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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1108

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Changing the Town’s Identity? – Language Ideologies and the Debate on Bilingual Language Policies

Authors: Hiss, Florian
Submitted by: Hiss, Florian (University of Tromsø, Norway)

The paper focuses on local people’s evaluations in their reactions to the possible implementation of Sámi-Norwegian bilingual policies in the town of Tromsø. Tromsø is the largest town of Northern Norway and often proudly described as “Paris of the North” or “Arctic Gateway”. It is the urban centre of a large and sparsely populated region, which is the home of three ethnic groups, Sámi, Kven, and Norwegians. After a long period of linguistic assimilation, the Sámi are granted a number of linguistic rights, which protect the usage, maintenance, and development of their language. However, the sociolinguistic situation is still loaded with ideological perceptions about linguistic differences that result from experiences of assimilation and stigmatization.

Against this sociolinguistic background, the case study focuses on a debate on the implementation of bilingual language policies in Tromsø. The local politicians’ plan to introduce the regulations of an “administrative area for the Sámi language” in Tromsø was encountered by conflicting language ideologies and attitudes and precipitated a vivid and partly rude debate about ethnic and local identity (e.g. viewing Sámi as a symbol of the rural that threatens the city’s identity). The analysis of newspaper texts (letters to the editor, contributions on discussion pages, etc.), in which local people engage in the metalinguistic debate, reveals on the one hand the reproduction of language ideologies through the semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure (Irvine & Gal 2000). On the other hand, it traces the linguistic mechanisms and strategies of evaluation and stance-taking (Martin & White 2005; Jaffe 2009) and reveals how writers anchor their evaluations and personal stances to the relations between the self, the recipients, and shared, ideological systems of values (Östman 2005). Ideologies about Sámi and Norwegian are mainly brought up implicitly in these relations. Quite a large number of evaluations are expressed as judgements of other people’s behaviour and attitudes, and, though it is the issue that triggered the debate, language turns out to play only a marginal role as a target of most writers’ evaluations. On the basis of these findings, the paper discusses the ideological boundaries that writers construe simultaneously with their construction of interactional bonds, the metalinguistic contextualization of the Sámi language in the debate at issue, and the impact of these on the implementation of bilingual language policies.

References:

Irvine, Judith T. & Susan Gal. 2000. ‘Language ideology and linguistic differentiation.’ Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language. Ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe. 35-83.

Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.). 2009. Stance. Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford.

Martin, James R. & Peter R.R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation. Appraisal in English. New York.

Östman, Jan-Ola. 2005. ‘Persuation as implicit anchoring. The case of collocations.’ Helena Halmari & Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Persuation across genres: A linguistic approach. Amsterdam. 183-212.