and falling tendencies in the social body. It argues, too, that in such deployments, waves are either (1) overpowering forces of social structuration or (2) signs of the animating effects of world-transforming collective social agencies. The “wave” thus generates questions—and uncertainties—about the relation of structure to agency.

The Decline of Social Welfare: Falling State Support for the Elderly since Early Victorian Times

1984 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Living Alone ◽  
Elderly Persons ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Welfare State

ABSTRACTCurrent searchings for ways to trim a burgeoning social welfare budget come at the end of a long period of decline in the value of pensions. The social welfare benefits paid in Britain today are not as valuable, relative to the incomes of non-beneficiaries, as were the pensions paid during the first half of the twentieth century, and they are worth very much less than the allowances distributed by the nineteenth century Poor Law. Demographic changes, including the growing numbers of elderly persons, the movement of elderly persons towards living alone, the decline in household size, and the return of large numbers of women to the paid workforce, have overtaken the Welfare State, which has failed to develop a programme for redistributing resources between the generations.

From Wombs to Farmland: The Transformation of Suman Shrines in Southern Ghana

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miho Ishii
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
Eastern Region ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Ethnic Conflicts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Southern Ghana

AbstractIn this article I attempt to analyze the transformation of savanna-originated spirit or suman shrines in a cocoa-producing migrant society in the Eastern Region of the Republic of Ghana. At the beginning of the twentieth century, various suman shrines were established as places where people were accused of witchcraft or exorcized in Akan societies. Earlier studies have called these 'anti-witchcraft shrines' and interpreted this phenomenon as being a result of the social change caused by the booming cocoa industry. In the meantime, the main function of suman shrines has been transformed from one associated with witchcraft, which is connected with kinship order in Akan societies, into one offering treatment against magic relating to ethnic conflicts over land. I point out that this shift in the function of suman shrines reflects a shift in local political disputes, namely from maintaining the birthrate within matrilineal kin groups in order to keep up numbers in the work force to the inter-ethnic relations found in the usufruct and contracts concerning farmland between landowners and tenants.

Conformity and Idiosyncrasy: Jean Rhys

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Female Images ◽  
Image Construction ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Professional Mobility

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as Fordism and Taylorism, which were introduced into the French couture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected constructions of modern femininity. Increasingly standardized images of feminine types were produced by Paris couturiers while the new look of the Flapper seemingly advertised women’s expanding social, political and professional mobility. Rhys, this chapter argues, noted fashion’s ability to provide resources for creative image construction but she simultaneously expressed criticism of its tendency to standardize female costumes and behaviour. Ultimately, Rhys demonstrates in her fiction that the radically modern couture of the early twentieth century was by no means the maker of social change and women’s political modernity. To offset the increased standardization of female images that she witnessed around her, Rhys created heroines and texts that relied on an overt display on difference.  

Addressing the Social Determinants of Health

2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saty Satya-Murti ◽  
Jennifer Gutierrez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Determinants Of Health ◽  
Social Determinants ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Determinants Of Health ◽  
Medical Attention ◽  
Community Center ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social

The Los Angeles Plaza Community Center (PCC), an early twentieth-century Los Angeles community center and clinic, published El Mexicano, a quarterly newsletter, from 1913 to 1925. The newsletter’s reports reveal how the PCC combined walk-in medical visits with broader efforts to address the overall wellness of its attendees. Available records, some with occasional clinical details, reveal the general spectrum of illnesses treated over a twelve-year span. Placed in today’s context, the medical care given at this center was simple and minimal. The social support it provided, however, was multifaceted. The center’s caring extended beyond providing medical attention to helping with education, nutrition, employment, transportation, and moral support. Thus, the social determinants of health (SDH), a prominent concern of present-day public health, was a concept already realized and practiced by these early twentieth-century Los Angeles Plaza community leaders. Such practices, although not yet nominally identified as SDH, had their beginnings in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social activism movement aiming to mitigate the social ills and inequities of emerging industrial nations. The PCC was one of the pioneers in this effort. Its concerns and successes in this area were sophisticated enough to be comparable to our current intentions and aspirations.

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