Abstract This article attempts to answer the question “How did educated Catalan-speaking young people and adults from Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Country rate the central Catalan, north-western Catalan and Valencian standard modalities between 2015 and 2024?” The hypothesis was that speakers of central Catalan and those of Balearic, north-western Catalan and Valencian still considered central Catalan to be the dominant variety but did not hold any especially negative views of the other varieties. To check that hypothesis, we analysed the data from a sample of 197 educated speakers who answered a survey designed using the open-guise technique. Grouped by the components of status, solidarity and dynamism, the results were compared to those obtained from five previous works (2015–2023), so we now have a broad, diverse state of play in terms of methods and results that could prove useful for future studies. In accordance with the aim of the special issue, and after contextualising our results within previous literature and explaining the situation regarding the standardisation of Catalan (codification, implementation and functional elaboration), we compiled a considerable number of proposals for reducing the linguistic insecurity felt by non-central Catalan speakers. This feeling has undergone a long process since the beginning of the codification of Catalan (1913–1933), with a monocentric and only incipiently compositional and pluricentric codification. The Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), for the sole fact of prohibiting the use of Catalan, slowed down the development of compositionality and pluricentrism. With the recovery of the autonomy of the Catalan-speaking territories of the Spanish State (circa 1980), the Institute of Catalan Studies claims it carries out a monocentric codification of and the Valencian Academy of the Language a pluricentric one. The challenge of a intralinguistic justice is now the pluricentric implementation and elaboration.
Arguing from the perspective of the triad language-culture-cognition, this paper re-analyses metalinguistic reflections from South African language portraits with the aim of providing evidence for cognitive-conceptual motivations for the context-dependent preference of certain languages over others. It argues that languages in the South African multilingual ecology appear as clearly assigned to certain high-/low-prestige domains and hence function as linguistic registers. These emerge as cognitive-conceptual responses to complex 'contexts of situation', i.e., domains of language use, which can be described/defined in terms of distinct modes of action governed by sociocultural norms, conventions, ideologies, statuses, identities, degrees of formality etc., as well as pragmatic uses of verbal acts. All in all, the metalinguistic reflections of participants yield evidence for how underlying sociocultural conceptualisations both of languages in multilingual repertoires and of linguistic registers in multilingual ecologies translate into what can be labelled 'sociocognitive load' that influences register choices. This reveals the structuredness of distributed sociocultural cognition and intra- and interspeaker metalinguistic reflection that governs language-as-register choices in South Africa's multilingual landscape.
This study takes a microhistorical approach to analysing a glottopolitical event that is relevant both to the history of Spanish spelling and to the development of regimes of linguistic normativity in the Spanish-speaking world. This event is Decree 3,876 of 1927, through which the Chilean government repealed the reformed spelling system and made the RAE spelling system official. Through a detailed description and contextualisation of this glottopolitical event, the study aims to highlight the issues of agency and ideology involved, which have been overlooked in previous studies. It concludes that the participation of Minister Aquiles Vergara, a nationalist military officer involved in affinity groups linked to Hispanism, is key to understanding this event.
Recent research on new speakers of minoritised languages has spurred a great deal of attention on the process, social dynamics, and motivations of individuals who choose to shift their linguistic repertoires and undergo what is known as a muda. This research seeks to diversify our understanding of such processes by looking at a particular kind of "new" speaker who, while already knowing the language, chooses to adopt linguistic forms that had largely fallen out of use. Drawing on data from an online questionnaire, this paper examines the contextual triggers, motivations, and experiences of male speakers of Basque who have chosen to adopt an informal address form known as hika and gives insight into some of the social value and meanings this form has acquired. The use of the informal pronoun hi significantly affects verbal morphology, which makes it difficult to master for those who have not naturally acquired it. Apart from the purely linguistic challenge, new speakers of hika may face legitimacy issues related to their lack of authenticity, especially when their interlocutor is a native speaker. We look at the trajectories of these new hika speakers, how they managed to engage in hika conversations, and how native speakers reacted to their attempts. Over a third of participants report that they employ more vernacular forms of the language when they speak in hika, and most seem to accommodate to their interlocutors' local dialect in order to avoid uneasiness. We conclude by suggesting where future research could be beneficial.
Music is crucially important in the creation and interpretation of indexical meaning in many mediatized contexts. As this special issue on music and language seeks to highlight, an integrated approach to the study of language and music - or, musicolinguistics - offers a more comprehensive way of analyzing language, especially taking a semiotic approach in contexts where music plays a vital role. This paper examines the semiotic interaction of subtitles, music, sound effects, and other editing effects in a South Korean reality show called Unpretty Rapstar. Language and sound broadly function together semiotically to represent the institutional voice of producers, which effectively overrides that of one contestant, Jessica Ho (stage name: Jessi), whose gendered performance is rendered antagonistic and aggressive. An examination of subtitles and music together - alongside other editing tactics such as camera effects - reveals how Jessi is rendered a disfluent speaking subject. Jessi's "disorderly" performance of language becomes indexically linked to her performance of femininity as aggressive, unruly, and excessive. I engage ethnomusicologist Christopher Small's concept of musicking which expands the scope of a musical performance, treating music as a social action which accounts for multiple activities and actors surrounding musical acts or events. Specifically, I attend to the addition of sound effects, tunes, and subtitles - largely added during the post-production phase by editors - and how these contribute to the musicality of an otherwise discursive event, culminating in a final musicolinguistic event: Jessi's viral diss rap.
This study explores the multilingual identities of Thai-Muslim young adults who migrated from rural areas to urban Pattani, Thailand, for education. Speaking Patani Malay as their mother tongue alongside Thai, English, Arabic, and Central Malay, the participants navigated language learning within a nation-state that recognizes only Standard Thai officially. Utilizing the multilingual identity and positioning theories, in-depth dialogues with 15 university students revealed their self-positioning as multilingual learners who were autonomous multilingual learners engaged in individualized language practices. They invested significant effort in language development and cultivated cultural capital, including confidence, articulation, and sociability, alongside socially valued accents. Confronted language ideologies that marginalized their mother tongue and experiences of ethnic accent bullying, the participants negotiated complex identities to pursue transnational mobility, often reducing public use of their heritage language. The study concludes by proposing a framework to support positive multilingual identity formation.
Japan's rapid internationalization amid a falling birthrate and weak yen has reshaped English use and, in turn, the sociolinguistic landscape of English education. Over the past two decades, English-medium private preschools have expanded dramatically and international schools have surged. At the same time, free online resources have made early English education widely accessible, contributing to the rise of Ouchi Eigo. These shifts have drawn more parents than ever into early English education while broadening perceived choice and intensifying parental responsibility under accelerating educational marketization and broader neoliberal trends. To examine parental motivations, we conducted in-depth interviews with ten families and analyzed the data qualitatively. The analysis identifies shared dispositions organized into three categories that orient parents toward early English education. Grounded in learning histories and socio-economic outlooks, parents engage in what we term retrospective investment to secure better futures for their children.
This paper seeks to explore the structural, systematic and continued enregisterment of ideologies of English and ideologies of Gendern, constructed as socially salient registers associated with characterological figures in German and German-speaking discourse. Linguistic purism is a longstanding, pervasive and well-documented sentiment in the logic of German-speaking language ideology. In most accounts, emphasis is placed on linguistic purism as a nationalist gesture. In particular, English has been the target of external purism since the 19th century through popular and political discourse and aided along by ideology brokers such as the Verein Deutsche Sprache. Less attention has been paid to German language ideologies that are aimed at variation within the language. We wish to propose in this paper that the notion of internal purism can constructively be used to understand, describe and analyze language-ideological animus against gender-inclusive language. This study is grounded in corpus-based discourse analysis to bring forth these parallels and entanglements in the enregisterment of internal and external purism as two dominant attitudinal strands in the German-speaking ideological landscape. The digitized text of the magazine Sprachnachrichten, published continually since 2002 by the Verein Deutsche Sprache, has been used as a corpus for frequency analyses and qualitative discourse analysis. Additionally, journalistic and social media discourse surrounding policies of gender-inclusive language and the ongoing antifeminist rollback of such initiatives have been considered. Based on this data, our analysis constructs a timeline of shifting and overlapping waves of external versus internal purism and identifies intersections of ideological discourse aimed at anti-English and anti-gender ideological discourse.
This paper gives an overview of the Manx sound recordings in the Manx National Heritage (MNH) collections and the project to digitise and publish a selection of the archives through the British Library's 'Unlocking our Sound Heritage' (UOSH) project. As with many sound archives, legacy issues of poor cataloguing, old and disintegrating formats and budgetary constraints have in the past made access to the MNH sound archive very difficult. An opportunity to tap into UK Heritage Lottery money (usually unavailable in the Isle of Man) to fund the digitisation of select sound archives was presented to MNH, through participation in the British Library's Unlocking our Sound Heritage (UOSH) project. The digitisation of the recordings was funded through the project and undertaken at UOSH hub National Museums Northern Ireland and the work to catalogue, describe and make discoverable was undertaken by MNH staff and encompassed a large volunteer project. This paper will discuss the UOSH project in the context of the Manx language content, the particular challenges of cataloguing minority language recordings and making them discoverable to the public.
Around the world, people are shifting from smaller, minority languages to dominant, majority ones. Not only does this represent a significant loss of linguistic diversity, but it also has detrimental impact on the populations concerned - through causes as well as effects. Members of communities such as the Isle of Man have promoted language revitalisation as their preferred response to language shift. There is increasing interest in language revitalisation as a contributor to individual and group wellbeing and empowerment. This paper relates trends and examples around the world to the case of Manx, based on research conducted in the Isle of Man since 2008. I look at examples of processes and outcomes from around the world, including what kinds of activities are promoted, and how we might evaluate their outcomes or even success. I am particularly interested in stated and unstated goals and how they relate to outcomes - both intended and unintended. I look at what kinds of ideologies of language and society are revealed by examining the processes and discourses involved.
More often than not, multilingual families are met with expectations concerning their language use and policies, from society at large, from educational institutions and from their different communities. However, families also hold opinions about their own languages, their language use and how this corresponds to ideologies, aims and expectations. This contribution discusses language as situated practice along with language ideologies, as biographically shaped lived experience and also as an attempt to organize different scales of languages in use in the form of registers. In focus are thus self-evaluations of family registers, in particular the ways to repeat, reframe and rekey language experiences linked to family languages among parents and children. In this way, family language policies (FLP) and register are discussed as interacting and intersecting concepts from a longitudinal perspective. The relationship between FLP and registers is exemplified by drawing on empirical data from multilingual family interviews that took place in Austria over the course of 15 years and evolved around multimodal collaborative building tasks, including parents and over time also their children. Self-evaluations contribute to one aspect of register in particular, namely the awareness of speakers about register organization in society, inquiring what can be learned from small-scale self-evaluations about macro-level language policies and ideologies.
This paper looks at the importance of community, cooperation and creativity for the Manx language in the 21st century from the viewpoint of a small cultural charity, the Manx Heritage Foundation, which is now known by its trading name, Culture Vannin (MHF Culture Vannin). Established in 1982, its wide remit relates to the intangible cultural heritage of the Isle of Man. The organisation played a lobbying and funding role in relation to the first Manx Language Officer within schools in 1992, has a track record in making language-related grants, and has employed a Manx Language Development Officer Yn Greinneyder [encourager, motivator] since 1998, initially in conjunction with Manx National Heritage, the Isle of Man's national museum service. In 2015, MHF Culture Vannin approached the then Isle of Man Department of Education and Children to explore a more coordinated approach to Manx language work, leading to the first multi-agency joint Manx language strategies via Jeebin, a network of Manx language professionals. As a result of Jeebin's work, the Council of Europe confirmed in 2021 that conditions had been met to extend the protection of Manx under Part III of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Selected examples from the work of MHF Culture Vannin for the language since 1998 will show the importance of community, cooperation and creativity in terms of language advocacy and development in a minority language context, in ways that move beyond traditional language policy and planning. The importance of music, art and playfulness are shown to be central to the community's emotional and social connection to Manx.
This article analyses narratives of migration control reproduced by four central American migrants staying in a migrant shelter in Mexico. Narratives of migration control refer to constraints to human mobility and point to the spread of an arterial border; a migration control strategy through checkpoints on the road and ID requirements in coach stations. The participants' narratives shed light on how an arterial border intertwines with a transnational migration policy that seeks to stop undocumented migrants from reaching the US south border. This article contributes to current sociolinguistic and narrative studies in contexts of human mobility that faces hostility and control policies globally by shedding light on surveillance mechanisms on Central American migration through Mexico to the United States.
This study uses a matched-guise test to examine attitudes toward informal address in Uruguayan Spanish, which features two competing pronouns (tú, vos), their associated verb forms (tienes 'you haveT' vs. tenés 'idV'), and mixed combinations (TT, VV, TV). The analysis compares perceptions in Montevideo and Rocha. Two Montevideo speakers (one male, one female) were evaluated by raters from Montevideo (N = 82) and Rocha (N = 75) on attributes related to status, solidarity, and perceived national and regional identity. A cumulative link mixed-effects model showed that all variants were perceived as Uruguayan. Montevideo raters judged VV as the most Uruguayan, followed by TV, whereas Rocha raters showed no significant differences among variants for the male guise, but perceived the TT female guise as most Uruguayan. In both locations, TT increased perceptions of speakers as less from Montevideo and more from Rocha. Gender effects emerged: the female speaker was perceived as less from Rocha and more from Montevideo than the male when using VV, indicating heightened sensitivity to women's address choices. Rocha raters evaluated the female VV guise as less proper (correcta) than the male and the female TV guise as more disagreeable (antipática). These patterns suggest intersecting forms of prestige: VV and TV carry metropolitan prestige, while TT holds local covert prestige linked to authenticity, solidarity, and resistance to change. This study demonstrates the enduring role of informal address as a regional marker and the importance of speaker gender in attitudinal research.
Within language revitalisation circles, the revival of Manx is often cited as a notable success story offering hope to many beleaguered small language communities worldwide. Outside these circles, however, the Isle of Man is more often mentioned - typically in less glowing terms - in reference to its status as a tax haven for international capital. While small, the island is a major player in the global economic order, and public policy there exemplifies many characteristics of neoliberal capitalism. This article explores some of the ways in which neoliberalism, characterised by low levels of public investment, has created a society inconducive to the revitalisation of Manx, with aspects of the revival therefore struggling in recent years. The high degree of precarity that many people in neoliberal societies face is discussed and, drawing on political science literature about "postmaterialism", I argue that this sort of socio-economic environment is unlikely to contribute to the success of causes such as language revitalisation. I also explore how an austere fiscal climate impacts important Manx-language educational provision and limits the funding available for various public bodies that are key to the revival. I conclude with some brief comments about the inequality that tax havens such as the Isle of Man have a key part in creating and its detrimental consequences for the maintenance of language diversity globally.
This paper discusses Manx as it is spoken in the twenty-first century. Like many minoritized languages, Manx underwent linguistic obsolescence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More recently, Manx has undergone revitalization, which has increased speaker numbers. The revitalized Manx speaker community is here analysed as new speakers, who acquired the language through means other than transmission in the home. New speakers of minority languages often differ from other speaker profiles in various ways, including the beliefs they hold about language. This paper aims to explore such beliefs in the context of Revitalized Manx. To do so, I will present both qualitative and quantitative data from new speakers of Revitalized Manx, collected by means of sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic observation. The paper addresses the following research questions: 1) How do Manx new speakers understand "good language use" in Manx? 2) What language ideologies underlie the judgements speakers make about their own and others' language practices. This paper will shed light on the beliefs around "good language use" present in the current Manx revival community. It will also explore the relationship between these beliefs and linguistic structure in Manx, namely the valuing of varying morphosyntactic constructions in a revitalized language community.
While much work on language variation and change has stressed the role of social context, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which particular socio-cultural practices may guide processes of language change in locally or regionally variable ways. This paper explores the role of specialized discourse forms - such as shamanic incantation, ceremonial dialog, and other forms of verbal art - as loci for the emergence and propagation of linguistic innovations in the Amazon basin, particularly those associated with language contact. Specialized discourse in this region arguably enables a potent recipe for language change, via an emphasis on extensive circulation across speakers, communities, and languages; a particular value ascribed to dispersed and linguistically distinct forms; discursive norms that favor close replication while also licensing creative manipulation; and the social position of specialists themselves, who tend to bring together both diffuse social networks and relative status. Various examples of lexical and grammatical change in Amazonian languages are identified that have plausible ties to specialized discourse.
This article argues that language preservationist, revival and development movements may renew or restart themselves over an extended period, but that there can be detectable, societally sanctioned sociolinguistic tips in favour of the minoritised language that are associated directly with identifiable 'founder groups'. Founder groups constitute an initial group of highly dynamic actors in language revitalisation projects. They play a key role in setting out the target language variety for subsequent, larger populations of learners, speakers and other users of the language. Crucially, they may also lay foundations for major elements of the established language ideologies that circulate among revivalists after an extreme language shift such as that which affected Manx Gaelic. The approach here is perceptual-sociolinguistic in nature, discussing Manx-speakers' sense of the Gaelicness of their language through time and space and its relative importance; in time through the construction of continuity from a Gaelic past to the present and future, and in space by comparison with contemporary Irish and Scottish Gaelic, including attitudes towards aspects of pan-Gaelicism. The research draws on qualitative fieldwork undertaken between 1988 and 2024 and especially new analysis from two broader surveys among Manx speakers and advanced learners concluded in 2003 and 2013.
A predominant ideological tendency in the Manx language movement positions contemporary revival speakers as legitimate successors of historical native speakers, with linguistic innovations framed as naturalized language change. Simultaneously, strongly purist stances have seen the borrowing of numerous lexical items from the closely related Gaelic languages, at the expense of established English loanwords. A countervailing stance has gained ground more recently, prompted by the greater availability of digitized historical texts and recordings. This "authenticist" stance seeks greater adherence to linguistic norms which were prevalent among native speakers, as well as greater acceptance of English loanwords. This article analyses data from sociolinguistic interviews as well as pedagogical materials to examine the motivations and implications of these ideological shifts, and the extent to which they challenge or confirm generalizations about "new speaker" varieties. Related issues of gender, counterelites, the role of language "experts", and the language ideologies of teachers are also considered. The present analysis problematizes scholarly contentions that so-called "essentialist" ideologies are necessarily oppressive, reactionary, or likely to be eclipsed within revitalization contexts. In fact, authenticist stances may themselves reflect contemporary shifts towards demotization, resulting in revalorization of the hybridity of the historical language, as well as representing an assertion of Manx identity. Pragmatic motivations are also apparent, reflecting a desire for clearer linguistic models than provided by the perceived heterogeneity of revival usage.
