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Revitalizing minority languages, transforming family life


A recent workshop in Edinburgh, under the auspices of the Revitalise project, looked at how the challenges of language transmission, within and outwith a family context, are particularly acute in minority languages in the twentieth-first century. Under scrutiny were languages such as Gaelic, where Armstrong looked at how enrolling children in Gaelic medium education could lead to ‘reverse’ transmission among the parents, who can elect to learn the language themselves as result of their children’s enrolment; Welsh, where Evas looked at the conditions that encourage and hinder Welsh-speaking parents transmitting the language to their children; Irish, where Hickey explored the importance of parental participation in their children’s language socialization and the need for effective partnerships between parents and educators if revitalization is to be effective, a similar theme being pursued by MacLeod in the case of Gaelic in Scotland; and a very important consideration from Smith-Christmas on the perception and views of children upon whom we very often ‘impose’ revitalization. These themes represent just some of the topics presented at the workshop and more details on these papers, and others, will (eventually) be found here.

My own take on the topic looked at how, while intergenerational language transmission certainly does still place in Brittany, other, and what might be termed ‘creative’, modes of transmission are very much in evidence. These can include educational (immersion or L2 instruction) channels, adult-adult transmission (including a heightened role for the grandparent generation) and also neo-native transmission via new speaker parents. Thus language input can be differentiated, as well as the eventual outcomes of such interventions, since emerging speakers can be located at a variety of non-fixed points on a speaker continuum, which can be influenced by speaker ‘anchorage’ (ideologically oriented stances of speakerhood) (Barthes, 1977), which are influenced by a myriad of community and individual factors:

Discussing the case of neo-native speakers of minority languages, the term can be traced in the literature to include Hawaiian (Wilson, 1996), Cornish and Manx (McLeod, 2008), Irish (Ó Giollagáin, 2004; Ó Giollagáin & Mac Donnacha et al, 2007). In Brittany, a number of new speaker parents are raising their children through the medium of Breton, and this can be reinforced through immersion schooling - though not always, as sometimes the variety of Breton used in the schools might not be deemed ‘authentic’ enough and potentially ‘damaging’ for neo-native speakers (see Hornsby, 2015 for more details). One major consideration that is sometimes overlooked in discourses on transmission of a minority language is that while we are indeed seeing the appearance of neo-native speakers of Breton (and Cornish, and Welsh, etc.), these are also speakers of French, and English - in other words, minority language speakers are also multilingual speakers/users of a range of languages and their linguistic practices reflect their multilingual competencies.

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They don’t speak like their grandparents or their older neighbours - and is that really surprising? Many children and young adults have a different way of speaking from their older relatives in majority languages as well. In fact, recognizing that ‘difference’ is now here to stay in minority language communities is an important step in providing what Fishman (1991) termed ‘prior ideological clarification’, even though such clarification may only come into community awareness quite a way down the road to revitalization. As Lane, Costa, & De Korne (2017: 21) succinctly remind us: ‘Rather than being a conflict which is resolved in order to be erased, [ … ] diversity within minority speech communities appears to be a tenacious and perhaps essential feature’.

Research leading to this blog has benefitted from ongoing discussions on the “new speaker” theme as part of the EU COST Action IS1306 network entitled “New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges”.

Financial assistance through the ICT conference grant scheme (COST IS1306) for attendance at the present workshop is gratefully acknowledged.

References

Barthes, R. 1977. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana.

Fishman, J. 1991. Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon & Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.

Hornsby, M. 2015. Revitalizing Minority Languages: New speakers of Breton, Yiddish and Lemko. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lane, P., Costa, J. & De Korne, H. (eds.) 2017. Standardizing Minority Languages: Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery. New York/Abington: Routledge.

McLeod, W. 2008. “A new multilingual United Kingdom? The impact of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages”. In S. Pertot, T.M.S. Priestly & C.H. Williams (eds.), Rights, Promotion and Integration Issues for Minority Languages in Europe, 44-59. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ó Giollagáin, C. 2004. A contrastive view of Irish language dynamics. Collegium antropologicum 28(1) (supplement). 73–81.

Ó Giollagáin, C., Mac Donnacha, S., Chualáin, F.N., 2007. Comprehensive linguistic study of the use of Irish in the Gaeltacht: Principal findings and recommendations 2007/Staidéar cuimsitheach teangeolaíoch ar úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht: príomhthátal agus moltaí. Dublin: Stationery Office.

Wilson, W. H. 1998. The Sociopolitical Context of Establishing Hawaiian-medium Education. Language, Culture and Curriculum 11:3, 325-338

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