Mother Tongues And Nations

Trends in Linguistics is a series of books that publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighboring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. The series considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. Bonfiglio examines the ideological legacy of the metaphors "mother tongue" and "native speaker" by historicizing their linguistic development. The early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of language, identity, geography, and ethnicity that configured the national language as originating in the mother-infant relationship, as well as in local organic nature. These insular protectionist strategies generated the philologies of (early) modernity and their genetic and arboreal "families" of languages, and continue today to evoke folkloric notions that configure language ethnically. Scholarly recognition of the biological metaphors that racialize language will help to illuminate persisting gestures of ethnolinguistic discrimination.

In a time when the increasing cultural diversity and population mobility of the continent calls for good communication skills, this fascinating book features a wealth of data and critical opinion on the topic of mother tongue education.In the first part of the book, the two editors address central cultural, political and educational concerns relating to the mother tongue, using some of the findings of their European Commission funded research on the changing European classroom. The second part presents case study articles by practitioners from nine countries which have significant regional or immigrant mother tongue populations. These include Welsh in Wales, Catalan and Galician in Spain, Turkish and Greek in Germany, Arabic and Corsican in France, and Belorussian in Poland, as well as critical accounts of the main first language situation in England, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, post-Soviet Russia, and Spain. The concluding part of the book looks at language awareness as a possible approach to linguistic diversity. It examines the preparation of teachers at all levels, as experinced by the editors through their involvement in an in international language study group based in Calgary, Cambridge, Mainz and Bialystock.Teaching the Mother Tongue in a Multilingual Europe is packed with original information which will be of use to all teachers and educationalists concerned with language.

Pioneering in the comparison of standard language teaching in Europe, the International Mother tongue Education Network (IMEN) in the last twenty-five years stimulated experts from more than fifteen European countries to participate in a range of research projects in this field of qualitative educational analyses. The volume “Research on mother tongue education in a comparative international perspective – Theoretical and methodological issues” documents theoretical principals and methodological developments that during the last decades shaped IMEN research and may enlarge the fundaments of comparative qualitative research in language education in a seminal way. The topics of this volume include: • IMEN’s aims, points of departure, history and methodology; • research on the professional practical knowledge of MTE-teachers; • innovation, key incident analysis and international triangulation; • positioning in theory and practice. Also included: the IMEN bibliography 1984-2004 which supplies a complete picture of IMEN research activities from the beginning.

Over a period of eighteen months, the author, her husband and their two young daughters rattled over the roads and motorways of Europe in their mobile home. Drysdale sought out Europe's indigenous tribes and took stock of their place in our modern world.

This collection brings together research on linguistic prescriptivism and social identities, in specific contemporary and historical contexts of cross-cultural contact and awareness. Providing multilingual and multidisciplinary perspectives from language studies, lexicography, literature, and cultural studies, our contributors relate language norms to frameworks of identity beyond monolingual citizenship - nativeness, ethnicity, politics, religion, empire. Some chapters focus on traditional instruments of prescriptivism: language academies in Europe; government language planners in southeast Asia; dictionaries and grammars from Early Modern and imperial Britain, republican America, the postcolonial Caribbean, and modern Germany. Other chapters consider the roles of scholars in prescriptivism, as well as the more informal and populist mechanisms of enforcement expressed in newspapers. With a thematic introduction articulating links between its breadth of perspectives, this accessible book should engage everyone concerned with language norms.

Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear. How deep does your language go back? Jaji’s artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues speak the beginnings and the present; they capture and claim the losses, the ironies, and a poet’s human evolution. Mother Tongues is a collection of language unto itself that translates directly to the heart.

This volume tracks the complex relationships between language, education and nation-building in Southeast Asia, focusing on how language policies have been used by states and governments as instruments of control, assimilation and empowerment. Leading scholars have contributed chapters each representing one of the countries in the region.