scholarly journals Dissenting narratives of identity in Saami, Meänkieli and Kven literatures

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-55
Author(s):  
Enikő Molnár Bodrogi

In this study, I analyse the interconnections between language and identity in the literatures written in minority languages in Fennoscandia (Meänkieli, Saami and Kven). I concentrate on authors who write in their native languages (as well), and who can move between minority and majority language both as ordinary people and as writers. These literatures are small bodies, because there is a small number of people who can still read and write these languages. Minority literatures often deal with the relationship between minority and majority (dominant) cultures describing them by means of power relations. In the minority literatures I am going to deal with past, reconstructed on the horizon of the present, vizualised in a narrative frame, represeting an integral part of the minority writers’ great narratives, whose aim is to write their own minority histories, as opposed to the official ones. When examining the works of Fennoscandian minority writers, we can notice many a time that they build their own life-stories into the past recalled for the sake of community. In my study, I analyse some important elements of the writers’ narrative-building. I will be looking for answers for the following questions: What kind of power relations determine the life of the given minorities? How do they relate to different borders in their everyday life? How firm the virtual borders created by minority and majority populations are and what kind of consequences crossing borders has. As the theoretical basis of the lecture is concerned, I analyise the topic from the perspective of microhistorical research and the psychological study of identity and stigma.

Author(s):  
Brynne D. Ovalle ◽  
Rahul Chakraborty

This article has two purposes: (a) to examine the relationship between intercultural power relations and the widespread practice of accent discrimination and (b) to underscore the ramifications of accent discrimination both for the individual and for global society as a whole. First, authors review social theory regarding language and group identity construction, and then go on to integrate more current studies linking accent bias to sociocultural variables. Authors discuss three examples of intercultural accent discrimination in order to illustrate how this link manifests itself in the broader context of international relations (i.e., how accent discrimination is generated in situations of unequal power) and, using a review of current research, assess the consequences of accent discrimination for the individual. Finally, the article highlights the impact that linguistic discrimination is having on linguistic diversity globally, partially using data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and partially by offering a potential context for interpreting the emergence of practices that seek to reduce or modify speaker accents.


Author(s):  
Alba Colombo ◽  
Jaime Altuna ◽  
Esther Oliver-Grasiot

Popular festivities and traditional events are important moments in which symbolic content, deep emotions and community solidarity are developed. However, there has been little research on the relationship between such events and their social networks and the power relations within these networks. This paper explores the ability of community events and networks to reflect and strengthen social context. Rather than observing the capacity of the event to generate a network, we focus on identifying how the event network is constructed, and how it creates relationships between the different groups, or nodes, within broader social networks. The case analysed is the Correfoc de la Mercè, a traditional firework event in Barcelona involving the Colles de diables, or Catalan popular fire culture groups. Our findings show that there is a bidirectional link or a mutual dependence between the groups (or nodes) and the event, which also support the development of shared social and symbolic capital.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 753
Author(s):  
Ivan Chajda ◽  
Helmut Länger

In order to be able to use methods of universal algebra for investigating posets, we assigned to every pseudocomplemented poset, to every relatively pseudocomplemented poset and to every sectionally pseudocomplemented poset, a certain algebra (based on a commutative directoid or on a λ-lattice) which satisfies certain identities and implications. We show that the assigned algebras fully characterize the given corresponding posets. A certain kind of symmetry can be seen in the relationship between the classes of mentioned posets and the classes of directoids and λ-lattices representing these relational structures. As we show in the paper, this relationship is fully symmetric. Our results show that the assigned algebras satisfy strong congruence properties which can be transferred back to the posets. We also mention applications of such posets in certain non-classical logics.


2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (9) ◽  
pp. 1025-1031
Author(s):  
Amy Allen

This article discusses the relationship between power and reflective disclosure in Nikolas Kompridis' book Critique and Disclosure. Although the concept of power is not explicitly theorized in great detail in this book, I argue that power is highly relevant for Kompridis' account of reflective disclosure. I offer a few ways in which a thematization of power relations might complicate and enrich Kompridis' understanding of disclosure.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 1589
Author(s):  
Yongkeun Hwang ◽  
Yanghoon Kim ◽  
Kyomin Jung

Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the text generation tasks which has achieved significant improvement with the rise of deep neural networks. However, language-specific problems such as handling the translation of honorifics received little attention. In this paper, we propose a context-aware NMT to promote translation improvements of Korean honorifics. By exploiting the information such as the relationship between speakers from the surrounding sentences, our proposed model effectively manages the use of honorific expressions. Specifically, we utilize a novel encoder architecture that can represent the contextual information of the given input sentences. Furthermore, a context-aware post-editing (CAPE) technique is adopted to refine a set of inconsistent sentence-level honorific translations. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, honorific-labeled test data is required. Thus, we also design a heuristic that labels Korean sentences to distinguish between honorific and non-honorific styles. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms sentence-level NMT baselines both in overall translation quality and honorific translations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199423
Author(s):  
Anne M Cronin ◽  
Lee Edwards

Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.


Author(s):  
Shahrzad Mahootian

Throughout its history, Iran has been a richly multilingual nation, with documented evidence reaching back nearly three millennia. Today, estimates of the number of languages spoken in modern Iran vary, with numbers ranging from fifty-four to seventy-six living languages. This chapter presents a general description of societal bilingualism, how bilingual communities come about, the relationship between language and identity in multilingual contexts, and how best to describe the kind(s) of bilingualism found in Iran, including the use of English. The chapter then turns to bilingualism in Iran from a historical perspective, with the goal of understanding why there are so many languages in present-day Iran. Finally, it addresses the status of English in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran and issues of language maintenance.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Branislav Mičko

Building on an original dataset, this article focuses on the interactions between NATO and its declared worldwide partners. It argues that the analysis of these interactions can reveal NATO’s strategic approach to partnerships, but it can also provide a tool for its classification as an organisation that is either exclusive – defined by the focus on defence of its members, or inclusive – emphasising the global protection of democracies and human rights. The relationship between types of interactions and NATO categorisation is estimated using an unconditional negative binomial regression with fixed effects as well as a within-between (hybrid) model. Furthermore, they are illustrated on two brief case studies of Sweden and Japan. The results of the study suggest that NATO engages primarily with countries that are powerful relative to their neighbourhood, even though they are not the most powerful among the partners. The given country’s level of democracy, integration into the international institutions, and stability, do not seem to play any overarching role here.


Psihologija ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Genc

In most modern societies, nearly every realm of life involves some form of evaluation of our knowledge, abilities and skills. Given the potentially significant consequences of exams, it is not surprising that they are often very stressful. This study aimed to determine the existence and nature of the relationships between level of test anxiety, coping strategies, and achieved success on a mid-term test. As well as examining the direct relations between the given variables, our primary interest was to investigate the potential mediating role of coping mechanisms between the input and output variables of the examined stressful transaction. The study was conducted on a sample of 263 students from the Psychology and German Studies Departments of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad. According to our results, only emotion-focused coping mechanisms were statistically significant mediators in the relationship between level of test anxiety and mid-term test achievement. The results indicate that students with high test anxiety who employ predominantly emotion-focused coping strategies score lower on a pre-exam knowledge test.


Author(s):  
Elvira Küün

The goal of this project in Estonia was to determine what languages are spoken by students from the 2nd to the 5th year of basic school at their homes in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. At the same time, this problem was also studied in other segregated regions of Estonia: Kohtla-Järve and Maardu. According to the database of the population census from the year 2000 (Estonian Statistics Executive Office?s census 2000), there are representatives of 142 ethnic groups living in Estonia, speaking a total of 109 native languages. At the same time, the database doesn’t state which languages are spoken at homes. The material presented in this article belongs to the research topic “Home Language of Basic School Students in Tallinn” from years 2007–2008, specifically financed and ordered by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (grant No. ETF 7065) in the framework of an international study called “Multilingual Project”. It was determined what language is dominating in everyday use, what are the factors for choosing the language for communication, what are the preferred languages and language skills. This study reflects the actual trends of the language situation in these cities.


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