Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 166

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Indigenous Minority Languages in Urban Areas

Authors: Hilton, Nanna Haug
Submitted by: Hilton, Nanna Haug (University of Groningen, Netherlands, The)

The topic of the proposed thematic session for SS19 is the dynamics that exist in urban areas between speakers of indigenous minority languages and other speech communities. By focussing on speech communities in urban areas the session aims to host a discussion relevant to the main theme of the conference.

Language contact between minority languages and majority languages in European urban centres is a topic that has been given quite a lot of attention in sociolinguistic studies in recent years (e.g. Svendsen and Røyneland, 2008, Cheshire et al. 2011). In North America, language change in heritage languages in large urban centres is also a topic that has received attention (e.g. Nagy, 2011). In general, however, previous sociolinguistic studies of language contact in urban environments have focussed on the intersection of speakers with non-native, immigrant backgrounds and speakers of national majority languages. The current session would aim to add to our knowledge of language contact between minority and majority groups by looking explicitly at processes in urban contact situations that occur in the mix of indigenous minority languages with national majority (and other) languages.

One reason why a focus on indigenous minority languages is particularly interesting is the rather different social status that these varieties hold compared to that of immigrant languages. In Europe many indigenous minority languages have, for instance, been given official recognition with the growing amount of ratification of the Charter of Regional and Minority Languages (Council of Europe, 1992), but are at the same time often viewed as ‘rural’ or even ‘peasant-like’ (Gal, 1978, Hilton et al. 2010). Another reason why the focus of indigenous minority languages in urban centres might be so interesting is that speakers of such languages tend to have a drastically different social profile from that of speakers with an immigrant background. What the minority speakers all have in common, however, is their relatively recent arrival into larger urban areas. Furthermore, it is true for a number of indigenous minority languages throughout the world that they are linguistically very closely related to the national majority language (the case of West-Frisian and Dutch, for instance, or Catalan and Castilian Spanish). The linguistic outcome of contact situations between these languages might therefore be rather different than that with languages from different language families in the mix.

Some discussion points that would be raised in the thematic session are:

What is the role that ethnic, or national, identity plays for language change in contact situations between indigenous minority language speakers and other speech communities?

Which language maintenance efforts are put into place in urban environments by speakers of indigenous minority languages?

What is the impact of an official status on power relations between a minority and a majority speech community?

What are the linguistic outcomes of contact between speakers of closely related languages with different official statuses in urban areas?

Key references

Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S., Torgersen, E. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2), pp. 151-196.

Kotsinas, U-B. 1988. Immigrant children’s Swedish – a new variety? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 9, pp. 129–141.

Svendsen, B. A., Røyneland, U. 2008. Multiethnolectal facts and functions in Oslo, Norway. International Journal of Bilingualism 12, pp. 63–83.

Stanford, James N., & Preston, Dennis R. (eds.). 2009. Variation in indigenous minority languages. IMPACT 25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Other references

Council of Europe. 1992. European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
CETS No.: 148. Accessed 15 September at http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/Commun/QueVoulezVous.asp?NT=148&CL=ENG

Gal, S. 1978. Peasant men can't get wives: Language change and sex roles in a bilingual community. Language in Society 7, pp. 1-16

Hilton, N.H., Gooskens, C., van Bezooijen, R. 2011. Attitudes towards Frisian in the Netherlands. Oral presentation held at Poznan Linguistics Meeting 42. Poznan 2 May, 2011.

Nagy, N. 2011. Lexical change and language contact: Faetar in Italy and Canada. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(3), pp. 366-382.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Indigenous Minority Languages in Urban Areas