This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.
This revised second edition is a comprehensive overview of why we speak the languages that we do. It covers language learning imposed by political and economic agendas as well as language choices entered into willingly for reasons of social mobility, economic advantage and group identity.
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.
The notion of "heritage" has become one of the global tropes in recent years. At the heart of heritage politics are three questions: what heritage is, who decides what it is, and for whom is the decision made. However, existing work on heritage language has rarely tackled these questions, assuming that teaching children of migrants their "heritage language" empowers them. This book challenges this assumption, situating the notion of heritage language in the host society’s involvement in social justice, nation-building efforts, (superficial) celebration of diversity, and investment on global links the migrants offer as well as the migrants’ fear of discrimination and desire for belonging, social status, and economic gain. Based on ethnographic research in Bolivia, Peru, the United States, and Japan, the book illuminates the complexity and political nature of determining what constitutes heritage language for migrants with connections to Japan. This volume opens up a new field of investigation in heritage language studies: the complex linkage between heritage language and social justice for migrants. This book was published as a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.
This edited collection examines the role that language has played in forming modern European nations. With language an omnipresent issue within the European Union, the importance languages have played within the histories and present situations of member nations is a crucial topic. Drawing on an international cast of contributors, the book explores the issues of monolingualism vs. plurilingualism within individual nations, the revival of languages in nations such as former soviet republics, and concludes with a look at language in the electronic age.
This book examines the role of language in the present and past creation of social, cultural, and national identities in Europe. It considers the way in which language may sometimes reinforce national identity (as in England) while tending to subvert the nation-state (as in the United Kingdom). After an introduction describing the interactive roles of language, ethnicity, culture, and institutions in the character and formation of nationalism and identity, the book considers their different manifestations throughout Europe. Chapters are devoted to Britain and Ireland; France; Spain and Portugal; Scandinavia; the Netherlands and Belgium; Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg; Italy; Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic; Bulgaria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Albania, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo; Greece and Turkey; the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Baltic States, and the Russian Federation. The book concludes with a consideration of the current relative status of the languages of Europe and how these and the identities they reflect are changing and evolving.
The book discusses recycled discourses of language and nationalism in Finnish higher education, demonstrating the need to look beyond language in the study of language policies of higher education. It analyses the historical and political layeredness of language policies as well as the intertwined nature of national and international developments in understanding new nationalism. Finnish higher education language policies were fuelled by the dynamics and tensions between the national languages Finnish and Swedish until the 2000s, when English begins to catalyse post nationalist discourses of economy and competitiveness. In the 2010s, English begins to be seen as a threat to Finnish. Educational, economic and epistemic nationalism emerge as the main cycles of new nationalist language policies in Finnish higher education. The book will be of interest to language policy and higher education scholars and practitioners, as well as graduate students language policy and higher education.
Standardization, as defined in this study, is a struggle to create a national language. It involves more than alphabet reform or codification of phonology and vocabulary. Standardization is treated as language development, similar and closely related to social, economic, and political development. The approach here is interdisciplinary, cutting across a number of fields in social sciences: sociolinguistics, political science, mass media studies, education, and policy studies.
Drawing on fieldwork in Iraq, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, Nationalism, Language, and Muslim Exceptionalism compares the politics of six Muslim separatist movements, locating shared language and print culture as a central factor in Muslim ethnonational identity.
The language we use forms an important part of our sense of who we are - of our identity. This book outlines the relationship between our identity as members of groups - ethnic, national, religious and gender - and the language varieties important to each group. What is a language? What is a dialect? Are there such things as language 'rights'? Must every national group have its own unique language? How have languages, large and small, been used to spread religious ideas? Why have particular religious and linguistic 'markers' been so central, singly or in combination, to the ways in which we think about ourselves and others? Using a rich variety of examples, the book highlights the linkages among languages, dialects and identities, with special attention given to religious, ethnic and national allegiances.
