scholarly journals Language Ideologies and Transnational Migration: A Study of Cape Verdeans in Galicia

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Nicola Bermingham
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Peripheral Region ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Symbolic Resource

Changes to the global infrastructure have contributed to the growing (linguistic) diversity of large metropolises. However, there have been calls from scholars to explore “emerging superdiversity” (DePalma and Pérez-Caramés 2018) in peripheral regions in order to fully understand the complexities and nuances of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Wang et al. 2014; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). This article, therefore, explores language ideologies among a purposive sample of five young adults of Cape Verdean origin living in the peripheral region of Galicia, Spain, and draws on interview data to examine the ways in which multilingual migrants engage with the language varieties in their linguistic repertoire. In studying immigration from a former African colony to a bilingual European context, we can see how language ideologies from the migrant community are reflected in local ones. The sociolinguistic dynamics of Cape Verde and Galicia share many similarities: both contexts are officially bilingual (Galician and Spanish in Galicia, Kriolu and Portuguese in Cape Verde), and questions regarding the hierarchisation of languages remain pertinent in both cases. The ideologies about the value and prestige of (minority) languages that Cape Verdean migrants arrive with are thus accommodated by local linguistic ideologies in Galicia, a region which has a history of linguistic minoritisation. This has important implications for the ways in which language, as a symbolic resource, is mobilised by migrants in contexts of transnational migration. The findings of this study show how migrants are key actors in (re)shaping the linguistic dynamics of their host society and how, through their practices and discourses, they challenge long-standing assumptions about language, identity and linguistic legitimacy, and call into question ethno-linguistic boundaries.

Endangered Languages

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Endangered Languages ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Language Documentation ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
National Languages

Over the few past centuries, and the last 65 years in particular, there has been a remarkable reduction in global linguistic diversity, as people abandon minority language varieties and switch to larger, and what they perceive to be more economically, socially and politically powerful, regional or national languages. In addition, governments have been promoting standardised official languages for use in schooling, media, and bureaucracy, often under a rubric of linguistic unity supporting national unity. The last two decades have seen a significant increase in interest in minority languages and language shift, endangerment, and loss, in academia and among language speakers and the wider public. There has also been growing interest from anthropological linguists and sociolinguists in the study of language ideologies and beliefs about languages. This volume brings together chapters on theoretical and practical issues in these two areas, especially the views of linguists and communities about support for and revitalization of endangered languages. The chapters thus go straight to the heart of ideological bases of reactions to language endangerment among those most closely involved, drawing their discussions from case studies of how language ideologies and beliefs affect language practices (and vice versa). Most of the authors conduct collaborative community-based research and take a reflective engagement stance to investigate (potential) clashes in ideological perspectives. This is one of the key theoretical and practical issues in research on endangered languages, and so has important implications for language documentation, support and revitalization, as well as language policy at local, national and international levels.

Mimesis and the Historical Imagination: (Re)Staging History in Cape Verde, West Africa

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTINA S. MCMAHON
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Local History ◽  
West African ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Global Performance ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms

This article examines what is at stake when performers and playwright critically transfigure oral histories when staging them theatrically. Representations of race and colonial history are integral to a nation's conception of its own cultural identity. These issues are at the forefront of many theatre productions in Cape Verde, an intensely creolized West African nation whose islands bear traces of the Europeans and Africans who have commingled there for centuries. The article examines two performances rooted in Cape Verdean history that challenge existing theoretical paradigms for the mimetic relationship between actors and the historical personae they portray onstage. Proposing the concept of the ‘historical imagination’, it explores how theatre artists self-consciously alter the local history they circulate to an international theatre festival stage and, concomitantly, how the theatre festival context and media coverage profoundly impact how national history is told within a global performance arena.

English as Eastern: Zhuang, Mongolian, Mandarin, and English in the linguistic orders of globalized China

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (271) ◽  
pp. 35-64
Author(s):  
Alexandra Grey ◽  
Gegentuul Baioud
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Minority Language ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
East West

Abstract Socially constructed and globally propagated East-West binaries have influenced language ideologies about English in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but they are not hegemonic. This essay explores how East-West language ideologies are reformed in mergers with Mandarin-minority language ideologies. It discusses two separate but similar recent studies of minority language speakers and language ideologies in the PRC, respectively by Grey and Baioud. Each study reveals aspects of how Mandarin and English are being socially constructed as on the same side of a dichotomous and hierarchic linguistic and social order, in contradistinction to minority languages. The essay thus problematizes the construction of English as a Western language and Mandarin as an Eastern language; both in academic discourses and in wider social and political discourses. The essay uses Asif Agha’s theory of “enregisterment” to unify the points drawn from each study. It concludes that the language ideologies and practices/discourses under examination reproduce the displacement of a subaltern status; we describe this process as dynamic, internal Orientalism and “recursive” Orientalism, drawing on foundational theory of language ideologies. This essay paves the way for further studies of recursive Orientalism.

scholarly journals Language Challenges in Global and Regional Integration

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Phillipson
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Research Collaboration ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Student Mobility ◽  
National Language ◽  
University Education ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Linguistic Capital

Summary The article analyses whether the expansion of English is adding to linguistic repertoires, or whether a process of linguistic capital dispossession of national languages is taking place. It explores the role that discourses of ‘global English’ and of English as a ‘lingua franca’ play in processes of global and regional European integration. It considers whether the linguistic capital of all languages can be made productive when in much of Europe there is a marked downgrading of the learning of foreign languages other than English, alongside the continued neglect of many minority languages. Language pedagogy and language policy need to be situated within wider political, social and economic contexts. EU schemes for research collaboration and student mobility are of limited help in maintaining linguistic diversity. The Bologna process furthers European integration but intensifies the hegemony of English. Nordic universities are moving into bilingual education, combining English with a national language. The 2006 Declaration on a Nordic Language Policy aims at ensuring that Nordic languages and English develop in parallel, that all residents can maintain their languages, and that language policy issues should be widely understood. If neoliberalism and linguistic neoimperialism are determining factors, there are challenges in maintaining the vitality of languages, and organizing school and university education so as to educate critical multilingual citizens.

scholarly journals Language ideologies in Barbados

Pragmatics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janina Fenigsen
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Ideological Tensions

Barbadian ways of speaking draw their stylistic richness from intertwined and differentially valued resources of Creole (Bajan) and Barbadian English. Barbadians (and linguists) interpret this formal diversity through two ideological paradigms. One (labeled in Bajan, “adjusting to suit”) corresponds to linguist’s “register”. By attending to laminations of individual repertoires and to skills of their selective contextual deployment, the paradigm indexes the richness of speakers’ resources. The other paradigm interprets the stylistic diversity of speakers’ repertoires in essentializing, “sociolectal” terms that iconically link social categories and polarized language varieties. By exaggerating the distinctiveness of language varieties and by turning them into unambiguous indices of fixed social personae, the paradigm colludes with the hierarchies of linguistic and social prestige. These paradigms and hierarchies can be approached in terms of historical processes that defined their social and linguistic targets. Such a framework, however, neglects institutional sites pivotal in the continued production of cultural orders of language - the literature, media, and theater. Within these sites, characterized by hightened metadiscursive awareness, ideological tensions surrounding language and its couplings with social, racial, and national identities are scripted and launched into public domain. Macrohistorical explanations also neglect the processes that turn specific linguistic forms into emblems of Barbadian language varieties while erasing others. By considering strategies and practices of (re)allocation of linguistic styles to characters in literature, journalism, and theater, I explore sociocultural and semiotic underpinnings of drawing Creole and Barbadian English forms into production of linguistically marked social identities and socially marked language varieties.

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