Linguistic Genocide Or Superdiversity

Are we facing an immense wave of language death or a period of remarkable new linguistic variation? Or both? This book answers this question by analysing studies of language endangerment and loss along with those of language change, revitalization and diversity. Using case studies from Russia and the EU, the authors compare historical language variation to that of the present day, arguing that accelerated language extinction can be considered a result of colonization, modernization and globalization, but so too can many new creoles, intertwined and mixed languages, new ethnic identities, new groups of urban dwellers or migrant groups, all with their own distinct cultural traits. The book therefore surmises that the linguistic heritage of today is simultaneously more endangered and more diverse than ever before.

Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes, and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social “difference” have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference. This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Indonesia has an extreme diversity of linguistic wealth, with 707 languages by one count, or 731 languages and more than 1,100 dialects in another estimate, spoken by more than 600 ethnicities spread across 17,504 islands in the archipelago. Smaller, locally used indigenous languages jostle for survival alongside Indonesian, which is the national language, regional lingua francas, major indigenous languages, heritage languages, sign languages and world languages such as English, Arabic and Mandarin, not to mention emerging linguistic varieties and practices of language mixing. How does the government manage these languages in different domains such as education, the media, the workplace and the public while balancing concerns over language endangerment and the need for participation in the global community? Subhan Zein asserts that superdiversity is the key to understanding and assessing these intricate issues and their complicated, contested and innovative responses in the complex, dynamic and polycentric sociolinguistic situation in Indonesia that he conceptualises as superglossia. This offers an opportunity for us to delve more deeply into such a context through the language and superdiversity perspective that is in ascendancy. Zein examines emerging themes that have been dominating language policy discourse including status, prestige, corpus, acquisition, cultivation, language shift and endangerment, revitalisation, linguistic genocide and imperialism, multilingual education, personnel policy, translanguaging, family language policy and global English. These topical areas are critically discussed in an integrated manner against Indonesia’s elaborate socio-cultural, political and religious backdrop as well as the implementation of regional autonomy. In doing so, Zein identifies strategies for language policy to help inform scholarship and policymaking while providing a frame of reference for the adoption of the superdiversity perspective on polity-specific language policy in other parts of the world.

This volume focuses (self-)critically on sloganization as an emergent phenomenon in language education discourse. Motivated by an increasing uneasiness with a number of widespread concepts in current language education research that have become sloganized, this volume comprises a collection of chapters by international scholars that scrutinize the discourse of language education, identify popular slogans and reconstruct the sloganization processes. It promotes critical self-reflection of scholars and professionals in the field of language education – a field that has widely been dominated by the need to develop innovative approaches and practices, at the expense of self-critical work that attempts to situate the field and its approaches within wider historical, cultural and conceptual contexts.

A groundbreaking new work that sheds light on case studies of linguistic human rights around the world, raising much-needed awareness of the struggles of many peoples and communities The first book of its kind, the Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights presents a diverse range of theoretically grounded studies of linguistic human rights, exemplifying what linguistic justice is and how it might be achieved. Through explorations of ways in which linguistic human rights are understood in both national and international contexts, this innovative volume demonstrates how linguistic human rights are supported or violated on all continents, with a particular focus on the marginalized languages of minorities and Indigenous peoples, in industrialized countries and the Global South. Organized into five parts, this volume first presents approaches to linguistic human rights in international and national law, political theory, sociology, economics, history, education, and critical theory. Subsequent sections address how international standards are promoted or impeded and cross-cutting issues, including translation and interpreting, endangered languages and the internet, the impact of global English, language testing, disaster situations, historical amnesia, and more. This essential reference work: Explores approaches to linguistic human rights in countries of great demographic diversity and conflict Covers cases of linguistic human rights in the Americas, China, Europe, North Africa, India, Nepal and New Zealand, including international minorities, such as the Kurds and the Roma, and the Deaf worldwide. Illustrates how education worldwide has often blocked off minority languages by not offering mother-tongue medium education Presents and assesses conventions, declarations, and recommendations that recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples and minorities. Includes a selection of short texts that present additional existential evidence of linguistic human rights. Edited by two renowned leaders in the field, the Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights is an ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students of language and law, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, language policy, language education, indigenous studies, language rights, human rights, and globalization.

This book is the fruition of five years’ work in exploring the idea of superdiversity. The editors argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. Through case studies of language practices in spaces understood as inherently translocal and multi-layered (classrooms and schools, youth spaces, mercantile spaces and nation-states), this book explores the relevance of superdiversity for the social and human sciences and positions it as a research perspective in sociolinguistics and beyond.

This volume illustrates how language revival movements in Russia and elsewhere have often followed a specific pattern of literacy bias in the promotion of a minority’s heritage language, partly neglecting the social and relational aspects of orality. Using the Vepsian Renaissance as an example, this volume brings to the surface a literacy-orality dualism new to the discussion around revival movements. In addition to the more-theoretically oriented scopes, this book addresses all the actors involved in revival movements including activists, scholars and policy-makers, and opens a discussion on literacy and orality, and power and agency in the multiple relational aspects of written and oral practices. This study addresses issues common to language revival movements worldwide and will appeal to researchers of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, education and language policy, and culture studies.

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.