Damien Mooney – författare

Creating an orthography is often seen as a key component of language revitalisation. Encoding an endangered variety can enhance its status and prestige. In speech communities that are fragmented dialectally or geographically, a common writing system may help create a sense of unified identity, or help keep a language alive by facilitating teaching and learning. Despite clear advantages, creating an orthography for an endangered language can also bring challenges, and this volume debates the following critical questions: whose task should this be - that of the linguist or the speech community? Should an orthography be maximally distanciated from that of the language of wider communication for ideological reasons, or should its main principles coincide for reasons of learnability? Which local variety should be selected as the basis of a common script? Is a multilectal script preferable to a standardised orthography? And can creating an orthography create problems for existing native speakers?

Creating an orthography is often seen as a key component of language revitalisation. Encoding an endangered variety can enhance its status and prestige. In speech communities that are fragmented dialectally or geographically, a common writing system may help create a sense of unified identity, or help keep a language alive by facilitating teaching and learning. Despite clear advantages, creating an orthography for an endangered language can also bring challenges, and this volume debates the following critical questions: whose task should this be - that of the linguist or the speech community? Should an orthography be maximally distanciated from that of the language of wider communication for ideological reasons, or should its main principles coincide for reasons of learnability? Which local variety should be selected as the basis of a common script? Is a multilectal script preferable to a standardised orthography? And can creating an orthography create problems for existing native speakers?

This book offers a sociolinguistic investigation of new speaker linguistic practices in the revitalisation of Gascon, a dialect of the Occitan language, within the urban context of Pau, France. Combining phonetic analysis, qualitative discourse analysis, and an analysis of how transferred features are used to take stylistic stances, it investigates how new speakers of Gascon draw on French-influenced phonetic forms to take stylistic stances in order to align with, resist, or reconfigure prevailing language ideologies.The book includes three sub-studies: a phonetic analysis of transfer from French, focusing on three linguistic variables; a thematic/discourse analysis of ideological tensions surrounding authenticity, standardisation, and speaker legitimacy; and a contextual analysis of how phonetic transfer from French is operationalised to take stylistic stances. The author presents the concept of ‘new speakerness’ as a socially and phonetically complex phenomenon, ultimately contributing to broader debates in variationist sociolinguistics and the politics of language revitalisation. By offering a model for understanding how minoritised languages are reshaped by new speakers, the book provides a nuanced, empirically rich, and theoretically engaged account of how language contact, social meaning, and revitalisation intersect.

This book offers a systematic acoustic phonetic analysis of both language and dialect death in the region of Béarn, southwestern France. Focusing on Béarnais, a localised dialect of Gascon which is under pressure from French, the author explores the socio-political process of language shift, whereby members of a speech community cease to speak their indigenous language in favour of an incoming dominant language. Gascon is at an advanced stage of this process, making its remaining speakers excellent candidates for the study of language obsolescence, and this unique study will be of interest to researchers working in a broad range of disciplines, including language variation and change, language and dialect contact, Occitan and French, sociophonetics and phonology.