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This special issue of the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (JEMIE) brings together some of the participants of the symposium Political and Economic Resources and Obstacles of Minority Language Maintenance organized by the Language Survival Network ‘POGA’ at Tallinn University, Estonia, in December 2010. More than 20 scholars representing linguistics, anthropology, social sciences and law participated in the symposium, to present papers and discuss questions related to minority language loss, maintenance and revitalization. The six case studies contained in this special issue look at different minorities and regions in the European Union, Russia and the US. The linguistic communities discussed are the Russian-, Võru/Seto- and Latgalian-speaking minorities of Estonia and Latvia; the Welsh- and Breton-speaking communities of the Celtic language; the Russian Finno-Ugrian people with regional autonomies; and the native American groups of the Delaware/Cherokee and the Oneida. The reader will find articles relating to interdisciplinary research approaches in and on minority languages and minority language communities.
When we first started the project of looking at minority languages through a linguistic landscape lens, we felt that the visibility of minority languages in public space had been insufficiently dealt with in traditional minority language research. A linguistic landscape approach, as it had developed over the last years, would constitute a valuable path to explore, by looking at the ‘same old issues’ of language contact and language conflict from a specific angle. We were convinced that fresh linguistic landscape data would be able to provide innovative and useful insights into ‘patterns of language […] use, official language policies, prevalent language attitudes, [and] power relations between different linguistic groups’ (Backhaus 2007, p. 11). The linguistic landscape approach, as presented by the different authors in this volume, has clearly proven to be a heuristic appropriate and relevant for a wide range of minority language situations. More specifically, the ideas and analyses in the different chapters do contribute to a further understanding of minority languages and their speakers. They deepen our comprehension of language policies, power relations and ideologies in minority language settings.
This chapter explores the Linguistic Landscape of six medium-size towns in the Baltic States with regard to languages of tourism and to the role of English and Russian as linguae francae. A quantitative analysis of signs and of tourism web sites shows that, next to the state languages, English is the most dominant language. Yet, interviews reveal that underneath the surface, Russian still stands strong. Therefore, possible claims that English might take over the role of the main lingua franca in the Baltic States cannot be maintained. English has a strong position for attracting international tourists, but only alongside Russian which remains important both as a language of international communication and for local needs.
Towards a part-of-speech ontology: encoding morphemic units of two South African Bantu languages
(2012)
This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very similar on the lexical and sub-lexical levels. It is therefore our goal to describe the morphemes of these languages in a single common database in order to outline and interpret commonalities and differences in more detail. Moreover, the relational database which is developed defines the underlying morphemic units (morphs) for both languages. It will be shown that the electronic part-of-speech ontology goes hand in hand with part-of-speech tagsets that label morphemic units. This database is designed as part of a forthcoming system providing lexicographic and linguistic knowledge on the official South African Bantu languages.
Electronic dictionaries should support dictionary users by giving them guidance in text production and text reception, alongside a user-definable offer of lexicographic data for cognitive purposes. In this article, we sketch the principles of an interactive and dynamic electronic dictionary aimed at text production and text reception guiding users in innovative ways, especially with respect to difficult, complicated or confusing issues. The lexicographer has to do a very careful analysis of the nature of the possible problems to suggest an optimal solution for a specific problem. We are of the opinion that there are numerous complex situations where users need more detailed support than currently available in e-dictionaries, enabling them to make valid and correct choices. For highly complex situations, we suggest guidance through a decision tree-like device. We assume that the solutions proposed here are not specific to one language only but can, after careful analysis, be applied to e-dictionaries in different languages across the world.
Providing an innovative approach to the written displays of minority languages in public space this volume explores minority language situations through the lens of linguistic landscape research. Based on very tangible data it explores the 'same old issues' of language contact and language conflict in new ways.
Over the past decades, problems related to linguistic minorities and their well-being, as well as to minority languages and their maintenance, have developed as an independent branch of minority studies. Studies of language in society and sociolinguistics, strategies of minority language survival and the empowerment of their speakers have produced a considerable output of case studies and theoretical writings.In this multifaceted field of investigation, language use, language practices, language policies and language politics represent interrelated aspects of social and linguistic relations that cannot be meaningfully addressed from a point of view of one scientific discipline only. This is specially the case when one wants to understand processes of language loss and maintenance, or the revitalization and empowerment of a language community. Such processes are linguistic expressions of complex social settings, and reflect group and individual identities that in turn express changing systems of collective values, human networks, fashions and social practices.
This article discusses the situation of the Latgalian language in Latvia today. It first provides an overview of languages in Latvia, followed by a historical and contemporary sketch of the societal position of Latgalian and by an account of current Latgalian language activism. On this basis, the article then applies schemes of language functions and of evaluations of the societal position of minority languages to Latgalian. Given the range of functions that Latgalian fulfils today and the wishes and attempts by activists to expand these functions, the article argues that it is surprising that so little attention is given to Latgalian in mainstream Latvian and international sociolinguistic publications. In this light, the fate of the language is difficult to prognose, but a lot depends on whether the Latvian state will clarify its own unclear perception of policies towards Latgalian and on how much attention it will receive in the future.
In this chapter, I will focus on the phenomenon of drop out, i.e., withdrawal from the turn due to overlapping talk, in order to reflect on the link between “unfinished” turns and participation framework. With the help of a sequential and multimodal analysis inspired by the conversation analytical approach, I will show that dropping out from a turn is strongly linked to the availability displayed by potential recipients of a turn-at-talk. Although conversation analysis has described in detail the systematics of overlapping talk, especially of its onset (Jefferson 1973, 1983, 1986) and its resolution (Scheg-loff 2000; Jefferson 2004), the phenomenon of withdrawal from a turn due to simultaneous talk has not been investigated in detail. While it seems to bedifficult to describe this interactional practice by referring exclusively to syntactic features (incompleteness of the turn), I suggest looking at turn withdrawal from a multimodal perspective (e.g. Goodwin 1980, 1981; Mondada2007a; Schmitt 2005), taking into account visible resources like gaze or gesture. The problem of continuing or stopping a turn-in-progress in overlapping talk can be closely linked to the participation framework (Goodwin and Goodwin 2004), as speakers do visibly take into account their recipient’s availability and coordinate their turn construction with the dynamic changes of the participation framework and the interactional space.
The current state of the art for metadata provision allows for a very flexible approach, catering for the needs of different archives and communities, referring to common data category registries that describe the meaning of a data category at least to authors of metadata. Component models for metadata provisions are for example used by CLARIN and META-SHARE, but there is also an increased flexibility in other metadata schemas such as Dublin Core, which is usually not seen as appropriate for meaningful description of language resources.
Making resources available for others and putting this to a second use in other projects has never been more widely accepted as a sensible efficient way to avoid a waste of efforts and resources. However, when it comes to the details, there is still a vast number of problems. This workshop has aimed at being a forum to address issues and challenges in the concrete work with metadata for LRs, not restricted to a single initiative for archiving LRs. It has allowed for exchange and discussion and we hope that the reader finds the articles here compiled interesting and useful.