Languages & Linguistics
Language and Ethnicity
Language and ethnicity refer to the relationship between language and cultural identity. It explores how language is used to express and maintain ethnic identity, as well as how ethnic groups may have distinct linguistic features. This field of study examines the intersection of language, ethnicity, and social dynamics, shedding light on the complex ways in which language reflects and shapes ethnic identity.
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11 Key excerpts on "Language and Ethnicity"
eBook - PDFPaul at the Crossroads of Cultures
Theologizing in the Space Between
- Kathy Ehrensperger(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- T&T Clark(Publisher)
Cultural changes may not affect ethnic identity and the continuity of ethnic identity is not identical with cultural continuity. Cultural practices, structures, even perceptions of the world can sustain more than one ethnicity, as can languages, but certain cultural aspects may be unique to a particular ethnic identity – and the same applies to languages. 52 3.1.4 Language, culture and identity: conclusions These considerations about language, culture, and collective (ethnic) and individual identity demonstrate the inherent interweaving of these aspects in networks of mutual influence as inseparable embodied dimensions of identity at group level as well as at the level of the individual. Although these aspects are inseparable, they are neither static nor immutable. In emphasizing their interrelation I do not advocate an immutable essentialism of culture and ethnicity or a perception of languages as closed entities, hermetically sealed against any outside influence. Where people and thus cultures and ethnicities come into contact with each other there is mutual exchange and thus influence. In that sense, as noted above, they are always ‘hybrid’. Hence the question which arises from this – the question that proponents of the concept of Hellenism as well as of theories of hybridity have tried to resolve – is how contact and interaction between different cultures and languages affect the identity of groups and individuals. Informed by the aspects of recent sociolinguistic and sociological theories outlined above, what is of special interest is how people who live in contexts where different cultures and languages are present within a limited geographical area, and during a specific 50 Hall 2002: 9–19; Hutchinson and Smith 1996: 6–7. 51 Edwards 2009: 251; Anthias 2001: 633. Cf. also Hodos who states that ‘ethnicity is an active designate of an explicitly political nature, whereas cultural identity arises from the broader social patterning’ (2010: 11).
- Marlis Hellinger, Anne Pauwels, Marlis Hellinger, Anne Pauwels(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The pathways that facilitate this importation have been made by the repeated interconnections between the concept of language and the concept of race. In other words, language in the service of racism and ethnocentrism cannot occur without conceptualizing language and race in similar ways. Ac-cordingly, the identification of language with race is not possible without the genetic misprisions that create the myth of race in the first place; thus a folkish notion of genetic ownership of language lies at the root of all ethnocentric lin-guistic prejudice: “our native” language, which is “our birthright”, is seen as en-dangered by the presence of an other who is perceived as a biological contami-nant and thus a threat to the matrix of nation, ethnicity, and language. The understanding of the construction of this matrix presents a significant problem in the field of applied linguistics. To date, the study of racism in lan-guage has largely been limited to descriptions and classifications of the permu-tations thereof, along with ample theoretical critiques, but the historical and ideological etiology of the conflation of race and language has yet to be for-mally assessed. The Language, Ethnicity, and Race Reader (Harris and Hamp- 620 Thomas Paul Bonfiglio ton 2003), a useful but motley anthology, is a case in point. This is indeed an impediment, as prejudicial misconceptions cannot be properly demystified without an understanding of their origins and radical causes. Thus this inquiry will illuminate the sine qua non of ethnolinguistic prejudice, the determining factors without which that prejudice would be nonexistent, and focus on the historical development and exemplary permutations thereof. Ashcroft (2001) locates the beginning of the link between language and race in the discovery of Indo-European. It can be shown, however, that this phenomenon occurred much earlier.
eBook - PDFInterlinguistics
Aspects of the Science of Planned Languages
- Klaus Schubert(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Having proved such possibilities, the language may penetrate new domains and develop the stylistic layers for them. (3) Creativity is an individual act. It is easier to try out a language in individual activity than to gather a community, or even an ethnic social group, for this purpose. This is so at least in the first stage of the socialization of a language. On the way of a planned language towards the acquisition of functionality there are many barriers: a planned language at the initial stage lacks a number of those essentially important conditions that make up the prerequisites for the successful functioning of any ethnic language. What are these prerequisites? (1) An ethnic language is linked to a certain population, which provides the conditions for a continuous interaction of speakers and language. (2) An ethnic language is spoken in a state of ethnic integration of its speakers (there are in the world instances of scattered ethnic groups and languages, but these are of a secondary character). 60 Aleksandr D. Duli&nko (3) An ethnic language is territorially fixed, i.e., the language and the population have a common homeland. (4) An ethnic language is maintained and used while being inherited from generation to generation, whereby an uninterrupted linguistic tradition or habit and a corresponding linguistic setting is formed. (5) An ethnic language is used in a state of prevailing monolingualism among its speakers; this accordingly constitutes a situation without a linguistic alternative. (6) An ethnic language is accepted as the only real instrument of communication in its ethnic and social group.
eBook - PDFEthnicity and International Law
Histories, Politics and Practices
- Mohammad Shahabuddin(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
what does ‘ethnicity ’ mean? 13 Similarly, Richard Schermerhorn defines an ethnic group ‘ as a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their people-hood’. 9 Likewise, although Paul Brass admits that defining an ethnic group on the basis of objective features is problematic, in that it is usually extremely difficult to determine the boundaries of ethnic categories in this way, one of his definitional criteria of an ethnic group is having at least one distinguishing cultural feature that clearly separates one group of people from another, whether that be language, territory, religion, colour, diet, or dress. 10 More recently, Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr, too, define ethnic groups in non-biological terms and as ‘“psychological communities” whose members share a persisting sense of common interest and identity that is based on some combination of shared historical experience and valued cultural traits – beliefs, language, ways of life, a common homeland’. 11 Another widely used textbook defines an ethnic group as a large or small group of people, in either traditional or advanced societies, who are united by a common inherited culture (including language, music, food, dress, and custom and practices), racial similarity, common religion, and belief in common history and ancestry and who exhibit a strong psychological sentiment of belonging to the group. 12 Thus, ethnicity, as the character-making element of ethnic groups, is perceived broadly: going far beyond mere biological features, it incorpo- rates a wide range of cultural attributes including language and religion. In the context of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1996), Capotorti argues that ‘the substitution of 9 Richard Schermerhorn, ‘Ethnicity and Minority Groups’ in Ethnicity, ed.
eBook - PDFBasic Aspects of Language in Human Relations
Toward a General Theoretical Framework
- Harald Haarmann(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Consequently, all basic experience of the environment among human beings, all kinds of behavior -verbal or non-verbal -, and the profile of people's ways of thinking (including atti-tudes and mentality) are not simply anthropocentric, but at the same time - and more precisely - ethnocentric. The relationship between language and identity may be specified by singling out individual features (e.g. as in Crystal 1987: 18 ff.). One speaks of physical identity (e.g. language and age, sex, physical type), psychological identity (e.g. language and personality, intelligence), geographical identity (e.g. language and the regional background of a speaker, accents, dialects), national identity (e.g. lan-guage and nationalism, political status), social identity (e.g. language and social stratification, status, role, solidarity and distance), contextual identity (e.g. situa-tionally determined varieties of speech and writing), stylistic identity (e.g. identifi-cation with style levels). The most basic form of identity which underlies the indi-vidual features is ethnic since any facet of language- and non-language related identification is linked to a specific community and its profile of individualizing ethnic patterns. Given the basic nature of ethnic identification, it is reasonable to assign to a theory of identity the key role in the formation of methodological foun-dations in the humanities. Consequently, the theory of identity has to be regarded as the basic theory of all the humanities, on which the more specialized ethnologi-cal and other anthropological disciplines (...) would have to be based and elaborat-ed (Müller 1987: 391).
eBook - PDFThe Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival
Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity
- Joshua A. Fishman, Michael H. Gertner, Esther G. Lowy, William G. Milán, Silvia Burunat, David E. Fishman, Ofelia García, Itzek Gottesman, Phyllis Koling, Rena Mayerfeld, Carole Riedler-Berger, Mark J. Steele(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Chapter 4 Language Maintenance and Ethnicity JOSHUA A. FISHMAN After two decades of modern sociolinguistic inquiry into language maintenance and language shift in the U.S.A. and after one decade of renewed academic interest in the transformations of ethnicity in the U.S.A., the time is probably ripe to attempt to bring these two normally separate areas of inquiry into more focused interaction with each other. In addition, it may also be possible, due to the substantial amount of work that has recently gone into each of these topics in settings outside of the United States, to seek more general (i.e., more widely applicable) theoretical formulations with respect to these topics, and to do so without in any way decreasing local (U.S.A.) validity. Indeed, it is my goal in this paper to attempt to enhance local validity by means of increased comparat-ive perspective. Interactions Between Ethnolinguistic Collectivities: A Typology Of Resolutions There appear to be three major and recurring resolutions to interaction between two separate monolingual ethnolinguistic collectivities when such interactions are viewed from a perspective of more than three generations of time depth. If we take A to be indigenous and Β to be intrusive in a particular setting then: Resolution ι : Β A = A Resolution 2: Β A = Β Resolution 3: Β -> A = Β + A In Resolution 1 the intrusive language is lost. 1 In Resolution 2 the indigen-ous language is lost. In Resolution 3 both languages are maintained. Obviously, these are three very different resolutions and the social circumstances leading to them are likely to be very different as well. Nevertheless, if possible, we must 5 8 I Histórica/, Cross-Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives find a single conceptual framework within which to pursue our inquiry so as to make comparisons between one setting and another (or between one resolution and another) possible.
eBook - PDFGrammar
A Linguists' Guide for Language Teachers
- Tom Rankin, Melinda Whong(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Overall, when considering the nature of Language, our answer to the question, ‘what is Language’ is: a rich system of communica- tion, sharing specifically linguistic design features, which is an innate biological characteristic of the species Homo sapiens. Though a shared property, as with any biological mechanism, the underlying unity permits a rich variety of forms to surface. The interesting feature of Language when considering languages cross- linguistically, is the interplay of unity and diversity. While the range of linguistic diversity grows from the same shared root of Language, this diversity is fundamentally constrained. As we develop our understanding of this unity and diversity in terms of the idea of Virtual Grammar, we will see that all forms of language are constrained in shared ways. Language learners cannot escape these constraints, even if the language we produce as learners of another language might diverge from the variety that proficient speakers speak. Even at early stages, learner language is not wild, with unconstrained variation. Discussion of language learning will be left for Chapter 4 so that we can turn to the matter of diversity amongst languages in the next section. 2.1 What Is Language? 53 2.2 LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AND DIVERSITY IN LINGUISTICS The question of how many languages there are in the world is both controversial and complex, not least because of the vexed issue of determining the boundaries between one language and another (see next section). The generally accepted estimate for the number of 2.6 CASE IN POINT: NUMBER, GENERIC AND SPECIFIC MEANING Case in Point 2.3 on Number showed that languages make different levels of plurality distinction by expressing dual and paucal num- ber in addition to singular and plural. The Cushitic language Bayso is one such language, with paucal and plural marking (examples from Corbett, 2000, p. 11). (i) luban-jaa foofe. lion-paucal watch.1sg ‘I watched a few lions’ (ii) luban-jool foofe.
eBook - PDF- Michael Grenfell(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
If languages are invented, and languages and identities are socially con-structed, we nevertheless need to account for the fact that some language Linguistic Ethnography 129 users, at least some of the time, hold passionate beliefs about the import-ance and significance of a particular language to their sense of ‘identity’. It is now well established in contemporary sociolinguistics that one ‘lan-guage’ does not straightforwardly index one subject position, and that speakers use linguistic resources in complex ways to perform a range of subject positions, sometimes simultaneously. However, while accepting this, May (2001, 2005: 330) argues that ‘historically associated languages continue often to hold considerable purchase for members of particular cultural or ethnic groups in their identity claims’. While it is certainly an oversimplification to treat certain languages as ‘symbols’ or ‘carriers’ of ‘identity’, we are obliged to take account of what people believe about their languages, to listen to how they make use of their available linguistic resources and to consider the effects of their language use – even where we believe these ‘languages’ to be inventions. Heller (2007) suggests that if we tend to understand linguistic resources as whole, bounded systems which we call ‘languages’, it is because nations and states have found it necessary to produce powerful discourses which constitute language ideo-logies in the process of national belonging. Makoni and Pennycook (2007: 36) further argue for language policy in education which focuses on ‘trans-lingual language practices rather than language entities’. Garcia (2007: xiii) suggests that if language is an invention, we must observe closely how people use language, and base pedagogical practice on that use, and not on what the school system says are valuable practices.
eBook - PDF- Anthea Irwin-Turner(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
At other times as students of language and media, we think about categories in the ways that people them- selves construct them; in that case, we are talking about ethnicity. Perhaps a more useful way to differentiate bet- ween race and ethnicity, then, is not by biology and society, but by structure and agency, like figure 8.3. Do you remember these two terms? We’ve come across them before. Structures of society are the things that define us from outside us. Agency is the way we construct our own identities. It’s a little more complicated than my repre- sentation here – for example remember that our construction of identity only really ever hap- pens within the limits of societal structures – but hopefully considering race and ethnicity diagrammatically like this has helped you to recognise the differences between them to some extent. The concept of ethnicity involves a lot more agency than the concept of race; it is based on cultural categorisations that we hold and cultural practices that we carry out to construct our- selves as part of a group along with other people who hold and carry out similar things. They can include some or all of the following: shared ancestry, a sense of shared history, shared language, shared religion, shared dress codes and styles, shared food preferences and habits, shared arts practices. Pause for reflection. Do you think you have an ethnicity? 8.2.2 Taking It to the Next Level: Ethnocentrism When I ask this question to my students in Northern Ireland taking the course that this book developed out of, answers are always mixed, and a significant number of students are not sure. This is unsurprising, and says less about the ability or knowledge of the students in the room than it does about the dominant ideas that societies hold, in developed nations at least.
eBook - PDF- Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
10 Language and culture KEY TERMS • back-channel cues • coherence system • communicative competence • complementary schismogenesis • contextualization cues • conversational rituals • cooperative overlap • ethnography of communication • exuberances and de fi ciencies • framing • indirectness • interactional sociolinguistics • interruption • languaculture • linguistic determinism • linguistic relativity • message and metamessage • prior text • rate of speech • Rules of Rapport • Sapir – Whorf hypothesis CHAPTER PREVIEW Language and culture are closely intertwined in complex ways; indeed, many anthropological linguists argue that they are inseparable. The meaning of utterances comes not only from the words spoken but also from culturally agreed-upon conventions for how those words are used and interpreted, as well as from how they have been used in the past within a given culture. This chapter illustrates the relationship between language and culture by examining representative scenarios of conversational interactions between speakers who grew up in different countries speaking different languages, and between Americans of different ethnic and regional backgrounds. An opening scenario of an interaction between an American student and his German counterparts illustrates culturally in fl uenced aspects of language that can cause miscommunication or mutual misjudgment of intentions and abilities. Next, we introduce the concept of framing and explore how differences in framing can exacerbate discrimination and social inequality. This is illustrated with reference to John Gumperz ’ s studies of interethnic communication. We move then to discussion of politeness strategies and the conversational styles that result from their systematic use of features like overlap, rate of speech , and indirectness . We then consider the ritual nature of conversation. Differences in conversational rituals are illustrated with examples from language and gender.
eBook - PDFThe Ethnic Process
An Evolutionary Concept of Languages and Peoples
- Levic Jessel(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
220 The ethnic process and the sociology of language aware. If the ethnic process is indeed the primordial source, as, in fact, it has to be if it is to be theoretically useful, it has resulted in the rather noteworthy phenomenon of differentiation, both territorial and linguistic. Academic study of this phenomenon is apparently in disfavor. Socio-linguistic behavior seems to confirm this. Do the social sciences take no position on the stark fact of differentiation? The notion that a single biological source can affect developments of structure and relationships of the sovereign surrogates within each ethnic group need not be unreason-able. Abstract though it be, what could be more rational than a unitary, basic, determinative concept of an ethnic process emanating from the genetic endowment and interacting with environmental forces? It would be functionally characteristic of man. Hence, when Fishman, deeply conscious of the importance of ethnic backgrounds, hesitates to direct his theoretical quest at fundamental inter-pretations, and to encompass broader visions than pedestrian, localistic, perhaps transient ambivalences, it is surprisingly myopic. What is so remarkable about the ambivalences he has encountered in the area of language maintenance and language shift that these and similar topics of wide interest but relatively minor rank should engage his entire attention ? Exceptional situations that refuse to fit into current concepts require either further observation of the knotty ambivalences, theoretical expansion, or both. One criterion lies in their relative importance to the entire study. Culling widely from a congeries of such social dilemmas, Fishman despon-dently confesses to dissatisfactions with the results. Local peculiarities often insist upon remaining insoluble.
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