'Along the Routes to Power'

Explorations of Empowerment through Language

Martin Pütz, Joshua A. Fishman, JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer, Martin Pütz, Joshua A. Fishman, JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9783110185997
• eBook ISBN: 9783110923247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The present volume grew out of the 30th International LAUD Symposium, held on April 19–22, 2004 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. The conference, "Empowerment through Language", was centrally concerned with the concept of power and/or empowerment as observed in the status and use of language(s) and their speakers in bilingual and multilingual communities. The book discusses the theoretical issues inherent in the relation between language and power, the empowerment strategies involved in language policy and language planning situations, and the issue of language endangerment in Africa, i.e., the fate of minority languages and their speakers and the sociopolitical factors perpetuating their exclusion from access to knowledge and skills.

The volume constitutes a collection of papers by prominent linguists from many countries who explore the exciting interdisciplinary area of language, power, and linguistic empowerment. Broadly speaking, the papers focus on the theoretical and sociolinguistic problems related to the role of power in language policy and language planning situations in multilingual settings, language choices, code switches, and associated topics. Thus, the aim of the volume is to open up language policy and language planning issues as observed in multilingual contexts (nations, institutions, other settings, and domains) to the wider community of critical sociolinguistics by concentrating on the relationship between language and power. More particularly, it offers a decidedly sociolinguistic perspective to the study of language and power, which likewise has been tackled from other perspectives in the areas of sociology and political science. This interdisciplinary relationship is important both for linguistics and for the sociology of language. In this way, the book is an important contribution to general linguistics, sociolinguistics, minority issues in multilingual settings as well as the social sciences.

In honor of his upcoming 80th birthday (2006) , Fishman's colleagues and former students are preparing five volumes by him or about him, this being one of them.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Along the routes to power
• Section 1. Theoretical perspectives: Linguistic empowerment and language choices
• Sociolinguistics: More power(s) to you! (On the explicit study of power in sociolinguistic research)
• The power of language, the language of power
• Language endangerment, the construction of indigenous languages and world English
• The power to choose and its sociolinguistic implications
• How codeswitching as an available option empowers bilinguals
• Section 2. Language policy and language planning: Empowering speakrs of minority languages in communities and institutions
• Language policy failures
• Empowerment through the community language – A challenge
• Pidgins and Creoles between endangerment and empowerment: A dynamic view of empowerment in the growth and the decline of contact languages, especially in the Pacific
• Lost in transculturation: The case of bilingual education in New York City
• Language policies in Spain: Accomodation or alteration?
• The potential of parliaments for the empowerment of linguistic minorities: Experiences from Scotland and Norway
• The dominance of languages and language communities in the European Union (EU) and the consequences
• Section 3. The language empowerment discourse: Case studies of language policy and language planning in Africa
• Socio-political factors in the evolution of language policy in post-Apartheid South Africa
• Marginalisation and empowerment through educational medium: The case of the linguistically disadvantaged groups of Botswana and Tanzania
• Language policy, cultural rights and the law in Botswana
• We speak Otjiherero but we write in English - Disempowerment through language use in participatory extension work
• Empowerment through English – A realistic view of the educational promotion of English in post-colonial contexts: The case of Nigeria
• Life in a Tower of Babel without a language policy
• JK Nyerere of Tanzania and the empowerment of Swahili
• Living on borrowed tongues? A view from within
• Index