Language Matters: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Language and Nationalism in Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico
Abstract
Taking a sociolinguistics-in- action approach, Language Matters explores the language situations in Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, three geographic areas that experienced the effect of linguistic imperialism in a historically similar timeframe and manner, but with very different results. English has all but replaced the native language of Guam, plays a significant role in the multilingual society of the Philippines, but is barely existent in the daily lives of Puerto Ricans, who are mostly monolingual Spanish speakers. Language Matters is the first book to explain why this is.
The book includes a discussion of language shift and maintenance factors, including societal bilingualism, migration, socioeconomic factors, institutional support, prestige, and threats, but also examines nationalist groups’ involvement in native language maintenance and the construction of national identity. It also includes an analysis of how these factors presented themselves in Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Some of the key factors explaining the differences between the countries include societal bilingualism and prestige, but also the role of nationalist groups associating the vernacular with national identity, and in some cases simultaneously presenting English as a threat to this identity.
http://www.academicapress.com/node/310
... In historiography, the idea that the Old Russian language was just the language, while Novgorod and Pskov were its regional dialects is still the prevailing opinion. Modern Russian linguistics and historiography inherited this viewpoint from Soviet science, but the political and intellectual history of the 20th century provides historians with several examples of status changes when idioms, previously defined as dialects, became languages (Clampitt-Dunlap, 2018;McMahon, 2019;Suny, 2017). The change of status from "dialect" to "language" had political and ideological significance in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, and changes of borders and the emergence of new nations (Lowry, https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2020.08.76 Corresponding Author: Maksym W. Kyrchanoff Selection and peer-review under Tamir, 2019), that were ambitious enough in their attempts to establish a new independent, but nationalizing in fact (Brown, 2018;Stojanov, 2008;Wright, 2016), states inspired these transformations (Bergmann, 2020;Bieber, 2020;Hazony, 2018). ...
This introduction to our special issue surveys some of the current work undertaken by scholars on the island of Puerto Rico and abroad that document the language forms, uses, and ideologies of language in the U.S. territory. We provide the “total linguistic fact” (Silverstein 1985) of what it means to speak English and Spanish in Puerto Rico, Census projections of language use, self-reported data and actual documented work on the form and social uses of languages. We provide the sociohistorical context of the history of both Spanish and English on the Island, language policies across time, and how these have played out and been contested in real time. Setting the scene for our special issue, we ask our readers to think critically on the status of contact languages in globalized times, ideological shifts of language practices, and the intimate ties between language and identity.
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