Standardizing Minority Languages : Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery

Pia Lane, James Costa, Haley De Korne (editors)

Routledge, 2018

This volume addresses a crucial, yet largely unaddressed dimension of minority language standardization, namely how social actors engage with, support, negotiate, resist and even reject such processes. The focus is on social actors rather than language as a means for analysing the complexity and tensions inherent in contemporary standardization processes. By considering the perspectives and actions of people who participate in or are affected by minority language politics, the contributors aim to provide a comparative and nuanced analysis of the complexity and tensions inherent in minority language standardisation processes. Echoing Fasold (1984), this involves a shift in focus from a sociolinguistics of language to a sociolinguistics of people.

The book addresses tensions that are born of the renewed or continued need to standardize ‘language’ in the early 21st century across the world. It proposes to go beyond the traditional macro/micro dichotomy by foregrounding the role of actors as they position themselves as users of standard forms of language, oral or written, across sociolinguistic scales. Language policy processes can be seen as practices and ideologies in action and this volume therefore investigates how social actors in a wide range of geographical settings embrace, contribute to, resist and also reject (aspects of) minority language standardization.

Contents

Introduction: Standardising Minority Languages: Reinventing peripheral languages in the 21^st century?

James Costa, Haley De Korne, and Pia Lane

Basque Standardization and the New Speaker: Political Praxis and the Shifting Dynamics of Authority and Value

Jacqueline Urla, Estibaliz Amorrortu, Ane Ortega, and Jone Goirigolzarri

On the pros and cons of standardizing Scots: Notes from the North of a small island

James Costa

Legitimating Limburgish: The reproduction of heritage

Diana Camps

Negotiating the standard in contemporary Galicia

Bernadette O’Rourke

Language standardisation as frozen mediated actions – the materiality of language standardization

Pia Lane

Language standardization in the aftermath of the Soviet Language Empire

Lenore Grenoble and Nadezhd Ja. Bulatova

Standardization of Inuit languages in Canada

Donna Patrick, Kumiko Murasugi, and Jeela Palluq-Cloutier

“That’s too much to learn”: Writing, longevity, and urgency in the Isthmus Zapotec speech community

Haley De Korne

Orthography, Standardization, and Register: The Case of Manding

Coleman Donaldson

Beyond Colonial Linguistics: The Dialectic of Control and Resistance in the Standardization of isiXhosa

Ana Deumert and Nkululeko Mabandla

Visions and revisions of minority languages: Standardization and its dilemmas

Susan Gal

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781138125124, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.