Dialect, language, nation: 50 years on Joseph, John E.; Rutten, Gijsbert; Vosters, Rik
Language policy,
05/2020, Letnik:
19, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled ‘Dialect, language and nation’ (Am Anthropol 68:922–935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step ...model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and elaboration. In this article, we start by discussing the life and work of Einar Haugen, situating him within the history of linguistic thought throughout his career. Next, we zoom in on his standardization framework more specifically, discussing the relevant aspects of his four-box matrix, but also comparing his initial proposals to later influential publications on the subject expanding on his ideas, most notably by Milroy and Milroy (Authority in language. Investigating language prescription and standardisation, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1985) and Joseph (The rise of language standards and standard languages, Frances Pinter, London, 1987b). Finally, we will proceed to give an overview of what we perceive to be major lacunae or shortcomings in Haugen’s standardization framework, focusing on specific elements missing, unclear or in need of refinement in one of the four originally defined steps, but also discussing Haugen’s fairly restrictive understanding of the directionality of language change, the narrow empirical scope of traditional standardization research, the crucial role played by ideology in the development of a standard variety, and the strong monolingual bias and relative absence of language contact in traditional accounts of standardization.
This volume revisits the issue of language contact and conflict in the Low Countries across space and time. The contributions deal with important sites of Germanic-Romance contact along the different ...language borders, covering languages such as French, Dutch, German, and Luxembourgish. This first monograph in English on the topic broadens our understanding of current-day issues by integrating a historical perspective, showing how language contact and conflict operated from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the 18th and 19th centuries, and into the 20th and 21st centuries.
This series creates a space for innovative scholarship examining the ways language functions as a powerful meaning-making resource for constructing identities, managing relationships and building ...communities. Grounded in new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, and engaging a diverse range of communicative and textual practices, the series embraces work from variationist sociolinguistics through to discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics. Monographs and edited volumes are welcomed, as is any work that explicitly situates language in its political, economic and cultural contexts, and/or intersects with other modes of communication such as visual images, material culture, space/place, and nonverbal communication.
The nineteenth century has attracted considerable interest in German historical (socio)linguistics over the last twenty-five years, as it is considered to be the century in which the 'roots' of ...present-day German can be found. A great deal of the research literature has been devoted to the rise of standard German. Little attention has been paid to the relationship between norms and usage. In order to gain an understanding of their complex relationship, this chapter will first look at socio-historical developments and language ideologies which can be seen as crucial for the external language history of nineteenth-century German. It will then discuss different models of standardization, shaped by different ideologies and notions of 'standard language'. Next, an overview will be given of the main prescriptive works and the most important text sources and corpora for research on the language use of this period. This relationship will be illustrated with a few examples from grammar, followed by the conclusions.
Government and market are the two main factors that drive the practices of the Chinese media system and influence the news construction process. A dramatic, socially disruptive event like the 2014 ...Kunming terrorist attack has the potential both to damage the government image and to attract readers. Analyzing how different types of media, more specifically the state-sponsored and the market-oriented press, construct a terrorist attack may therefore reveal essential characteristics of the Chinese media system and its relationship with both government and market. In doing so, the present study makes a contribution in terms of methodology, resources, and empirical description. From a methodological perspective, drawing on a dataset of 275 news articles about the Kunming attack that was collected from 16 mainstream Chinese newspapers, we explore the possibilities of combining computer-assisted techniques (i.e. part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis, collocation, and concordance) and Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), based on which we identified 699 Chinese lexical indicators distributed across ten news values. The open-source wordlist produced by this procedure will facilitate future quantitative DNVA, but also fills a resource gap in non-English news values studies. After calculating the mean normalized frequency of indicators under each news value on a more empirical level, we found that the state-sponsored and the market-oriented press converge in foregrounding the news values of Eliteness and Personalization, in line with public expectations, while at the same time diverging in their use of the news values of Positivity, Negativity, and Superlativeness, which we can relate to the different aims and responsibilities of these two types of newspapers.
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