Prague Papers on Language, Society and Interaction / Prager Arbeiten zur Sprache, Gesellschaft und Interaktion – serie

This book provides the first systematic description of the linguistic accommodation of Moravian migrants in Bohemia. By analyzing the linguistic behaviour of 39 university students from different parts of Moravia living at a hall of residence in Prague, the author investigates part of an unsubstantiated and ideologically motivated dialect contact hypothesis according to which in informal, everyday communication Moravians in Bohemia accommodate not in the direction of the standard dialect but to Common Czech, a non-standard interdialect that is spoken throughout Bohemia. The study combines a quantitative analysis of six linguistic variables with an ethnographic study of informants’ linguistic and social behaviour. A primary objective of the study is to identify the impact of various social criteria on informants’ acquisition of Common Czech forms.

This book presents cutting-edge research into the complex interrelationships between linguistic diversity and ideology. It provides insight into how institutions and individual stakeholders carry ideologies forward into the discursive space through policies, propaganda or individual perceptions and reflections. The chapters focus on different European localities (UK, Central Europe, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Italy), social actors (migrant communities, citizens, and policy-makers), and institutional contexts such as public bodies (European, national) and private enterprises. Understanding ideology as a social act of conceptualization, the book contributes to the growing interdisciplinary body of linguistic research into the social theory of meaning and change.

The chapters in this volume reflect the variety of methods that researchers have recently applied in their investigations of "behavior toward language", or language management. The innovative methods introduced in the volume will appeal to researchers interested in different types of introspective interview methodology and discourse analysis, and to those looking for ways of linking language policy to everyday social interactions. The broad spectrum of themes taken up by the authors include the practices of language cultivation agencies, the use of first and second languages in educational contexts, attitudes toward language varieties, the use of language in immigrant communities, and the processes underlying literary criticism.

This volume offers empirical perspectives on the current sociolinguistic situations in former Eastern Bloc countries. Its seventeen chapters analyse phenomena such as language choice, hierarchies and ideologies in multilingualism, language policies, minority languages in new legal, educational, business and migratory contexts, as well as the position of English in the region. The authors use various methodological approaches – including surveys, discourse analyses, descriptions and analyses of linguistic landscapes, and ethnography – in order to deal with sociolinguistic issues in eight countries and seven regions, from Brandenburg, Germany, in the West to Sakhalin, Russia, in the East.

This volume expands the discussion on the language management (LM) framework through two themes: interests and power, which are driving forces of the LM process, observable and describable at every step. It consists of thirteen contributions analyzing diverse situations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Authors focus on a range of topics, including the role of language ideologies in various types of institutions, such as higher education institutions and language cultivation centers, the struggle to maintain minority languages, the positions of the actors involved in the process of making policies concerning foreign language teaching, or the processes that learning and choosing to use foreign languages entail. Emergent insights into the commonalities in the ways in which interests and power guide or underlie the management of language, communication, and sociocultural problems contribute significantly to the strength of LM as a sociolinguistic framework.