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EFNIL, the European Federation of National Institutions for Language, promotes the standard languages and the linguistic diversity of the European countries as an essential characteristic of their cultural diversity and wealth. The 17th annual conference of EFNIL in Tallinn dealt with the relation between language and economy.
• Language politics often have economic intentions, the language use of the individual is embedded in economic conditions, languages seem to differ in their economic value. In recent years, economists and sociolinguists have developed models of describing these interdependencies.
• The interaction in multilingual settings needs professional handling. There are traditional instances such as language teaching or translation and new professional fields of the digital age such as multilingual databases. Lots of economic needs and opportunities appear in this field.
• Digitization and societal diversity are two elements leading to more successful interaction, assisted by the use of automatic everyday translation, the development of plain language etc.
This volume presents an extensive overview of the interplay of language and economy.
Historical sociolinguistics in colonial New Guinea: The Rhenish mission society in the Astrolabe Bay
(2017)
The Rhenish Mission Society, a German Protestant mission, was active in a small part of northern New Guinea, the Astrolabe Bay, between 1887 and 1932. Up until 1914, this region was under German colonial rule. The German dominance was also reflected in rules on language use in official contexts such as schools and administration.
Missionaries were strongly affected by such rules as their most important tool in mission work was language. In addition, they were also responsible for school education as most schools in the German colonial areas in the Pacific were mission-run. Thus, mission societies had to make decisions about what languages to use, considering their own needs, their ideological convictions, and the colonial government’s requirements. These considerations were framed by the complex setting of New Guinea’s language wealth where several hundred languages were, and still are, spoken.
This paper investigates a small set of original documents from the Rhenish Mission Society to trace what steps were taken and what considerations played a major role in the process of agreeing on a suitable means of communication with the people the missionaries wanted to reach, thereby touching upon topics such as language attitudes, language policies and politics, practical considerations of language learning and language spread, and colonial actions impacting local language ecologies.