Cet ouvrage, à plusieurs voix, est en fait un dialogue entre deux approches sociolinguistiques des plurilinguismes : l'une qui considère que la coexistence de deux ou plusieurs langues au sein d'un même espace communautaire est inéluctablement porteuse de conflit, l'autre qui considère que la même situation favorise la manifestation d'interactions langagières originales où la coopération a toute sa place. On souhaite renouveler ici un débat déjà ancien par des éclairages nouveaux qui confrontent les hypothèses théoriques à diverses configurations géolinguistiques contemporaines.
National linguistic ideology has been at the base of most historical processes that –whether they are complete or not – have brought us to the current reality: a world of languages that represent, with greater or lesser exactitude, the diversity – and convergences – of human groups. Various of today’s thinkers have predicted the decline or even the end of national ideologies. In the area of language, postmodernism would make the linguistic affiliation of the community individuals irrelevant, de-ideologise language use, and extend plurilingualism and language alternation in association with a new distribution of (physical or functional) spaces of linguistic practice. But is this true everywhere? Are languages now nowhere the core of collective identity? Or are we witnessing a distinction between languages that, because of their magnitude, status, strategic position, etc., can continue to exercise the function of national languages and languages that have to renounce this function? Has national linguistic ideology really ceased to make sense? What other strategies should the historic language of a given geographic area employ if it wants to continue forming part of the life of the community that is set up there? What kinds of languages are desired by politicians, intellectuals and philologists? This book aims to bring some thoughts about these questions.
The book is an invitation to a genealogical understanding of the ideological and discursive processes that have emerged out of the regulation of linguistic minorities issues within an international context and, more precisely, at the United Nations. It highlights the contradictions, limits and possibilities in the elaboration of international measures within the universalist framework of human rights. The book also emphasizes the paradoxes between national interests and the elaboration of an international community - paradoxes in which minority issues fundamentally question the homogeneity of the state. It shows that despite the shift from national spaces to international ones, the fears of nation-states for linguistic minorities remain. Finally, the book reveals the importance of the reproduction of the interests of nation-states within an international organization and the reproduction of power through the legal management and regulation of minority rights in general, and those of linguistic minorities in particular. Through its presentation of the history of the United Nations, its vision of the protection of linguistic minorities, the underlying ideologies that have emerged, as well as the limits and possibilities of action, the book contributes to a better understanding of the complexity of the protection of linguistic minorities and the role of language ideologies within an international context.
This volume widens the scope of Legal Linguistics from the traditional focus on performative texts like statutes to the popularization of legal knowledge for different purposes. The chapters, written in English, German or French, discuss the theoretical basis and methods and investigate popularization efforts by national institutions, law firms and community websites. The objects of study cover a variety of modes and media from different national contexts reaching from print folders over online written texts to YouTube videos and movies.
Bibliographie Linguistique/ Linguistic Bibliography is the annual bibliography of linguistics published by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists under the auspices of the International Council of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies of UNESCO. With a tradition of more than fifty years (the first two volumes, covering the years 1939-1947, were published in 1949-1950), Bibliographie Linguistique is by far the most comprehensive bibliography in the field. It covers all branches of linguistics, both theoretical and descriptive, from all geographical areas, including less known and extinct languages, with particular attention to the many endangered languages of the world. Up-to-date information is guaranteed by the collaboration of some forty contributing specialists from all over the world. With over 20,000 titles arranged according to a detailed state-of-the-art classification, Bibliographie Linguistique remains the standard reference book for every scholar of language and linguistics.
The study of code-switching has been carried out from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives, largely in isolation from each other. This volume attempts to unite these three research strands by placing at the centre of the enquiry the role played by social factors in the occurrence, forms, and outcomes of code-switching. The contributions in this volume are divided into three parts: “code-switching between cognition and socio-pragmatics”, “multilingual interaction and identity”, and “code-switching and social structure”. The case studies represent contact settings on five continents and feature languages with diverse linguistic affiliations. They are predictive and descriptive in their research goals and rely on experimental or naturalistic data. But they share the common goal of seeking to explain how social structures, ideologies, and identity impact on the grammatical and conversational features of code-switching and language mixing, and on the emergence of mixed languages. Given its scope, this volume is a significant addition to the empirical and theoretical foundations of the study of code-switching. It is also of relevance to the general debate on the inter-relationships between language and society.
In spite of the day-to-day relevance of business communication, it remains underrepresented in standard handbooks and textbooks on applied linguistics. The present volume introduces readers to a wide variety of linguistic studies of business communication, ranging from traditional LSP approaches to contemporary discourse-based work, and from the micro-level of lexical choice to macro-level questions of language policy and culture.
