Language politics

Forced migration is a global issue.
About 34 million of the world's inhabitants were identified in 2010 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as either refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers or stateless people. Systematic inquiries are urgently needed to understand and improve the circumstances in which these people live, and to guide national and international policies and programs.
However, there are many ethical complications in conducting research with uprooted people, who have often been exposed to persecution and marginalisation in conflict situations, refugee camps, immigration detention settings, and following resettlement. This book brings together for the first time key scholars across a range of disciplines including anthropology, bioethics, public health, criminology, psychology, socio-linguistics, philosophy, psychiatry, social policy and social work to discuss the ethical dimensions, challenges and tensions of such research.
It encompasses the theoretical, conceptual, practical, and applied aspects of research ethics, while integrating different disciplinary perspectives. It is intended as a resource not only for researchers, students and practitioners but also for those conducting cross-cultural research more broadly. Many of its arguments, examples and concerns are pertinent to research with other vulnerable or marginalised populations.

The process of accession of the immigrant population has passed of form parallel to the creation of his own associations. This fact can be considered in a beginning one more step in the configuration of a multicultural model, but also he presents an intercultural component in power, across spaces of interaction this one can turn into a reality. The present study shows intercultural spaces in neighborhoods that have been protagonists of the social and demographic change, who have implied the entry of an important number of foreign population. It is a question of socially vulnerable spaces, in ∗ Universidad de las Islas Baleares y sociologo del Proyecto de Desarrollo Comunitario del Ayuntamiento de Palma (Islas

This paper explores the socio-psychological aspects of British national identification among British South Asians, which constitutes the largest ethnic minority group in Britain. Identity Process Theory can elucidate the social and psychological ‘functions’ of Britishness for social actors, offering a holistic account of national identification within this population. The paper provides a discussion of nationhood and the construction of national identity, temporal factors in national identification, its cognitive and affective aspects, the psychological ‘functionality’ of Britishness, and its social representations. It is argued that a civic, instrumental conception of Britishness might facilitate access to this identity among British South Asians.

Politicians have long engaged in marketing themselves by employing distinct speaking styles to signal social standing, competence, or a shared background with their audience. What effect does this use of different language appeals have on voter opinion? Utilizing a survey experiment in Thailand, I test a set of hypotheses about the effect of language on respondent opinions. Relying on three distinct treatments, a formal language register, an informal language register, and an ethnic language, I demonstrate the multiple effects of language on political appeal. The use of a formal register has mixed effects, signaling both high education as well as preparation for national office while also creating social distance between the speaker and audience. An informal register and the ethnic tongue both signal kinship ties to listeners, with the ethnic tongue having a much more profound effect. The results also show that an ethnic overture has greater electoral appeal than formal speech. These findings highlight the causal effect language has in shaping political opinions and illustrate the varied impacts of linguistic hierarchies on political appeal.

One of the dangers that we should be aware of when we study issues of language policy and planning is the fragmentary perspective by which they can be approached. Reality, by contrast, is interrelated and overlapping. This is why a complexity perspective stresses the importance of studying the contexts of phenomena, that is to say, their external relations. The direction to be followed here leads towards a better understanding of reality as a set of open systems that are in continuous exchange with the surrounding ecosystem, bearing in mind always that any apparent stability is the result of a dynamic equilibrium. Making headway towards an interdisciplinary approach is therefore necessary and imperative.
Headings such as status/normative/institution vis-à-vis others such as solidarity/normal/individual seem to imply a basic distinction in the definition of sociocultural reality. To discover and understand the dynamics of the interaction between these two major categories is, in fact, one of the most important subjects waiting to be addressed by language planning and policy strategies and more broadly by sociolinguistics. An interrelated set of guiding questions for the field could thus be stated as follows: What group or organisation, in pursuit of what overall objective or intention, wants to achieve what, where, how and when; and what do they actually achieve, and why? With this approach, even if how a group or organisation obtains its desired goal – that is, its actual intervention – is included as one of the main elements in a piece of research, the research will not focus exclusively on this topic, but will frame the intervention and identify how it is interrelated with all the other elements involved globally in this phenomenon, trying to establish a clear theoretical understanding of the entire interwoven set of events and processes.

A study of the limits of multilingual literary expression in print culture. Beginning with the insight that multilingual literature defies simple translation, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication. Looking closely at the limit of multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

Moving beyond the existing scholarship on language politics in north India which mainly focuses on Hindi–Urdu debates, Language Politics and Public Sphere in North India examines the formation of Maithili movement in the context of expansion of Hindi as the ‘national’ language. It revisits the dynamic hierarchy through which a distinction is produced between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ languages. The movement for recognition of Maithili as an independent language has grown assertive even when the authority of Hindi is resolutely reinforced.
The book also examines increasing politicization of the Maithili movement — from Hindi–Maithili ambiguities and antagonisms, to territorial consciousness, and subsequently to separate statehood demand, along with the persistent popular indifference. Mithilesh Jha examines such processes historically, tracing the formation of Maithili movement from mid-nineteenth century until its inclusion into the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution in 2003.
https://india.oup.com/product/language-politics-and-public-sphere-in-north-india-9780199479344

Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess - simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing - to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's'underdevelopment'. Bhojpuri media therefore demands that it is assessed not merely for its internal content but within the comparative media crucible, marked by interpenetrating forms and histories as diverse as those of ecological distress, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate, urban resettlements, and highway modernities. Foregrounding the libidinal excess, language politics, and curatorial informalities, Provincializing Bollywood synthesizes Bhojpuri media's spectacular public insubordination and its invocation of a shared debt, which is by no means regional in its provenance.

The  aim  of  this  article  is  to  interpret  the  changes  in  the
instrumentalisation and institutionalisation of Brazilian Portuguese brought about
by international cooperation treaties  specially those relative to Mercosul  ,
which place the Brazilian national language in a transnational extended space of
enunciation. We will focus on the new position of authorship of the Brazilian state
and  its  institutions,  mainly  the  educational  ones,  analysing  three  forms  of
circulation of linguistic knowledge: the coursebooks on Portuguese as a foreign
language published in Brazil, the certificate of proficiency Celpe-Bras and the
scientific associations. We will consider the National State and the Globalized
Market as two instances redefining the senses which the subjects establish with the
spaces of enunciation involved (national / transnational).

The parliament elections are now finished, and the problem of setting the new constitution is now rising especially because the islamists have gained the majority of the parliament.
It has been along debate between the Liberal and the Islamists since the addition of the second article to the constitution in 1971. The second article of the Egyptian constitution states that:
"Islam is the religion of the State and Arabic its official language.
Islamic law (Sharia) is the principal source of legislation."
These two parts of the article have many bad implications.

‘L’avenir de l’enseignement des langues locales : les obstacles juridiques et idéologiques dans un monde globalisant’, in L’enseignement des langues locales, institutions, méthodes idéologies : Actes des Quatrièmes journées des droits linguistiques, Giovanni Agresti & Michele de Gioia (eds), Aracne, Rome, Italie, 2012.

A transcript and video of a TV interview with Sir Eric Pickles MP on 20 March 2017, in which he agrees that the first large-scale central government funding for promoting the Cornish language, delivered from 2010 to 2016, was a political ‘bribe’ to secure fiscal savings in other areas of government from his Liberal Democrat coalition partners. Includes some relevant background information.

Presented 8 April 2016 at Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain conference at the University of Aberdeen:

Coined by Ernst Håkon Jahr as a sociolinguistic ’experiment’, Norwegian Nynorsk - the constructed written language based on Norway’s dialectal variation, created by Ivar Aasen in the 1800s - is one of two official written languages in the country. 

In this talk, I will present and introduce the linguistic activism which is strongly tied to the use and promotion of Nynorsk, particularly that of the Norsk Målungdom (the Norwegian Language Youth) – by going over their activities over the last year, we will look into how the organisation operates as well as how it tries to put linguistic and political questions on the agenda in today’s Norway.

As a matter of macrosociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological interest, I will touch on the following questions:

-​Has the linguistic activism of the Målungdom changed over time? If so, how and why?
-​Which issues relating to the use of Nynorsk in Norway have been prioritised?
-​Between 2015-2016, what did the Målungdom focus on and why?
-​Discussion: How could the linguistic activism behind Norwegian Nynorsk be of interest to linguists with a more structural and non-applied stance?

This presentation will be a reflection of the my interaction with the Målungdom as a member since September 2015. There will be reference to modern works and ideas in language planning and policy, sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography.

Border anxieties pervade discussions of refugees, asylum seekers and the defence of white privilege. Many scholars (see for example Burke 2002; Mares 2002; Tascon 2002; Macken-Horarik 2003; Green 2004; Hodge and O.Carroll 2006; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007; Soguk 2007) have explored the significance of borderlands/borderscapes in shaping and defending the white western self. The defence of a .vulnerable. white subject includes the demonisation of the asylum seeker other and a deep fear of the erosion of .patriarchal white sovereignty. (Moreton-Robinson 2004). In print news texts about lip sewing by asylum seekers, a common theme is the location of Woomera and other detention centres as .states of exception. (Agamben 2005) or part of .not-Australia.. Using Kristeva.s notion of the .abject. I explore the .dark. place of Woomera and its (voluntary and involuntary) residents in news texts and the role such texts play in constituting what Rutherford (2000) called the .good. white Australian subject. I explore how news texts depict .Woomera. to marginalise both external and internal Others . asylum seekers and white residents . and find that such symbols of abjection reveal the extent to which news representations continue to involve white projections, desires and imaginings of the cultural and class Other.

This is Chapter 1 of "Choosing a Mother Tongue: The Politics of Language and Identity in Ukraine." This book presents a sociocultural linguistic analysis of discourses of conflict, as well as an examination of how linguistic identity is embodied, negotiated and realized during a time of war. It provides new insights regarding multilingualism among Ukrainians in Ukraine and in the diaspora of New Zealand, the US and Canada, and sheds light on the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on language attitudes among Ukrainians around the world. Crucially, it features an analysis of a new movement in Ukraine that developed during the course of the conflict – ‘changing your mother tongue’, which embodies what it is to renegotiate linguistic identity. It is of value to researchers, faculty, and students in the areas of linguistics, Slavic studies, history, politics, anthropology, sociology and international affairs, as well as those interested in Ukrainian affairs more generally.

Though generally associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the idea of hegemony had a crucial history in revolutionary Russia where it was used to conceptualize the dynamics of political and cultural leadership. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study considers the cultural dimensions of hegemony, with particular focus on the role of language in political debates and in scholarship of the period. It is shown that considerations of the relations between the proletariat and peasantry, the cities to the countryside and the metropolitan centre to the colonies of the Russian Empire demanded an intense dialogue between practical politics and theoretical reflection, which led to critical perspectives now assumed to be the achievements of, for instance, sociolinguistics and post-colonial studies.

Table of contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: the Multiple Dimensions of Hegemony
1. Hegemony in Russian Social Democracy Before 1917
2. Hegemony without Social Science: Traditional Intellectuals in Late-Imperial Russia.
3. Verbal Art and Revolution: the Living Word
4. Metamorphoses of Hegemony in the Period of the NEP
5. The New Paradigm in Linguistic Science
6. The Revolution in the West and East: Hegemony and the National Question
7. Hegemony: the Decline and Fall of a Paradigm
8. Ideology Critique, Positivism and Marxism: the Paradoxical Legacy of Nikolai Marr
9. Conclusion
Glossary of Names
References

This article presents a brief survey and analysis of the most intimate coupling of culture and national projects that occurred in Central Europe following the success of the Italian and German nation-states established in this manner during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Language is the very`stuff' of culture as well as the instrument of communicating and reaffirming cultural difference vis-aÁ-vis other cultures. As such, language became central to the processes of nation-and nation-state-building in Central Europe, leading to politicisation of language and also of linguistics and philology, which were expected to fortify the nations and their nation-states than rather to lend themselves to objective research. It is proposed that this specific Central European interweaving of language and national projects may be better comprehended through the application of Einar Haugen's model of language standardisation and Miroslav Hroch's model of nation-building. These two models in the Central European case seem to be closely corresponding to each other. The short catalogue of language elements used to produce national differentiation closes this contribution.

There are currently twenty-four official languages of the European Union (EU), all of which have official status in at least one of the twenty-eight Members States. The equal status of these official languages results in multilingualism polices that are present in particular treaties and regulations of the EU and its institutions. These policies are to be explored to determine whether they are still significant in developing cross-cultural awareness throughout the Union and continue to uphold the founding principles of the EU being united in diversity. Recent sources from the EU, its institutions and published material will be referred to as well as additional secondary texts in order to establish whether the theoretical polices of the Union work in practise to integrate Member States. Specific examples that show the limitations of multilingualism will also be addressed to see if ‘full multilingualism’ (languages of all EU citizens being recognised) can be achieved and whether the promotion of foreign language learning could instigate a preference to using common languages throughout the Union instead. The language policies are appropriated for the individual institutions within the EU as well as being associated with the Union as a whole. As a result, the linguistic regimes of the European Court of Justice, European Parliament and European Commission will also be explored respectively to see how the significance of multilingualism in these institutions strengthens or weakens its importance within the EU overall.

This chapter challenges simplistic representations of the intercommunal violence that took place during the 1946 oil strike in Abadan, in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, as rooted either in primordial ethnic hatred or in an imperialist plot. The chapter reconstructs in detail several days of tensions and clashes, and places them within a historical context of coercive industrial urban development, labor activism, ethnic mobilization and global politics. Using oil company records, national archives and personal accounts, the focus of the analysis is the socio-spatial unit of the club as a place for socialization, a site of strife in the life of an oil city, and as a key political space with significance in the evolution of the modern Iranian nation state.

In recent decades, the criminalization of immigration and the use of private prisons have increased in popularity. The criminalization of immigration and the privatization of prisons work hand in hand in shaping the American criminal justice response to immigration. Privatization creates a powerful opportunity for the social construction of the undocumented immigrant into a powerful potential source of revenue for for-profit corporations. Private prison corporations, such as Corrections Corporation of American and The GEO Group, stand to profit significantly from the private immigration detention center. Several investigative reports have focused on how these companies stand to profit, but little attention has been given to the psychosocial consequences that impact immigrant detainees and their families.