Language and Identity

The intention of this paper is to interpret the ontological conditions of youth identity crisis missionally. This is first done by conceptualising identity crisis as a psychological phenomenon using frameworks of authenticity and attachment to explain the impact of early attachment abuse, abandonment depression, insecure attachment anxiety with God, and self-regulation on the identity formation of the youth. Secondly, the paper introduces a missional hermeneutic that provides an interpretative framework for coping with the crises of identity amongst young people. A missional hermeneutic of care for coping with the crisis of identity formation, therefore, elaborates on the missional basis of biblical interpretation as a powerful framework within which to interpret a skewed, conflicted identity. The author herewith proposes a missional opportunity that can activate the missional consciousness of young people in their time of crisis and identity formation. Furthermore, the author insists that this missional methodology can be a very useful strategy for producing therapeutic change in young people and can help youth ministry workers and pastoral caregivers to reframe the crisis of youth identity from the perspective of 'missio Dei'.

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 book is devoted to the analysis of ethno-linguistic and socio-cultural foundations of the identity of Dagestanis. The author discribres
particularities of  ethno-linguistic situation in the Mountainous and Lowland districts of Dageston, the influence of migration, urbanization, ethnic mixations on the cultural and language identity,  as well as the correlation of ethnic and religious identitues,  forms of actualization of ethnic and civil  consciousness,  ethnic stereotypes and other components of consciousness of Dagestanis. Special attention is paid to the problem of preserving the language diversity and cultural identity of the peoples of Dagestan.The book is intended for anthropologists, historians, philologists.
culture and a wide range of readers interested in Etnea-
takovymi and ethno-cultural problems.

This study analyzes the language used in the construction of the personal identity of Dr. Heidegger through the labels attached to him, both given by self and by others, and his stance-taking. The researcher applies Discourse Analysis to analyze the main character's utterances. The researcher also uses Indexicality Principle by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) as a mechanism to analyze identity. The qualitative content analysis is used to analyze thoroughly and interpret text data to draw inference towards the utterances on the short story. The result of the study shows that Dr. Heidegger is labeled mostly with negative words by others, however, he responded to combat these labels by using re-appropriation or by revaluing the existing labels. Moreover, the stances taken by Dr. Heidegger are found to position himself among others. Together with the labels given by self and others, and his interlocutor(s) in his talk-in-interactions the findings reveal that he is a strange old man, who is very curious and knowledgeable. Lastly, the conclusion can also be drawn that language and discourse are central to the construction of identities that are not always determined by a person himself, but also bound up with how others perceive him.

This dissertation is based on a long-term ethnographic and sociophonetic study of 15 transgender people on the female-to-male (or transmasculine) identity spectrum. The focus of the study is the way these individuals’ voices change during the first 1-2 years of masculinizing hormone therapy, which brings about a drop in vocal pitch along with other salient physiological changes. Based on regular recordings of participants during a one year period, the analysis tracks changes in fundamental frequency as well as formant frequencies and the acoustic characteristics of [s], each of which has a different place in biology-driven theories of gender and the voice. In addition to ostensibly hormonally driven changes to speakers’ available fundamental frequency range, I present evidence that these speakers are engaged in various types of articulatory shifts as part of their gender role transition, which affect both formants and [s]. However, I argue that changes in all three of the phonetic domains examined here must be situated in both sociocultural and linguistic context, even where biology appears to play a significant role. The analyses presented, which include attention to both intra- and inter-speaker variation, draw on a multi-layered understanding of gender derived from transgender people’s own distinctions between gender assignment, gender role, gender identity, and gender presentation. My speakers’ metalinguistic commentary on gender and the voice further elucidates the constellations of phonetic features that combine to create their cohesive gendered speaking styles. Ultimately, I focus on the ways that changes in one phonetic variable, like pitch, can recontextualize other elements of a speaker’s linguistic style, like the acoustic spectrum of [s]. This connection drives home the necessity of considering the relationship between linguistic characteristics, rather than treating them as entirely separable variables. Attention to stylistic wholes, over individual variables, points us toward the notion that transmasculine individuals do not engage in across-the-board masculinization, but rather bring together acoustic characteristics acquired from disparate sources in order to construct phonetic styles that reflect their complex affiliations with manhood, maleness, and masculinity.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

This study analyzes the language used in the construction of the personal identity of Dr. Heidegger through the labels attached to him, both given by self and by others, and his stancetaking. The researcher applies Discourse Analysis to analyze the main character’s utterances. In addition, the researcher also uses Indexicality Principle by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) as a mechanism to analyze identity. Qualitative content analysis is used to analyze thoroughly and interpret text data to draw inference towards the utterances on the short story.  The result of the study show that Dr. Heidegger is labeled mostly with negative words by others, however, he responded to combat these labels by using re-appropriation or by revaluing the existing labels. Moreover, the stances taken by Dr. Heidegger are found to position himself among others. Together with the labels given by self and others, and his interlocutor(s) in his talk-in-interactions the findings reveal that the he is a strange old man...

In his memoirs, Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew bemoans the lack of a cohesive national identity at the time of the republic’s founding in 1965. “How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?” he laments. Now, after nearly 50 years of nation-building, flag days, and National Day parades, a national identity for Singaporeans is still arguably very much in flux. Some
commentators have even characterised Singaporeans as being in the midst of an identity crisis, and such a characterisation may indeed be quite valid given the official shift in recent years from the cultivation of an imagined national community to encouraging Singaporeans to conceptualise the city state as a global city serving as a cross-road for a larger global imagined community. Accompanying this shift has been a massive influx of immigrants, which has impacted many Singaporeans’ sense of belonging and prompted increased debate on the issue of what constitutes a Singaporean identity. While some commonly proposed elements, such as pragmatism and a materialistic mind-set are, in fact, compatible with a global city identity, others, like Singaporean cuisine and Singlish, our home-grown vernacular, are decidedly more in line with a localised
national identity. This article reviews survey data, official discourse, and opinions expressed by Singaporeans in blogs and Internet chat boards in an effort to shed further light on this current hot-button issue of Singaporean identity.

This article deals with identity political discourse in situations of cultural movements, precisely in situations of migration. It addresses the question of migration through the interpretation of past and in the making events. In this context, it focuses on the perception of Other, and on its representation. As such, it observes spatiotypies in their discursive specificities. Spatiotypies are attributions of power and discourse. They state, mentally and politically, the social life of individuals. The corpus is composed of French newspaper articles, from the middle of 2015 to the end of 2016. This period saw the dismantling of the "Camps de Calais" and the distribution of migrants to other locations on the French territory.

The "Odissey" of Enaiat lasts seven years, from Afghanistan to Italy. Fabio Geda tells it in the novel "Nel mare ci sono i coccodrilli", that we analyse here embroiding a counterpoint of the Homeric poem.
An inter-interpretation between the contemporary novel and the classical poem.

This paper examines creolization  of the Caribbean. It looks into creolization from three points of view namely linguistic, ethnic, and biological, and discusses language, identity, and gender of the Caribbean respectively. Any attempt to define creole becomes an area of continuing concern to question the very status of language. There has been a long chain of disagreement over the definitions of creole languages and how they are different from other languages. The various etymological points of view are discussed in the first section. The second section debates the mythical or the (Andersonian) imagined Caribbean identity and it talks about ethnic creolization. The final section discusses the biological creolization.

This chapter discusses the evolution of minority policies in Poland after 1945 in the
context of the processes of ethnic homogenization and nationalization of the Polish state. It analyses the impact of political changes and ethnic structure on the national and minority policy of Poland at various stages of historical development of the country. It also explores whether, and if so, to what extent, the process of national consolidation in Poland has been completed, i.e. to what extent the national identity has prevailed over the regional or linguistic identities. The findings reveal that, after 1989, the minority issue is no longer a relevant factor in Polish politics, remaining within the confines of the dispute over the nature of the Polish identity between the conservative-nationalist and the leftist-liberal segments of Polish politics. At the same time, however, minority rights are not, despite the wording of the Constitution and relevant legislation, relegated to the level of democratic discourse by the political elites, but in many cases are rather seen as a challenge to the stability of the Polish statehood.

The Lakhota language, like many other Native American languages, faces a decline in young speakers. Can the culture exist independently of a language and can the people have the same feeling of belonging to it even after the language has been lost? The following study analyzes the relation of language and identity in a situation when most members of a tribe are no longer able to speak the language. It is based on interviews with 52 participants carried out on Pine Ridge Reservation. The study compares the opinions of speakers of the language with the non-speakers with the objective to find out what alternative signs of identity people use when they are not able to speak the language. The analysis focuses on the attitude to the language, it is trying to answer the question whether it is necessary to speak the language to be Lakhota and what do the people think about the eventuality that the language might disappear completely.

This paper explores the issues of youth language  in Kyrgyzstan  in order to research how youth,  Bishkek born, and newly arrived  young people from all parts of Kyrgyzstan use the language to construct identities in communication. The language of young people is one of the central topics in Sociolinguistics,  that is  a gap, subject to research in Kyrgyzstan.  As Paul Kerswill argues ‘Youth language” is labile, contingent and transient, subject to fashion, serving as a badge of  nonconformity, but above all constructing for its speakers a set of complex identities for deployment as markers of different stances in relation to varying interlocutors and shifting conversational contexts’.  This study will submit the data collected via public places, public transport, places of leisure  and bazar areas. Also the survey will be conducted among students in Kyrgyz universities.  As the preliminary research shows, the many educated young people are bilinguals in Kyrgyzstan. There are two reasons to  speak Russian: a)Necessity of learning  scientific and technical literature in education; b) Russian is associated with Urbaneness, civilization and belonging to educated subculture.  At the same time, in comparison with Students of the 1990-2000, current students especially Bishkek born young people,  learn Kyrgyz;  especially ethnic Kyrgyz students  display good proficiency in Kyrgyz, while this rate of Kyrgyz  language use in 1991-2000 was very low.  But Kyrgyz spoken by young people,  resembles Pidgin Kyrgyz,  creolized language belongs to youth community.  The elements of Pidgin Kyrgyz  is frequently practiced in social media. Even the young people  whose mother tongue is Kyrgyz, use  informal mixtures of two languages (Kyrgyz-Russian, Kyrgyz-Turkish and Kyrgyz-English) in conversation. The paper also  will analyze the influences of  code switching (mainly Kyrgyz-Russian) to the development of the Kyrgyz language.  In the course of the research, interactions occurring  between young people will be examined to study  how the increasing linguistic  diversity within the national population  might be harmonized with the  national identity.

There is a rich body of literature on the experience of Japanese immigrants in the United States, and there are also numerous accounts of the cultural dislocation felt by American expats in Japan. But what happens when Japanese Americans, born and raised in the United States, are the ones living abroad in Japan?

Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan navigate and complicate the categories of Japanese and “foreigner.” Drawing from extensive interviews and fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Jane H. Yamashiro tracks the multiple ways these migrants strategically negotiate and interpret their daily interactions. Following a diverse group of subjects—some of only Japanese ancestry and others of mixed heritage, some fluent in Japanese and others struggling with the language, some from Hawaii and others from the US continent—her study reveals wide variations in how Japanese Americans perceive both Japaneseness and Americanness.

Making an important contribution to both Asian American studies and scholarship on transnational migration, Redefining Japaneseness critically interrogates the common assumption that people of Japanese ancestry identify as members of a global diaspora. Furthermore, through its close examination of subjects who migrate from one highly-industrialized nation to another, it dramatically expands our picture of the migrant experience.

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This paper explores Israeli backpackers’ travel narratives, in which a profound self-change is recounted. These tourists are construed as narrators, whose identity stories, in which the powerful experience of self-change is constructed and communicated, are founded on, and rhetorically validated by the unique experiences of authenticity and adventure. The relation between the travel narrative, attesting to an external voyage toward an “authentic” destination, and the self-change narrative, attesting to an internal one, is examined in light of two major discourses in tourism: the semi-religious and the Romanticist. The paper addresses the sociocultural context, that of contemporary Israeli culture, against which the self-change narratives construct a collective notion of identity, and wherein they can be viewed as effective performances.

"crackle[s] with insight and revealing detail" (Jakub Benes on H-nationalism)

"a major contribution to the study of nationalism" (Carl Strikwerda in American Historical Review)

"This well-written, innovative, and engaging study pushes us to reorient our understanding not only of language and national identity in Belgium, but also how to go about studying them. Students unfamiliar with Belgian history will have no problem jumping right into this book, for Van Ginderachter concisely introduces and contextualizes all key issues. One could even say that it serves as a kind of primer on modern Belgian history. It will be useful not only to readers interested in Belgian history, but also to those studying nationalism, language, ethnicity, and labor movements in modern European history." (Matthew G. Stanard in Journal of Social History)

"The relationships of workers and the modern labor movement to social categories such as nationality, ethnicity, class, and religion are complex and poorly understood, usually treated separately from everyday experiences. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including a unique set of 'proletarian tweets,' this superb book both illuminates the Belgian case and provides a model for future research." (Advance praise by John Breuilly, LSE)

When people use a particular language or live in an environment in which a certain language is used, they create a complex system of relationships towards it, as well as perceptions, representations, and beliefs. This complex structure, which may also be termed linguistic ideology in certain circumstances, is reflected in the discourse about language shaped by individuals and the community.
Discourse about language thus reveals the individual’s and group’s relationship to a language or languages. This discourse is also found in scholarly works on language, and even in the definitions of language. It is necessary to ask to what extent and in what contexts discourse about language is ideologically conditioned—that is, when discourse about language appears and develops without facts that can be scientifically confirmed and established by experts, and becomes a means for establishing relations of power, domination/subordination, and inclusion/exclusion.
This book presents the hypothesis that ideological discourse leads to fetishizing language. That is, a language that functions as a symbol of identity becomes a fetish within a community that uses an expressly ideologically conditioned discourse about (its own) language.
The purpose of this volume is to present the ideological cores in discourse about language formed by Slovenian speakers that potentially identify with the Slovenian minority (or ethnic community) in Italy. The research is based on an analysis of material that was published in the newspaper Primorski dnevnik from January 2011 to December 2012.
Chapter one presents three dominant epistemologies that have appeared in scholarly literature at least since the beginning of the twentieth century and that define language as a system (or structure) of signs, as a means of communication, and as an identity symbol. These three definitions are not »new«; in various forms and contexts, they have appeared in the history of western linguistics from Antiquity onward. Despite the fact that none of these capture the totality and complexity of the concept of language and its phenomena, it can be asserted that together they cover a great range of language aspects and that they succeed in satisfying the epistemological need for a definition of language for scholarly purposes. These definitions are also not ideologically neutral; each of them expresses a particular »relation« to language or »representation« or »concept« of language that is not (only) scholarly, but also (originally) ideological.
Chapter two is dedicated to analyzing the material in this study. (The Slovenian) language has a specific status among members of the Slovenian minority in Italy, where the sociolinguistic position of Slovenian is more pronounced. The conceptions of this status, as created by its speakers, are also specific. Based on this, the hypothesis can be established that the linguistic ideology that developed in this environment due to the position of Slovenian influenced not only general discourse, but also scholarly discourse about language—that is, a hegemonic epistemological paradigm established itself in this space.
The need for identification led to a pronounced, and even extreme, emphasis on the symbolic function of language, whereas the other two aspects (systemic character and instrumentality) were neglected or were »reworked« according to the dominant Slovenian linguistics for the specific needs of this environment. This is less apparent in scholarly works of a theoretical character and in declarative discourse about language, and much more so in general-interest scholarship and applied discourse.
The hypothesis is tested through discourse analysis in various articles (columns, general-interest scholarship, reports, etc.) published on the topic of language in Primorski dnevnik from January 2011 to December 2012.
This chapter uses discourse analysis to examine how the concept of language is thematized in the selected texts, which declaration and interpretation processes are used, what the relations between the actants that appear in the thematization of »language« are, and, finally, what the potential functions (or goals) of such representation of language are.
The concluding essay presents the hypothesis that language has become an »identity fetish« in the context of the Slovenian community in Italy.
In the western epistemological tradition, alongside the definition that »language is a system of signs,« there also occasionally appears the definition of language as a complex structure of symbols. In addition, in the twentieth century there was substantial establishment of a definition that not only emphasized the symbolic value of linguistic phenomena, but also defines language as a symbol of identity.
Based on the material analyzed, the hypothesis can be established that, among the Slovenian speakers in Italy that potentially identify with the indigenous Slovenian minority, in addition to the symbolic function of language, there is also a fetishistic function. The concepts of the sign, symbol, and fetish are treated here from the perspective of semiotics and theory of symbols, with special emphasis on Sebeok’s and Ricoeur’s definitions.

Newcomers to Canada whose names index identities other than “white” and “English” face pressure to alter their names to facilitate integration. Some immigrants oppose the forces of conformity and refuse to assimilate their names. In interviews, they explain this stance using discourses of agency centring on a belief in true names, a moral obligation to get names right, and a need for a strong self. Focusing on ideologies of identity and language in their meta-agentive discourses, I argue that the act of immigrants keeping their ethnic names is a political move to redistribute responsibility for the integration of newcomers into the host society.

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.

Nicaraguan Spanish is characterized by the reduction of coda /s/ to glottal
frication, elision, and glottal constriction, but the latter variant has never been
explored in depth. The present study fills this void by analyzing the word-final,
intervocalic /s/ environment in sociolinguistic interviews, reading tasks, and
image identification tasks conducted with 36 Nicaraguans with the goal of
detailing the social patterning of glottal constriction. I find that glottal constriction
patterns like sibilance, a hyperarticulated variant, and a statistical analysis
reveals two distinct hyperarticulation strategies in formal tasks based on age
and education. Given their differing responses to formality, I propose that more
educated and younger speakers with more exposure to prescriptive norms apply
sibilance, a global hyperarticulation strategy, to signal their education and power
on an international scale, while less educated and older speakers utilize glottal
constriction to construct an identity associated with regional articulateness.

Diplomatic and peacekeeping initiatives by the international community in emerging cultures in conflict have failed to stem the violence and resolve the underlying conditions. Based primarily on political analysis, such initiatives do not address the underlying causes of the civil war at the individual, family, and tribal levels. This paper examines the psychological and sociological motivations for the violence within and between the Arab and African tribes of Darfur, to include motivation exploration of ethnic defections, failing cultural identity markers, and the effects of cognitive dissonance of the personal and social identities of the Darfur tribes. Research suggests that the identities of the African and Arab tribes are deeply contested over ethnicity, tribalism, religion, race and the generational memory that historical narratives provide. This fundamental identity conflict is overlaid by decades of violent physical, psychological and emotional assault upon the population. The result is a fundamental change of the psycho-sociology of tribal life and threatens disintegration and disestablishment of large group identity. The resulting societal and leadership breakdown of and within the tribes creates conditions of warlord-ism commonly found in ungoverned states such as Somalia. The paper concludes that the international community will ultimately fail unless measures are taken to create conditions for survival of the tribes physically, psychologically and sociologically.

The paper presents the history, the interdisciplinary character and the literature of the research in the field of official surname changes in Hungary. It presents a theoretical framework for the appropriate study of the complex phenomenon of surname changes. It gives an account of the examination of its primary sources, and also overviews the partial and case studies on different aspects of the topic.

First published in the American Chronicle, Buzzle and AfroArticles on 6th April 2010

Multiple divergent end point game
Consequently, when you have already ceased viewing the world through the eyes of an early 19th century Oromo, and you confidently become greatly assimilated into the global system, you will thoughtlessly tie yourself and your political group or association with the promises given to you by an American Congressman about Oromia’s liberation.

But, quite unhappily, another Oromo, who also believes frankly that he and his movement struggle for the benefit of their subjugated nation, will make a bond with the president of a small and marginalized country, who will be promising similar "delivery". As it happens, behind the American Congressman and the marginal president, there are people belonging in the same decision making center, who by practicing the multiple divergent end point game, ensure that unity will never take place among the Oromos.

If they are successful in their evil game, it is not due to any deficiency of the Oromo system or values, but to the earlier diffusion of the above described global system (an array of mindsets and attitudes). Certainly there are bribes, material goods, monies and other corruption techniques involved, but this matters little; if the same corruption techniques had been performed by representatives of two or more foreign powers before 150 years, the then targeted Oromo leaders would not have reacted in the way today react all the leaders of major Oromo movements.

The Oaxaca Valley during Monte Albán V provides an ideal context to explore the relationship between group identity and material culture in archaeology, a relationship that is often left largely unquestioned despite being poorly understood. Since the first excavations in the Valley of Oaxaca in the early 20th century, the region has been a source of archaeological interest, intrigue, and mystery. The decline of the city of Monte Albán as the sole political and cultural capital of the region marks the beginning of the period that the early explorers called “Monte Albán V” (MA V), which they interpreted as the result of a Mixtec invasion of an ethnically Zapotec state. This hypothesis has since been rejected by most scholars, but the dichotomy of Zapotec and Mixtec peoples as clearly delineated ethnic groups—as well as a belief in a sharp cultural and political discontinuity in the transition into MA V—has permeated much of our archaeological understanding of group identity in prehispanic Oaxaca. By compiling information from previous archaeological reports, I have analyzed variation in human burials dated to MA V at various sites across the region to better understand what identities were considered important in funerary practice. In particular, this study takes into account burial position, associated ceramic artifacts, and sex distribution. By applying recent anthropological theories of identity as social action, this study challenges many of the assumptions about identity in Postclassic Oaxaca that have been taken for granted by past research. Distinct ethnic traditions that could be attributed to Zapotec or Mixtec groups were not visible in the funerary treatment of individuals. Instead, the manipulation of genealogy and claims to specific ancestors appears more fundamental to group identity in much of MA V Oaxaca.

La piena consapevolezza di una scelta linguistica dialettale alterativa alla tradizione linguistica toscana si sviluppa – come già aveva notato Benedetto Croce – solo dopo la codificazione bembesca. Il dialetto, selezionato per la sua corposità e modellato sulla misura dello stile barocco, è proposto come un antidoto vitalizzante rispetto a prodotti letterari italiani non sempre originali, come una valida alternativa all’artificiosa lingua letteraria toscana. Su questa linea – inaugurata da Cortese e Basile – si inserisce la voce di Giambattista Valentino, un «povero scrivano» della seconda generazione di poeti, che tra moralismo e biasimo descrive ciò che accade nei suoi anni nella sua amata città. Nei tre poemetti in ottava rima – La Mezacanna co lo vasciello dell’Arbascia (1660), Napole scontraffatto dapò la peste (1665) e La Cecala Napoletana (1674) – Valentino affronta spesso la questione della lingua: nella finzione poetica dei suoi versi, in cui si alternano dialetto, lingua e latino, il nostro entra nella impegnativa disputa contro l’Accademia della Crusca. Il conflitto, che serve a costruire la sua fiera identità di poeta, si sviluppa su due questioni: da un lato, il nostro vuole proporre il napoletano come la vera lingua letteraria; dall’altro, disponendosi polemicamente verso i teorici della Crusca, adotta nella lingua toscana parole e modi del parlare contemporaneo. La fiera alterità linguistica si trasforma, in alcuni punti, poi, in alterità socio-culturale: lo scontro, verso la classe dirigente e i soprusi della dominazione spagnola, mira a definire il problema dell’indigenza degli intellettuali in un’epoca – la seconda metà del XVII secolo – in cui il loro operato diventa una merce che nessuno vuole più comprare.
Il contributo, dunque, propone di ricostruire gli scontri verso la cultura dominante di natura linguistica e socio-culturale, che si leggono tra i versi di Valentino, finalizzati alla costruzione della sua identità di poeta e alla rivendicazione del suo valore.

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.
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Increased attention to urban diversity as a site of study has fostered the recent development of linguistic landscape studies. To date, however, much of the research in this area has concerned the use and spread of English to the exclusion of other global languages. In a case study situated in Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne, we adopted a layered approach to investigate the role of Chinese language in Australia. Our data set consisted of hundreds of photographs of street signage in one square block area of the shopping district. Results of our analyses show that signage portrays a variety of code preferences and semiotic choices that in turn reveal insights into the identities, ideologies and strategies the help to structure the urban environment. As demonstrated in our study, such complexity requires a renewed and situated understanding of key principles of linguistic landscape research (Ben-Rafael & Ben-Rafael, 2015).

The concept of the ‘new speaker’ has gained currency in the sociolinguistics of minority languages in the past decade, referring to individuals who have acquired an additional language outside of the home and who make frequent use of it in the course of their daily lives. Policymakers and language advocates in both Scotland and Canada make frequent reference to the role that new speakers may play in the future of the Gaelic language on both sides of the Atlantic, and Gaelic language teaching of various kinds has been prioritised by policymakers as a mechanism for revitalising the language. This article examines reflexes of this policy in the two countries, juxtaposing the ongoing fragility of Gaelic communities with new speaker discourses around heritage, identity, and language learning motivations. In particular, I consider Nova Scotian new speakers’ sense of identity as ‘Gaels’, an ethnonym largely avoided or problematised by Scottish new speakers.

Abstract: The argument I will develop in this essay is that the foreign students are a latent human resource who can assist with overcoming English monolingualism in the Australian population. Foreign students, properly rewarded, can be a major source of skills transfer. Every one of those students is a walking compendium of language and cultural skills that Australians need to know.

This article considers the use of multiple languages in the
songs of the ongoing war in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. In examining
how and to what end different languages are employed in these songs,
I seek to shed light on the underlying assumptions about the
languages involved and about the communities using them. 
The key language combination examined in this article is that
of Russian and Ukrainian, which are the two languages most
commonly used in the songs under study. I compare the strategies of
multilingual songwriting utilized by predominantly or originally
Russophone Ukrainian artists to those used by their Ukrainophone
Ukrainian counterparts, revealing significant differences between the
two. While Russophone artists employ multilingualism in their songs
as a way of signalling a pro‐Ukrainian position in the war, their
Ukrainophone counterparts largely resort to multilingual expression
to cast the Russian language as the language of the enemy. This
divergence makes it possible to speak of at least two distinct strategies
or varieties of multilingualism in the songs of the War in Donbas.
I explore these key trends both through the corpora of
multilingual artists and through individual songs written in more
than one language. While my primary focus resides in the lyrics of the
songs, I also consider, where necessary, visual material (particularly
music videos) as well as the musical elements of the songs in
accordance with the methodological principles of multimodal
discourse analysis.

The language situation in contemporary Belarus is characterized not only by mass Belarusian-Russian bilingualism among the minority Belarusian-speaking segment of the population, but also by a significant division within the Belarusophone community in attitudes toward the literary norm: those whose usage is oriented toward the post-1933 standard (the only form of standard Belarusian officially recognized by the Belarusian government), and those, typically allied with the pro-western anti-Lukashenka opposition, who seek to distance themselves from what they regard as the overly russified language used in the official Belarusian-language media and state educational system.
In this paper I examine the language usage and language attitudes of a numerically small but potentially quite influential segment of contemporary Belarusian society: Belarusophone university students. Employing the “community of practice” model developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998), and applied in sociolinguistics by researchers such as Eckert (2000), I show that although there is a considerable range of variation in Belarusophone students’ usage of and attitudes toward the competing variants of standard Belarusian, this variation, when we take into account the students’ participation in specific forms of social engagement, is in many cases entirely predictable and regular. As defined by Wenger (1998), a community of practice is “an aggregate of individuals engaged in negotiating and learning practices that contribute to achieving a common goal.” The community of practice can be defined, and defines itself, with respect to three parameters: 1) what it is “about,” that is, the community's joint enterprise as it is understood and continually renegotiated by its members; 2) how it functions, i.e. the forms of mutual engagement and joint action that bind members together into a cohesive social entity; and 3) the capabilities it has produced, i.e. a shared repertoire of resources (practices, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, discourses, styles, etc.) that members have developed as part of a process of social learning. The concept of “community of practice” provides a more empirically satisfying model of social structure in complex, more mobile modern urban societies than the social network concept employed by sociolinguists such as Milroy (1980), since it focuses more on the content of social interactions, that is, what social networks are “about,” rather than simply keeping track of “who knows whom and in what capacity.”
On the basis of an e-mail survey of 70 Belarusophone students at universities in Belarus conducted in 2004-2005, I sought to test the hypothesis that the most active participants in what I call “oppositional communities of practice” are leading the way in the use of non-codified, innovative forms associated with the independent pro-western Belarusian-language media and younger Belarusophone intelligentsia. The oppositional communities of practice that were the focus of this study included the Association of Belarusian Students (ZBS), Malady Front and similar oppositional organizations, as well as fans of Belarusian-language rock groups (the “Belarusian sound community,” as Survilla (2002) has called them), all groups which define themselves in opposition to the Russocentric and neo-Soviet official Belarusian culture.
The survey included a linguistic questionnaire focusing on variants in the phonological shape of loanwords (e.g. codified standard [plan] ‘plan’ ~ [pl’an]), variants in inflectional and derivational morphology (e.g. hetaha horada ~ hetaha horadu ‘this city (gen. sg.)’, šmat moŭ~ šmat movaŭ ‘many languages’ (gen. pl.), samy tanny bilet ~ najtannejšy bilet ~ najtanny bilet ‘the cheapest ticket’, maladzjožny ~ moladzevy ‘youth’ (adj.) and a number of morphosyntactic and syntactic variables (e.g. kamitet pa spravax moladzi ~ kamitet u spravakh moladzi ‘youth affairs committee’), užyvaemaja zaraz stratehija ~ stratehija, jakaja zaraz užyvaecca ~ užyvanaja zaraz stratehija ‘the strategy currently being employed’, heta novy šljax ~ heta josc' novym šljaxam ‘this is a new way’. Respondents were asked to grade these variants according to the following scale: 1) the variant the respondent uses him or herself and which he/she considers to be correct; 2) an acceptable variant within the standard language; 3) a form that is used by other people, but which the respondent considers to be incorrect; 4) a form that the respondent considers to be impossible in Belarusian.
Respondents were also asked to answer a series of questions concerning their family's language use, language use in different domains, whether or not the respondents’ friendship networks include primarily Belarusian or Russian speakers, degree of exposure to Belarusian-language print and electronic media employing both the official standard and non-codified literary variants associated with the opposition media, degree of participation in Belarusian youth organizations (official vs. oppositional), exposure to Belarusian-language rock music, knowledge of Slavic languages other than Belarusian and Russian, and so on. In addition, I included a series of questions focusing on respondents’ attitudes regarding language and ethnicity and their views as to which nations/ethnic groups are culturally and psychologically closest to the Belarusians (this latter question was included to determine which external reference groups Belarusian students tend to identify with most).
For each informant, I calculated an index based on level of participation in oppositional communities of practice and commitment to the core values of the nationalist opposition (i.e. tendency to consider language an essential marker of national identity, tendency to view Belarusians as more like Central or West Europeans than the Russians). I then divided the responses into three groups: those with the highest scores for participation in oppositional communities of practice and oppositional values, those with average scores, and those with the lowest scores. I then produced aggregate scores for each of the linguistic variables for each of the three groups.
Analysis of the data shows that, as I hypothesized, the students with the highest scores for “oppositionality” show the strongest preference for innovative forms, while those with the lowest scores adhere more closely to the norms of the post-1933 codified standard (forms that are also, for the most part, linguistically closer to Russian). Those with average scores for oppositionality show the highest degree of variation, in some cases preferring the innovative variants, and in other cases remaining more conservative. Another interesting finding is that the individuals occupying the most extreme positions on the continuum of oppositionality show the most extreme evaluations of the competing variants: a higher percentage of those with high oppositionality indices regard the post-1933 standard variants as “incorrect” or “non-Belarusian,” while those with the lowest oppositionality scores show the strongest tendency to characterize the non-codified variants in the same way.
Belarusian language use among Belarusian university students thus represents a continuum, from the “hard core,” consciously Belarusian-dominant speakers, who use the language in all or most social contexts and whose language use is intimately tied to specific oppositional practices and discourses, to the Russian-dominant “casual users,” among whom there is a relatively low level of commitment to the use of Belarusian as an overt political and cultural statement. The “in-betweens,” whose language, though influenced to some extent by the recent innovations in literary usage, reflects the continued influence of the Soviet-era codified standard, show sympathy for oppositional cultural models as reflected in their patterns of media consumption, but are not full participants in the associated communities of practice.
While traditional variationist sociolinguistics tends to disregard speakers’ conscious manipulation of linguistic variables as representing a less authentic, less natural form of language, in studying Belarusophone student subcultures specifically as communities of practice, we must be sensitive to the role the innovative variants play in the affirmation of group membership and status within the group, that is, their function as a form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991). Viewed at the level of individual language use, such variation also plays a key role in the expression of individual positionality, or stancetaking, which has recently emerged as a central concern in research in interactional sociolinguistics (Jaffe 2009). As argued by Coulmas (2005), a focus on speaker agency, as expressed in the socially-motivated choices that speakers make from the linguistic options available to them, helps to shed new light on the problems of language variation and change that are at the heart of the sociolinguistic enterprise.

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Survilla, Maria Paula (2002). Of Mermaids and Rock Singers: Placing the Self and Constructing the Nation through Belarusan Contemporary Music. London: Routledge.

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