The Politics of Arabic in Israel

Author(s):  
Camelia Suleiman

Arabic became a minority language in Israel in 1948, as a result of the Palestinian exodus from their land that year. Although it remains an official language, along with Hebrew, Israel has made continued attempts to marginalise Arabic on the one hand, and secutise it on the other. The book delves into these tensions and contradictions, exploring how language policy and language choice both reflect and challenge political identities of Arabs and Israelis. It combines qualitative methods not commonly used together in the study of Arabic in Israel, including ethnography, interviews with journalists and students, media discussions, and analysis of the production of knowledge on Arabic in Israeli academia.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Françoise Le Lièvre

In France, English has a hegemonic position in many domains, including education, despite European policy promoting linguistic and cultural diversity to better integrate citizens in democratic processes. In 2013, the Fioraso law modified the Toubon law by allowing French universities to teach in a foreign language. Under the law, the choice of English at the expense of any other foreign language seems to have become practice. However, this practice clashes with long-standing criticism of Englishization in France. In this chapter an ambivalent picture of Englishization in French higher education arises, revealing tensions between criticism and official language policy on the one hand and language practice on the other. Translingual practices in France generate a different view of Englishization in higher education


Author(s):  
Andrew Linn ◽  
Anastasiya Bezborodova ◽  
Saida Radjabzade

AbstractThis article presents a practical project to develop a language policy for an English-Medium-Instruction university in Uzbekistan. Although the university is de facto English-only, it presents a complex language ecology, which in turn has led to confusion and disagreement about language use on campus. The project team investigated the experience, views and attitudes of over a thousand people, including faculty, students, administrative and maintenance staff, in order to arrive at a proposed policy which would serve the whole community, based on the principle of tolerance and pragmatism. After outlining the relevant language and educational context and setting out the methods and approach of the underpinning research project, the article goes on to present the key findings. One of the striking findings was an appetite for control and regulation of language behaviours. Language policies in Higher Education invariably fall down at the implementation stage because of a lack of will to follow through on their principles and their specific guidelines. Language policy in international business on the other hand is characterised by a control stage invariably lacking in language planning in education. Uzbekistan is a polity used to control measures following from policy implementation. The article concludes by suggesting that Higher Education in Central Asia may stand a better chance of seeing through language policies around English-Medium Instruction than, for example, in northern Europe, based on the tension between tolerance on the one hand and control on the other.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-27
Author(s):  
Monica Manolachi

Censorship as a literary subject has sometimes been necessary in times of change, as it may show how the flaws in power relations influence, sometimes very dramatically, the access to and the production of knowledge. The Woman in the Photo: a Diary, 1987-1989 by Tia Șerbănescu and A Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca are two books that deal with the issue of censorship in the 1980s (the former) and the 1970s (the latter). Both writers tackle the problem from inside the ruling system, aiming at authenticity in different ways. On the one hand, instead of writing a novel, Tia Șerbănescu kept a diary in which she contemplated the oppression and the corruption of the time and their consequences on the freedom of thought, of expression and of speech. She thoroughly described what she felt and thought about her relatives, friends and other people she met, about books and their authors, in a time when keeping a diary was hard and often perilous. On the other hand, using the technique of the mise en abyme, Liliana Corobca begins from a fictitious exchange of emails to eventually enter and explore the mind of a censor and reveal what she thought and felt about the system, her co-workers, her boss, the books she proofread, their authors and her own identity. Detailed examinations and performances of the relationship between writing and censorship, the two novels provide engaging, often tragi-comical, insights into the psychological process of producing literary texts. The intention of this article is to compare and contrast the two author’s perspectives on the act of writing and some of its functions from four points of view: literary, cultural, social and political.


Author(s):  
Antje Gimmler

Practices are of central relevance both to philosophical pragmatism and to the recent ‘Practice Turn’ in social sciences and philosophy. However, what counts as practices and how practices and knowledge are combined or intertwine varies in the different approaches of pragmatism and those theories that are covered by the umbrella term ‘Practice Turn’. The paper tries to show that the pragmatism of John Dewey is able to offer both a more precise and a more radical understanding of practices than the recent ‘Practice Turn’ allows for. The paper on the one hand highlights what pragmatism has to offer to the practice turn in order to clarify the notion of practice. On the other hand the paper claims that a pragmatism inspired by Dewey actually interprets ‘practices’ more radically than most of the other approaches and furthermore promotes an understanding of science that combines nonrepresentationalism and anti-foundationalism with an involvement of the philosopher or the social scientist in the production of knowledge, things and technologies.


Author(s):  
James Costa Wilson

This chapter proposes a critical analysis of the types of discourse articulated by children involved in language revitalization programmes in two Western European contexts: Provence (south-eastern France) and southern Scotland. It focuses on how the minority language (Occitan and Scots) is described and what this means for how children categorize the language and speech communities within which they are being socialized. Of all the social actors involved in language revitalization programmes, and despite the central part they play, children are the only ones whose opinion on participation is never required. Children occupy a very ambiguous place in language revitalization movements. On the one hand, they are perceived as the embodiment of the future of the language, while, on the other hand, they are often accused of not speaking the language properly or of mixing minority and dominant languages. This seems to be a fairly widespread pattern in Europe, where ‘neo-speakers’ are generally viewed with mistrust.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Socorro Cláudia Tavares de Sousa ◽  
Cynthia Israelly Barbalho Dionísio

ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to present an overview of the themes discussed in the field of Language Policy and Planning over the last twenty-one years (1990-2010) in Brazil, comparing the alignment of Brazilian research with the international scenario. To that end, expanded notions of language policy were adopted (COOPER, 1989; SHIFFMAN, 1996, 2006; SPOLSKY, 2004, 2009, 2012) and a survey was carried out in order to find the number of articles in the field in a sample of abstracts from Brazilian academic journals of Linguistics and Literature. The main themes identified in this study were: educational language policies, language planning, languages in contact, diffusion of the Portuguese language, and (meta)linguistic knowledge and language policies. On the one hand, these themes show a convergence between Brazilian and international trends; however, on the other, they show a specific thematic trend in the former, that is, the interest in the constitution of (meta)linguistic knowledge in relation to language policy.


Author(s):  
Edward S. Mitchell ◽  
Diana Ursulin Mopsus

Based on interviews conducted within a community of St. Lucian Creole (Kwéyòl) speakers on the island of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, the authors investigated the use of and attitudes towards Kwéyòl, English, Spanish, and Crucian Creole, the four most widely-spoken languages on St. Croix. The article examines the roles of two social variables, namely gender and education, in questions of language choice and attitudes in this bilingual creolophone community. Some of the more remarkable revelations of this study were found in the many apparently conflicting responses. On the one hand, we observed a general trend towards the loss of Kwéyòl, yet on the other, pride in the language is exceedingly high. We observed a strong tendency pointing towards a taboo against speaking Kwéyòl in public on St. Croix, while at the same time, a significant number proclaimed the right to speak Kwéyòl in public.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Elena Cordero-Hoyo ◽  
Begoña Soto-Vázquez

The purpose of this article is to identify the main causes behind women achieving, on the one hand, important positions as theatre managers in Spain but, on the other, being relegated a marginal status in the shift to cinema. We use the career of the artist Helena Cortesina to illustrate the only known example of a woman becoming a silent cinema entrepreneur in Spain. An actress, producer, and director of Flor de España o la leyenda de un torero ( Spanish flower or the bullfighter's story, 1921) Cortesina transitioned from the variety dances stage to silent film and became a theatrical manager. Her professional career exemplifies the inter-artistic relations between cinema and the scenic arts at the beginning of the twentieth century and the professional bridge between them. This article contributes to feminist film historiography. Following Monica Dall’Asta, it presents a ‘history that invites us to work using creative hypotheses and even imagination’. The article revisits Spanish Film History, reinterpreting the hegemonic production of knowledge that has been historically told from a (supposedly) un-gendered perspective. Our article seeks to disrupt this patriarchal narrative of firsts (including geniuses, technical discoveries, and masterpieces) that relegate women's experiences to the margins of History.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Luís Cunha ◽  
Lurdes Macedo ◽  
Rosa Cabecinhas

As a concept, Lusophony is today looked upon with justified suspicion by many Portuguese-speaking people. It is impossible to separate this concept from the colonial ballast that bounds the countries that have Portuguese as the official language. However, it is important to not end the debate on this plane. In this work we revisit some of the foundational narratives of a mythical identity, such as the different hauntings of a promised Quinto Império or lusotropicalism, both in its founding in Brazil and in its reconstitution in Portugal. On the other hand, we discuss about Lusophony from its formal matrix: a language shared by different peoples in different continents. Our objective is to problematize and deepen the debate, summoning a unique experience of reflection, concretely the one that is elaborated by Jorge de Sena already in the final stretch of Estado Novo. Based on these focuses, we argue about the possibility of Lusophony to include lines of escape from certain reductionisms, namely those that derive from the convergent and divergent circulation of narratives and singular experiences. This circulation of people, ideas and memories, is potentially defining a diffuse and polycentric space of effective interculturality, which nurtures further reflection.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Patrick W. Otim

Abstract:In 1953, Lacito Okech, a precolonial royal messenger, Christian convert, and colonial chief, became the first Acholi to write and publish a history of his people. The book was instantly popular, inspiring many other Acholi to write histories of their respective chiefdoms. However, although these works constitute the bulk of vernacular Acholi histories, scholars have not paid attention to them, partly because of language limitations and partly due to limited scholarly interest in the history of the region. This article uses Okech’s life and book to explore important questions about the production of local history in colonial Acholiland. In particular, it explores Okech’s adroit manipulation of his complex circumstances at the intersection of the roles of messenger, convert, and colonial employee, his dilemmas as a local historian, and the influence of his roles as an intermediary between the Acholi on the one hand and the Church Missionary Society and the colonial regime on the other on his writing of history.


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