Prestige

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  Language in Ethnicity

  A View of Basic Ecological Relations

  • Harald Haarmann(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  What is described here as Prestige planning may be defined as a cluster of individual ecological variables which imply evaluations of language planning activities by the speech community. The term Prestige planning could be paraphrased as planning with regard to elements of evaluation in the ethnic identity of a speech community. Thus Prestige planning is not the same as identity planning, as ethnic identity includes many other features which are not language related (see Haarmann 1983a, 322ff.). It must be admitted, however, that it is as difficult to define the term 88 Language in ethnicity: a view of basic ecological relations Prestige adequately in this sense as it is in the case of identity. In the early contributions, sociolinguists tried to avoid conceptual confusion by restricting the use of the term to special conditions. Weinreich (19'53, 79) proposed defining Prestige as a language's value in social advance. Until now, it has been in this sense that the term has been applied. Fish-man (1964, 54), commenting on Weinreich's proposed definition, point-ed out that new problems arise when attempting to evaluate or define social advance. According to Fishman, the term Prestige is needed for the analysis of language preferences or of factors linked to language maintenance. On the other hand, he stresses the dilemma which results from specifying a term whose meaning and use have been ambiguous: It may be precisely because Prestige obscures so many different considera-tions and has been used with so many different connotations that the relation-ship between Prestige data and language maintenance or language shift data has been rather more uneven than otherwise be expected (Fishman 1964, 54). This warning of Fishman's with respect to the ineffective use of Prestige should always be taken into consideration. In a recent contribution, Neide (1982) analyzed attitudes involving Prestige in a bilingual urban community in western Europe (German speakers in Belgium).

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  Attitudes to Standard British English and Standard Polish

  A Study in Normative Linguistics and Comparative Sociolinguistics

  • Maciej Rataj(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  173 Chapter 7 Prestige in English and Polish 7.1 Introduction The success of any linguistic variety depends on the willingness on the part of its linguistic community to use it� Prestige is a derivative of this; however, it seems that it does not always work as expected� For instance, those who use a sociolect such as slang do so for the purposes of group identity rather than con- sidering their slang as beautiful or more correct than other varieties� A stand- ard dialect is a special case in that, to the majority of speakers in numerous national speech communities, it is a non-native dialect which all speakers are nonetheless expected to understand and use on a daily basis� Thus Prestige is necessary for a standard dialect candidate to win the selection stage of language standardization, and subsequently to resist destandardization or replacement by another dialect� In Chapter 1 overt and covert Prestige were distinguished, notions which account not only for clear-cut diglossia, where two different lan- guages are employed, as in Paraguay, for example (Matthews 2007:105), but also for the use of the standard variety in official contexts and employing a regional or social vernacular, one not necessarily markedly different from the standard one, when the situation does not require this� By realizing that differ- ent contexts require different varieties as well as styles, one is able to account for the fact that slang and vernacular varieties, although popular, cannot substitute for standard ones� The present chapter is not the only one concerned with Prestige, as language reputation permeates such issues as general characterization of standard dia- lects, their usefulness in various walks of life and purism, as was partly analyzed above� Needless to say, overt and covert Prestige also determine the choice of one’s favourite language variety� The present discussion

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  Status Change of Languages

  • Ulrich Ammon, Marlis Hellinger, Ulrich Ammon, Marlis Hellinger(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In almost all cases they want their reluctant national government to grant this by means of linguistic legislation since apparently their own power, influence, attractiveness or numbers, in short their Prestige 4 Roland Willemyns in itself does not suffice to generate similar rights almost automatically. The English as an Official Language-movement in the United States is one of the few or even the unique example of advocates of a prestigious, national language wanting its position confirmed by linguistic legislation (Bister & Willemyns, this volume). This brings me to the question which will be debated in this article, viz. the relationship between language Prestige and linguistic legislation. I will try to demonstrate my viewpoints in the light of mainly two examples to be regarded as classical, i. e. Canada and Belgium. 1.2. In bi- or multilingual countries of any type (Kloss 1966) there almost always is some kind of competition between the languages present. In some of them one of the paramount problems is language shift, i. e. the assimilation of members of linguistic community A to linguistic community B. This conscious as well as unconscious shift towards another language and community is generally motivated by a want for upward social mobility. The shift, thus, always occurs from a less prestigious to a more prestigious community and taking over the language of the latter is one of the most noticeable signs of claiming affiliation and assimilation. The language of the target group, therefore, is to be considered the Prestige language. In this article it will be put forward that such a shift can only be stopped and eventually reversed if the Prestige language ceases to be the Prestige language, i. e. if the community which uses it ceases to be the Prestige community. Various other strategies have been devised to stop language shift.

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  Language and Nationality

  Social Inferences, Cultural Differences, and Linguistic Misconceptions

  • Pietro Bortone(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Similarly, the perception of entire languages as prestigious or low-level is affected by culture-specific and context-specific considerations. Speakers of native languages of South America may add Spanish elements to their speech for added Prestige; Spanish speakers from the same countries may, however, add English elements to their Spanish 12 In Danish, this is a suprasegmental element (the stød ) whose articulation – rather variable across speakers and regions – is often a laryngealization rather than a stop, though it still sounds like a glottal stop to untrained ears. The distinction need not detain us here. Language and Nationality 34 for added Prestige. And the cachet and status of languages also change over time. In Sweden, before the First World War, German was the foreign language taught in schools (previously it had been French), and was deemed the illustrious conduit of a model high culture; however (Östling 2008: 207–13), in the 1930s and especially after the Second World War, the Swedes’ wish to distance themselves from Nazism contributed to a forceful veer towards English: in 1946, English replaced German in Swedish schools, an emblematic shift in line with Sweden’s general cultural re-orientation from Germany to the United States, which continues to this day. In 1948, Denmark too introduced some orthographical changes, such as the abolition of the capitalized initial for all nouns, in a move understood to be an effort to make Danish look less like German. Well into the twentieth century, even eminent linguists were making judgmental pronouncements on whole languages. Just to take one example: Jespersen (1912: 2–11), described the English language as ‘grown-up’, ‘masculine’, ‘possessing male energy but not brutal force’, and as having a word order that manifests ‘business-like, virile qualities’ – also because, he wrote, ‘women as a rule are not such economizers of speech’.

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  Language in the USA

  Themes for the Twenty-first Century

  • Edward Finegan, John R. Rickford(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  At the same time, how-ever, there may exist another set of norms that relates primarily to solidarity with more locally defined social groups, irrespective of the social status of these groups. When forms are positively valued apart from, or even in opposition to, Social varieties of American English 71 their social significance for the wider society, they are said to carry covert pres-tige . In the case of overt Prestige, the social valuation lies in a unified, widely accepted set of social norms, whereas with covert Prestige the positive social significance lies in the local culture of social relations. It is therefore possible for a socially stigmatized variant in one setting to have covert Prestige in another. A local youth who adopts vernacular forms in order to maintain solidarity with a group of friends clearly indicates the covert Prestige of these features on a local level even if the same features stigmatize the speaker in a wider, mainstream con-text such as school. The notion of covert Prestige is important in understanding why vernacular speakers may not aspire to speak socially favored dialects, even when these speakers may evaluate the social significance of linguistic variation in a way that superficially matches that of their high-status counterparts. Thus, widely recognized stigmatized features such as multiple negation, nonstandard subject–verb agreement, and different irregular verb paradigms may function at the same time as positive, covertly prestigious features in terms of local norms. In recent years, the maintenance or even heightening of vernacular language features among non-mainstream speakers has been viewed in terms of power as well as Prestige.

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