Language Policy and Politics of Identity

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

The following study, involving poststructural ethnographic inquiry (Britzman, 1995), seeks to explore and deconstruct (Derrida, 1976) the sociohistorical, discursive construction and negotiation of “language policies” in one university-level English department in Japan. In doing so, the study focuses upon how language policies in the department both reflect and give shape to the discursive bounds of who teachers and students “are/are not,” and “can/cannot” and/or “should/should not” be or become, as participants in tertiary education and as members of Japanese society (Rudolph, Yazan & Rudolph, 2018). The study explores how teachers and students affirm, perpetuate, problematize, challenge and reify notions of “Japaneseness” and “Otherness” in the department, when negotiating language policies (whether explicit or implicit). The study contributes to scholarly dialogue examining how education, and language policies therein, might both embody and (re)produce essentialized and idealized notions of “Selfhood” and “Otherness,” with a specific focus on approaches to the cultivation of guroubarujinzai (individuals equipped for participation in the global community) in tertiary-level Japanese education.

One of the dangers that we should be aware of when we study issues of language policy and planning is the fragmentary perspective by which they can be approached. Reality, by contrast, is interrelated and overlapping. This is why a complexity perspective stresses the importance of studying the contexts of phenomena, that is to say, their external relations. The direction to be followed here leads towards a better understanding of reality as a set of open systems that are in continuous exchange with the surrounding ecosystem, bearing in mind always that any apparent stability is the result of a dynamic equilibrium. Making headway towards an interdisciplinary approach is therefore necessary and imperative.
Headings such as status/normative/institution vis-à-vis others such as solidarity/normal/individual seem to imply a basic distinction in the definition of sociocultural reality. To discover and understand the dynamics of the interaction between these two major categories is, in fact, one of the most important subjects waiting to be addressed by language planning and policy strategies and more broadly by sociolinguistics. An interrelated set of guiding questions for the field could thus be stated as follows: What group or organisation, in pursuit of what overall objective or intention, wants to achieve what, where, how and when; and what do they actually achieve, and why? With this approach, even if how a group or organisation obtains its desired goal – that is, its actual intervention – is included as one of the main elements in a piece of research, the research will not focus exclusively on this topic, but will frame the intervention and identify how it is interrelated with all the other elements involved globally in this phenomenon, trying to establish a clear theoretical understanding of the entire interwoven set of events and processes.

Moving beyond the existing scholarship on language politics in north India which mainly focuses on Hindi–Urdu debates, Language Politics and Public Sphere in North India examines the formation of Maithili movement in the context of expansion of Hindi as the ‘national’ language. It revisits the dynamic hierarchy through which a distinction is produced between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ languages. The movement for recognition of Maithili as an independent language has grown assertive even when the authority of Hindi is resolutely reinforced.
The book also examines increasing politicization of the Maithili movement — from Hindi–Maithili ambiguities and antagonisms, to territorial consciousness, and subsequently to separate statehood demand, along with the persistent popular indifference. Mithilesh Jha examines such processes historically, tracing the formation of Maithili movement from mid-nineteenth century until its inclusion into the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution in 2003.
https://india.oup.com/product/language-politics-and-public-sphere-in-north-india-9780199479344

The linguistic conjunction regime in the Catalan education system has been subject to several controversies over the years and we can see one position in favour and another against the model. In this article we identify the main arguments in the public debate for and against the system and analyse its normative basis in accordance with contributions of political theory on linguistic justice. Ultimately, our goal is to assess to which extent there is room for rapprochement or reconciliation between the arguments of the two positions. Our main argument is that both positions, which have employed fairly stable reasoning over time with a shared tendency to avoid explicit identity arguments, may have a certain margin for rapprochement. Some interpretations of the values that underline the arguments of both position, such as ideals of equal treatment of languages, equality of individual opportunities and the guarantee of pluralism, could support a linguistic conjunction system of in schools in which Catalan has a prominent role, Spanish enjoys sufficient recognition, and equal competence in both languages is guaranteed at the end of the school period.

Quand la liste des choix de sujets fut connu au mi-deuxième trimestre de l’année dernière, grande fut la surprise des chefs d’établissements, enseignants, élèves et parents de constater que le Kreol Morisien n’apparaissait pas sur la liste des sujets pour Grade 10 avec la possibilité de prendre cette matière au niveau du Cambridge Examination School Certificate. C’est un manquement administratif grave.

‘L’avenir de l’enseignement des langues locales : les obstacles juridiques et idéologiques dans un monde globalisant’, in L’enseignement des langues locales, institutions, méthodes idéologies : Actes des Quatrièmes journées des droits linguistiques, Giovanni Agresti & Michele de Gioia (eds), Aracne, Rome, Italie, 2012.

https://www.routledge.com/Transnational-Education-Crossing-Asia-and-the-West-Adjusted/Phan/p/book/9781138794658

Phan Le Ha (also written Phan Le-Ha and Le-Ha Phan). Transnational Education Crossing 'the West' and 'Asia': Adjusted Desire, Transformative Mediocrity, and Neo-colonial Disguise. London and New York: Routledge.


The book comes with a Foreword by Rui Yang, Education, University of Hong Kong, and with an Afterword by Francis Collins, Geography, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

[Note: Coming in April 2016, Duke Univ. Press.]  Motherless Tongues examines the vexed relationship between language and history, so palpable in the conflicted workings of translation in the Philippines, the United States and elsewhere. Crisscrossing various colonial and postcolonial terrains, this book considers the different ways by which translation has played an important, if overlooked, role in setting the conditions for thinking about particular imperial and national events. Such events include nationalist and revolutionary attempts to vernacularize politics, imperial deployments of linguistic difference as a weapons system in the “wars against terror,” and the translation of lives among area studies scholars in the midst and in the wake of the Cold War. Mapping those areas and moments where linguistic exchange and historical imagination give rise to one another, this book traces the ways by which translation simultaneously sustains and subverts regimes of knowledge and relations of power.

This book focuses on linguistic practices of identity construction in a popular culture media context, the Eurovision Song Contest. Subscribing to a normativity-based approach to critical discourse analysis, it studies Europeanisation as it surfaces at the discursive interface of European, national and sexual identities in Eurovision lyrics and performances. Research in critical discourse analysis that deals with Europeanisation, or the discursive work involved in European identity formation, has so far mainly studied data from EU political contexts that illustrate a top-down approach to what Europeanness means. The
present book complements this earlier research in several ways, focusing on the linguistic construction of identities, and its interrelation with non-linguistic modes of signification in the Eurovision Song Contest. Discursive mechanisms that prove to be central for the
normative shifts of Europeanisation in the given context are de-essentialisation, inclusion, camp, crossing and languaging.

This study explores the language ideological underpinnings of the politics of language and identity in the context of two complex socio-political and sociolinguistic settings: contemporary Catalonia and the Valencian Community. Specifically, it compares Catalan and Valencian student perspectives regarding shifting boundaries and hybrid forms of language and identity. Contemporary scholarship on the linguistic authority of the Catalan language in Catalonia has identified a partial shift from the construction of this language as the essential language of the Catalan people (ideology of authenticity) to that of everybody’s language and yet nobody’s language in particular (ideology of anonymity) (Woolard 2016; Soler-Carbonell 2013; Trenchs-Parera et al. 2013). However, this research is often concentrated in Barcelona and surrounding areas prior to the 1 October 2017 independence referendum. Therefore, this thesis explores this sociolinguistic phenomenon in the other provinces of Catalonia, as well as in other Catalan-speaking territories, especially from an inter-regional and comparative perspective. Sixteen focus group interviews were conducted between March and December 2017 with Catalan and Valencian final year secondary school students (4º ESO), in which participants were asked to comment on sociolinguistic issues and engage in an exercise comparing Catalan and Valencian ‘Language and Literature’ textbooks. The study takes a qualitative and comparative-thematic approach as a means of examining the multifaceted and complex language ideological landscape and negotiations of the authority of Catalan in Catalonia and the Valencian Community. Students’ metalinguistic discourses and meta-textbook commentaries reveal competing constructions of linguistic authority in Catalan focus group discussions, while in Valencian groups the roles of the ‘anonymous’ and ‘authentic’ languages appear to be more rigidly defined. This thesis identifies in both Catalan and Valencian groups recurring constructions of language and identity as rooted in ethnolinguistic essentialism, thus as important markers of group difference and sameness. This thesis concludes that processes of linguistic ‘de-ethnicisation’ (Boix-Fuster and Woolard 2020: 712) may not be as pronounced as previously

A transcript and video of a TV interview with Sir Eric Pickles MP on 20 March 2017, in which he agrees that the first large-scale central government funding for promoting the Cornish language, delivered from 2010 to 2016, was a political ‘bribe’ to secure fiscal savings in other areas of government from his Liberal Democrat coalition partners. Includes some relevant background information.

This is my rough translation of the introduction to the first European vernacular grammar, Nebrija's 1492 Spanish (Castillian) Grammar, written just after Columbus had sailed for the West, and dedicated to Queen Isabella as part of the effort to hispanicize the recently reconquered territory. An argument for using the vernacular language, not Latin.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (London, 1954) is one of the most renowned philosophers of contemporary thought. His work in the field of ethics and moral reach diverse subjects as sexual orientation, nationalism, social discrimination on ethnic or religious reasons and responsibility of governments and international organizations in development and poverty eradication.

This is Chapter 1 of "Choosing a Mother Tongue: The Politics of Language and Identity in Ukraine." This book presents a sociocultural linguistic analysis of discourses of conflict, as well as an examination of how linguistic identity is embodied, negotiated and realized during a time of war. It provides new insights regarding multilingualism among Ukrainians in Ukraine and in the diaspora of New Zealand, the US and Canada, and sheds light on the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on language attitudes among Ukrainians around the world. Crucially, it features an analysis of a new movement in Ukraine that developed during the course of the conflict – ‘changing your mother tongue’, which embodies what it is to renegotiate linguistic identity. It is of value to researchers, faculty, and students in the areas of linguistics, Slavic studies, history, politics, anthropology, sociology and international affairs, as well as those interested in Ukrainian affairs more generally.

Though generally associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the idea of hegemony had a crucial history in revolutionary Russia where it was used to conceptualize the dynamics of political and cultural leadership. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study considers the cultural dimensions of hegemony, with particular focus on the role of language in political debates and in scholarship of the period. It is shown that considerations of the relations between the proletariat and peasantry, the cities to the countryside and the metropolitan centre to the colonies of the Russian Empire demanded an intense dialogue between practical politics and theoretical reflection, which led to critical perspectives now assumed to be the achievements of, for instance, sociolinguistics and post-colonial studies.

Table of contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: the Multiple Dimensions of Hegemony
1. Hegemony in Russian Social Democracy Before 1917
2. Hegemony without Social Science: Traditional Intellectuals in Late-Imperial Russia.
3. Verbal Art and Revolution: the Living Word
4. Metamorphoses of Hegemony in the Period of the NEP
5. The New Paradigm in Linguistic Science
6. The Revolution in the West and East: Hegemony and the National Question
7. Hegemony: the Decline and Fall of a Paradigm
8. Ideology Critique, Positivism and Marxism: the Paradoxical Legacy of Nikolai Marr
9. Conclusion
Glossary of Names
References

An analysis of the debt negotiations between the Greek government and the EU partners in the months January-July 2015. The paper uses discourse analysis and international relations, identity and negotiation theories to claim that Greek national identity was used by the Tsipras government for negotiation purposes and that such use led to unsatisfying and poorly agreed results and undermined the existing relations between the parties.

The legitimacy of the many postcolonial Englishes in the world necessitated an imperative to explore their use in the classroom. This pedagogic imperative in many cases has collided with many problems because of deeply entrenched ideologies in educational systems around the world. This configuration of issues surrounding the sociolinguistics of Englishes has resulted in the burgeoning of scholarly investigations into constraints and possibilities of World Englishes (WE), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and English as an International Language (EIL) in classrooms around the world. In this paper, I will argue that Englishes as a pedagogical problem is partly a construction or creation of such investigations and, in many ways, is disconnected from the daily challenges of English language teachers. What is the place of Englishes as an academic pedagogical issue among the myriad of problems teachers face every day? This paper draws on a 3-year localization project in ELT curriculum development in several institutions in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. In particular, it tracks the stories of three teachers in each of the last three countries, to give substance to the paper's argument that the current line of inquiry in the pedagogical "implications" of the sociolinguistics of Englishes is unequal, and usually treats the teacher and the classroom as a recipient, not a co-constructor, of knowledge in the field. Keywords World Englishes • English as a Lingua Franca • English as an international language • Localization • English teacher R. Tupas () English Language and Literature

This article presents a brief survey and analysis of the most intimate coupling of culture and national projects that occurred in Central Europe following the success of the Italian and German nation-states established in this manner during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Language is the very`stuff' of culture as well as the instrument of communicating and reaffirming cultural difference vis-aÁ-vis other cultures. As such, language became central to the processes of nation-and nation-state-building in Central Europe, leading to politicisation of language and also of linguistics and philology, which were expected to fortify the nations and their nation-states than rather to lend themselves to objective research. It is proposed that this specific Central European interweaving of language and national projects may be better comprehended through the application of Einar Haugen's model of language standardisation and Miroslav Hroch's model of nation-building. These two models in the Central European case seem to be closely corresponding to each other. The short catalogue of language elements used to produce national differentiation closes this contribution.

Tupas, T.R.F. and Lorente, B.P. (2014). A ‘new’ politics of language in the Philippines: bilingual education and the new challenge of the mother tongues. In P. Sercombe & T.R.F. Tupas (Eds.). Language, identities and education in Southeast Asia: language contact, assimilation and shift in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore (pp. 165 - 180).  Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Que l'idioma autòcton posseeixi una varietat unificada i consagrada per un poder oficial no equival automàticament i de forma immediata, al fet que aquesta varietat lingüística sigui realment usada en totes les comunicacions socials corresponents per part de la nació abans subordinada. Comença, llavors, el subprocés d’extensió de l’ús d aquesta varietat lingüística autòctona, és a dir, el seguit d'accions que tenen com a objectiu l'adquisició del coneixement de les característiques formals del nou codi per part de la totalitat de la població i la seva utilització efectiva en la globalitat de les funcions comunicatives de la comunitat lingüística.

The results of the 2010 federal elections in Belgium show a growing divide between the French-speaking south (Wallonia) and the Dutch-speaking north (Flanders) of the country. In the north, the Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) achieved a landslide victory with its campaign for complete political autonomy for Flanders. Never in the history of Belgium has Flemish nationalism been politically stronger than today. A secession of Flanders from Belgium is no longer considered an unimaginable scenario. The N-VA has its roots in the “Flemish Movement,” a collective term for a plurality of people and organizations that have pushed for greater Flemish autonomy since Belgium achieved independence in 1830. This article presents an analysis of this movement, its ideology, goals, achievements and relevance to the current political crisis.