Abstract The latest research conducted in the Hungarian community of the City of Zagreb has shown that the Hungarian language is slowly losing its communication functions in informal domains (family, ...friends, the sphere of intimacy) and is withdrawing before Croatian, i.e., that language shift is in progress. As one of the key factors affecting language shift, school is mentioned as support in families in intergenerational language transmission and language preservation in the community. Croatia has ensured an institutional framework for education in minority languages to its minorities through a series of regulatory acts. However, exercising this right is often followed by numerous difficulties. In case of the Hungarian minority, this is due to geographical dispersity. Nevertheless, during the 1990s, a Hungarian group in kindergarten, a bilingual class and nurturing language for primary- and secondary-school pupils were launched in Zagreb. In order to obtain a clearer image of how various class models in a minority language actually function and which problems their participants are faced with, we conducted a preliminary research among younger members of the community who attended classes in Hungarian at least at one point during their education. We completed the results with information obtained through informal conversations with preschool and school teachers as well as through immediate observations of the community.
The Zhuang language test (Vahcuengh Sawcuengh Suijbingz Gaujsi, VSSG) is the first minority language test in the People's Republic of China. It was designed with multiple goals including improving ...Zhuang language teaching, recruiting students for relevant majors of tertiary study, identifying proficiency for work-related applications, and piloting the standardisation of national minority languages. Informed by a use-oriented testing perspective that takes into account social consequences and value implications, we examine attitudes of stakeholders (i.e. testers in an official capacity and testees) toward the test and consider how well the VSSG meets its goals. Drawing on documents and interviews, our study suggests that the test falls short of its primary goals due to a mismatch between stakeholder attitudes, the social functions of the tested language, and the value attached to the minority language. As a result, the test is an ineffective agent for promoting the status of the Zhuang language in the ways intended by its designers and policymakers.
Studies about the reception of Louis Hémon’s famous novel, Maria Chapdelaine (1916), focus usually on the countries with which the novel has obvious ties : France, the author’s home country, and ...Canada. Hémon emigrated there in 1911 and went to Péribonka, on the shores of Lac‑Saint-Jean, north of Québec, to meet the « peasants-pioneers » who came from France a few centuries before. He lived for six month among them and wrote Maria Chapdelaine, a polymorphic novel : all at once a romance, a travel story and a myth of Quebec’s origins. In my PhD thesis about Hémon’s literary fortune, I investigate the international reception of the novel which was translated in over twenty languages. The existence of translations in minority languages – Welsh, Gaelic, Albanian, Flemish, and also Scandinavian languages – makes us wonder about the novel’s reception in these countries : was it equivalent to the French reception, or did it open new perspectives ?
Bilingual language control in production tasks with language switches is supposed to be linked to domain-general cognitive control. In the present study, we investigated the role of language ...dominance, measured on a continuous scale, in the relationship between measures of language control elicited through language switching in a picture naming task and non-linguistic cognitive control induced by stimulus-response interference in a Simon task. In our sample of bilinguals who speak both a minority and majority language (language pair of Uyghur-Chinese), the results showed that as bilinguals were more L2-dominant, a pattern of reversed asymmetry switch costs in language control, i.e., larger L2 than L1 switch costs, was observed. Furthermore, the findings showed that recent exposure to the L1 minority language was associated with the change in language switch costs in terms of both response latencies and accuracy rates. This suggests a role for sociolinguistic context in bilingual language control. Concerning cross-domain generality, globally sustained language control was found to be correlated with domain-general monitoring control in response latencies for all bilingual participants. It lends support to the idea that bilinguals tap into monitoring control in the context of language switching. Additionally, the cross-domain overlap was found between two non-equivalent measures (global language control vs. cognitive inhibitory control) in response latencies, specifically for L1-dominant bilinguals. This suggests that language dominance may have an impact on cross-domain generality in language-switching processes.
Based on Spolsky's (2004) tripartite framework for language policy, this study explores language practices, language ideology, and language management in relation to minority languages, Putonghua, ...and English in ethnic minority families in Yunnan, China. Through observations of and interviews with nine interethnic marriage families in Kena Village and Anmin Village, we found that although people in both villages recognise the value of their native languages in ethnic identification and cultural inheritance, people in Anmin Village make efforts to teach the children Mosuo, while children in Kena Village usually acquire Malimasa naturally. Such differences are associated with sociolinguistic environment and child agency. Meanwhile, Putonghua is widely used in television programmes and smartphone applications and acquired by the young generation due to national policy and the spread of smartphones and television. Families in both villages demonstrated similar aspirations for their children's English learning, but low socioeconomic status affected their ability to invest in foreign language learning. The results suggest that in the special context of multi-ethnic and multilingual villages in Yunnan the agency of rural parents and grandparents is relatively weak, and family language policies are mainly influenced by meso - (e.g. school) and macro- (e.g. socioeconomic environment, national policy) level factors.
This article expounds on the urgency of the reform of the training mode of university minority language majors, elaborates on the data-driven teaching decision-making mode, and explores the ...implementation strategy of teaching decision-making driven by data. Multimodal teaching behavior data and refined process analysis method promote precision and personalized teaching, change the traditional thick line result analysis mode, and accelerate the development of minority language major teaching.
This article is based on a case study of Slovene speakers in north-western Italy and their attitudes towards language use and policy. Although the legal protection and support for the development of ...minority, regional, and non-dominant languages in Europe have made a remarkable progress, minority language communities still face many serious challenges. On the one hand, the level of their respective legal protection is often not efficient enough. On the other hand, legal protection provides only formal conditions for language maintenance, which has nothing to do with motivation, proficiency, or improvement. Today, most minority speakers in Europe are allowed and encouraged to use their home language in the public; but the question is whether they are motivated to do so. By studying the speakers of Slovene in Italy, my aim is to point at importance of colloquial local and non-local (
) varieties in maintaining minority language and bilingualism.
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