Bettina Migge - Böcker

Like many languages across the globe, the Celtic languages today are experiencing varying degrees of minoritisation and revitalisation. The experience of the Celtic languages in the twenty-first century is characterised by language shift to English and French, but they have also been the focus of official and grassroots initiatives aimed at reinvigorating the minoritised languages. This modern reality is evident in the profile of contemporary users of the Celtic languages, in the type of variation that they practise, and in their views on Celtic language and society in the twenty-first century. In turn, this reality provides a challenge to preconceived ideas about what the Celtic languages are like and how they should be regarded and managed at local and global levels. This book aims to shed light on some of the main issues facing the Celtic languages into the future and to showcase different approaches to studying such contexts. It presents contributions interested in explicating the modern condition of the Celtic languages. It engages with attitudinal support for the Celtic languages, modes of language transmission, choosing educational models in minority settings, pedagogical approaches for language learners and perceptions of linguistic practices. These issues are considered within the context of language shift and revitalisation in the Celtic languages. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum.

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non-native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers, etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change.

This volume undertakes a reimagination of Creole communities in the Caribbean and beyond by addressing the persistent disconnect between contemporary research on Creole communities and Sociolinguistics. While it acknowledges that early interactions between these fields have been fruitful, especially in understanding variation, Creole grammars and their relationship to their input languages, research on Creole communities subsequently prioritised typological and genealogical research, neglecting social meaning, speaker agency, and stylistic variation.The book advocates for a ‘social turn’ in research on Creole communities, urging a (re)connection with contemporary sociolinguistic concepts to normalise Creoles and their lexifiers, such as English, as objects of study within broader paradigms. It embraces post-structuralist approaches, focusing on language ideologies, identity work, and indexicality, and capitalise on concepts such as ‘forcefields’ and ‘(semiotic) assemblages’ to analyse the complex interplay of linguistic, social, political, economic, and ideological influences. The exploration challenges binary or linear framings of the linguistic landscape in Creole communities, such as diglossia or (post-)Creole continua, which often fail to capture the fluid, messy realities of language use. Crucially, we critique the ‘myth of orderly multilingualism’, an ideology that misrepresents the diverseness of linguistic practices in Creole contexts by assuming languages can be neatly separated.Drawing on insights from the English-official Caribbean, Guiana region, and the Pacific, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in Pidgin and Creole Studies, contact linguistics, World Englishes, and sociolinguistics.

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non-native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers, etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change.

Like many languages across the globe, the Celtic languages today are experiencing varying degrees of minoritisation and revitalisation. The experience of the Celtic languages in the twenty-first century is characterised by language shift to English and French, but they have also been the focus of official and grassroots initiatives aimed at reinvigorating the minoritised languages. This modern reality is evident in the profile of contemporary users of the Celtic languages, in the type of variation that they practise, and in their views on Celtic language and society in the twenty-first century. In turn, this reality provides a challenge to preconceived ideas about what the Celtic languages are like and how they should be regarded and managed at local and global levels. This book aims to shed light on some of the main issues facing the Celtic languages into the future and to showcase different approaches to studying such contexts. It presents contributions interested in explicating the modern condition of the Celtic languages. It engages with attitudinal support for the Celtic languages, modes of language transmission, choosing educational models in minority settings, pedagogical approaches for language learners and perceptions of linguistic practices. These issues are considered within the context of language shift and revitalisation in the Celtic languages. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum.

This new four volume collection, Pidgins and Creoles, will showcase the major areas of research and their achievements in this multidisciplinary field. The collection will include both works that represent the status quo as well as those that are controversial in nature but which have nevertheless functioned as major catalysts for the production of knowledge. An important focus of the volumes will be to critically assess existing models, truths, research agendas and methodological frameworks in the research on these languages. While the bulk of research to date has principally investigated so-called English-lexified creoles, the volumes will also draw on work carried out on the range of such languages, crucially including not just creoles but also pidgins.