Language, Power and Social Process [LPSP] – serie

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to talk and its role in certain workplace practice and relationships, this book consists of 14 contributions that address the thematic focus of how professional knowledge and identities are constituted in discourse, vis-a-vis a given institutional order.

No detailed description available for "Language Ideological Debates".

In Corsica, spelling contests, road signs, bilingual education bills and Corsican language newscasts leave language planners and ordinary speakers deeply divided over how to define what "counts" as Corsican and how it is connected with cultural identity. In Ideologies in Action Alexandra Jaffe explores the complex interrelationship between linguistic ideologies and practices on the French island of Corsica. This detailed exploration of the ideological and political underpinnings of three decades of language planning raises fundamental questions about what it means to "save" a minority language, and the way in which specific cultural, political and ideological contexts shape the "successes" and "failures" of linguistic engineering efforts.Jaffe's ethnography focuses both on the way dominant language ideologies are inscribed in the everyday experience of ordinary people, as well as how they shape the evolving strategies of language planners trying to revitalize the Corsican language. While Jaffe's analysis demonstrates the pervasive influence of dominant language ideologies on minority language speakers and language planners, she also draws on case studies from everyday discourse, educational practice and public and mediatized debates over language issues to develop an ethnographically-grounded perspective on levels of resistance. In the final part of the book she explores the emergence (and the limits) of "radical" genres of resistance found in forms of Corsican language activism and in examples of codeswitching and language mixing in bilingual radio practice.This book contributes to a growing literature on language ideology, and will be of interest to anthropologists, political scientists and linguists interested in the practical and theoretical dimensions of language contact, minority language literacy, bilingual education, and language shift.

No detailed description available for "Gender, Heteroglossia and Power".

This book observes and critiques controversies on the genesis and the character of Israeli Hebrew. Did it emerge through revival? Did Ben-Yehuda play a role in it? Is Hebrew a normal language now? The hegemonic ideology of the revival of Hebrew is shown to have been harmonious with various Zionist streams, as well as with its rival, Canaanism. The effects of revivalism are evaluated, and an argument is made in favor of non-revivalist alternatives in linguistics and in language education.

This volume presents a comprehensive introduction to the study of second language learning, multilingualism and gender. An impressive array of papers situated within a feminist poststructuralist framework demonstrates how this framework allows for a deeper understanding of second language learning, a number of language contact phenomena, intercultural communication, and critical language pedagogy. The volume has wide appeal to students and scholars in the fields of language and gender, sociolinguistics, SLA, anthropology, and language education.

This study examines the effect of race-consciousness upon the pronunciation of American English and upon the ideology of standardization in the twentieth century. It shows how the discourses of prescriptivist pronunciation, the xenophobic reaction against immigration to the eastern metropolises - especially New York - and the closing of the western frontier together constructed an image of the American West and Midwest as the locus of proper speech and ethnicity. This study is of interest to scholars and students in linguistics, American studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, and studies in race, class, and gender.

In a new era of global conflict involving non-state actors, At War with Words offers a provocative perspective on the role of language in the genesis, conduct and consequence of mass violence. Sociolinguistics meets political science and communication studies in order to examine interdependence between armed conflict and language. As phenomena attributed only to humans, both armed conflict and language are visible on two axes: language as war discourse, and language as a social policy subject to change by the victorious.In this unique volume, internationally known contributors provide original data and new insights that illuminate roles of text and talk in creating identities of enemies, justifications for violence, and accompanying propaganda. Incorporating contexts from around the world, this collection's topics range from a radio talk show hosts' inflammatory rhetoric to the semantic poverty of the lexicon of mass destruction. The first eight chapters discuss war texts. How does language serve as a vehicle to incite, justify, and resolve an armed conflict? Case studies from the US to China, and from Austria to Ghana detail such a progression to, through, and from war. The book's second part reflects the understanding of language as a symbol of power achieved by a victorious side in war. Five chapters discuss cases from Okinawa, Croatia, Cyprus, Palau, and Northern Ireland.Edited by a sociolinguist and a political scientist, At War with Words includes chapters by Michael Billig, Paul Chilton, Ruth Wodak and a dozen other prominent linguists and communications scholars. This book will be of interest to linguists, media scholars and political scientists, but is also accessible to any reader interested in language and war. Teachers will find particular chapters useful as course material in discourse analysis, language policy, war and peace studies, conflict resolution, mass communication, and other related disciplines.

Since the early 1970s, the Inuit of Arctic Quebec have struggled to survive economically and culturally in a rapidly changing northern environment. The promotion and maintenance of Inuktitut, their native language, through language policy and Inuit control over institutions, have played a major role in this struggle. Language, Politics, and Social Interaction in an Inuit Community is a study of indigenous language maintenance in an Arctic Quebec community where four languages - Inuktitut, Cree, French, and English - are spoken. It examines the role that dominant and minority languages play in the social life of this community, linking historical analysis with an ethnographic study of face-to-face interaction and attitudes towards learning and speaking second and third languages in everyday life.

This book is about the struggle for social power in the interethnic context of the Austrian part of the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire. It explores how the struggle for power is reflected in attempts to control language use at different levels of discursive interaction, and how, in a context of intricate and multiple language contact, language became a prominent site for interethnic controversies and conflict. The book shows how, in the wake of ongoing democratization, in particular in 1848-1849 and after 1860, the non-German speaking nationalities of the Empire attempted to redefine their status by demanding recognition of their languages and cultures while German-dominated state nationalism tried to reestablish its endangered hegemony by granting linguistic and cultural autonomy to the various ethnic groups.

Metalanguage brings together new, original contributions on people's knowledge about language and representations of language, e.g., representations of dialects, styles, utterances, stances and goals in relation to sociolinguistic theory, sociolinguistic accounts of language variation, and accounts of linguistic usage. Drawing on a variety of data sources such as lay and linguists' metalanguage, the media, parliamentary debates, education, and retail shopping, the book comprises four sections and an integrative commentary. The main thematic parts deal with metalanguage in relation to the following issues: the theory of metalanguage, ideology, social evaluation, and stylisation. Other key themes discussed include constructionism, identity formation, in- and out-grouping, deception, discrimination, manipulation, and the increasing semiotisation of the socio-cultural landscape. Apart from the strictly linguistic concerns, some contributions focus on discourse in a broader sense examining meta-commentary construed in modalities other than language.The book follows from and complements a great tradition of the study of metalanguage, reflexivity, and metapragmatics, and offers a new, integrating perspective from various fields of sociolinguistics: perceptual dialectology, variationism, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics. The broad range of theoretical issues and accessible style of writing will appeal to advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics and in other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities including linguists, communication researchers, anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, critical and social theorists. The book includes chapters by Deborah Cameron, Nikolas Coupland, Dariusz Galasinski, Peter Garrett, Adam Jaworski, Tore Kristiansen, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, Dennis Preston, Theo van Leeuwen, Kay Richardson, Itesh Sachdev, Angie Williams, and John Wilson.

This study investigates the interface of power and politeness in the realization of disagreements in naturalistic language data. Power and politeness are important phenomena in face-to-face interaction. Disagreement is an arena in which these two key concepts are likely to be observed together: both disagreement and the exercise of power entail a conflict, and, at the same time, conflict will often be softened by the display of politeness (defined as marked relational work).The concept of power is of special interest to the field of linguistics in that language is one of the primary means to exercise power. Often correlated with status and regarded as an influential aspect of situated speech, the workings of the exercise of power, however, have rarely been formally articulated. This study provides a theoretical framework within which to analyze the observed instances of disagreement and their co-occurrence with the exercise of power and display of politeness. In this framework, a checklist of propositions that allow us to operationalize the concept of power and identify its exercise in naturalistic linguistic data is combined with a view of language as socially constructed.A qualitative approach is used to analyze the concepts of power and politeness. The material for analysis comes from three different contexts: (1) a sociable argument in an informal, supportive and interactive family setting, (2) a business meeting among colleagues within a research institution, and (3) examples from public discourse collected during the US Election 2000.

Narrative as Social Practice sets out to explore the complex and fascinating interrelatedness of narrative and culture. It does so by contrasting the oral storytelling traditions of two widely divergent cultures - Anglo-Western culture and the Central Australian culture of the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Aborigines. Combining discourse-analytical and pragmalinguistic methodologies with the perspectives of ethnopoetics and the ethnography of communication, this book presents a highly original and engaging study of storytelling as a vital communicative activity at the heart of socio-cultural life. The book is concerned with both theoretical and empirical issues. It engages critically with the theoretical framework of social constructivism and the notion of social practice, and it offers critical discussions of the most influential theories of narrative put forward in Western thinking. Arguing for the adoption of a communication-oriented and cross-cultural perspective as a prerequisite for improving our understanding of the cultural variability of narrative practice, Klapproth presents detailed textual analyses of Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral narratives, and contextualizes them with respect to the different storytelling practices, values and worldviews in both cultures. Narrative as Social Practice offers new insights to students and specialists in the fields of narratology, discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, anthropology, folklore study, the ethnography of communication, and Australian Aboriginal studies.

Narrative as Social Practice sets out to explore the complex and fascinating interrelatedness of narrative and culture. It does so by contrasting the oral storytelling traditions of two widely divergent cultures - Anglo-Western culture and the Central Australian culture of the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Aborigines. Combining discourse-analytical and pragmalinguistic methodologies with the perspectives of ethnopoetics and the ethnography of communication, this book presents a highly original and engaging study of storytelling as a vital communicative activity at the heart of socio-cultural life. The book is concerned with both theoretical and empirical issues. It engages critically with the theoretical framework of social constructivism and the notion of social practice, and it offers critical discussions of the most influential theories of narrative put forward in Western thinking. Arguing for the adoption of a communication-oriented and cross-cultural perspective as a prerequisite for improving our understanding of the cultural variability of narrative practice, Klapproth presents detailed textual analyses of Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral narratives, and contextualizes them with respect to the different storytelling practices, values and worldviews in both cultures. Narrative as Social Practice offers new insights to students and specialists in the fields of narratology, discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, anthropology, folklore study, the ethnography of communication, and Australian Aboriginal studies.

Read the Cultural Other contains studies on non-Western discourse. It has two principal aims. Firstly, it argues that the study of non-Western, non-White, and Third-World discourses should become a legitimate, necessary, and routine part of international discourse scholarship. Hitherto, non-Western, non-White, and Third-Word discourses have been relegated and marginalized to a 'local', 'particular', or 'other' place in (or, one might argue, outside) the mainstream. To reclaim their place, the book deconstructs the rhetoric of universalism and the continued preoccupation with Western discourse in the profession, and stresses the cultural nature of discourse, both ordinary and disciplinary, as it outlines a culturally pluralist vision. Secondly, in order to take the multicultural view seriously, it explores the complexity, diversity, and forms of otherness of non-Western discourse by examining the case of China and Hong Kong's discourses of the decolonization of the latter. Far too often, non-Western discourse has been stereotyped as externally discrete, internally homogeneous, and formally containable within a 'universal', 'general', or 'integrated' model. The present work focuses on China and Hong Kong's discourses, which have been marginalized by their Western counterparts. Through culturally eclectic linguistic analysis and local cultural analysis, it identifies and highlights the specific ways of speaking of China and Hong Kong - their concepts, concerns, aspirations, resistance, verbal strategies, etc. - with respect to similar or different issues. The culturally pluralist view and analytical practice proffered here call for a radical cultural change in international scholarship on language, communication, and discourse.

Read the Cultural Other contains studies on non-Western discourse. It has two principal aims. Firstly, it argues that the study of non-Western, non-White, and Third-World discourses should become a legitimate, necessary, and routine part of international discourse scholarship. Hitherto, non-Western, non-White, and Third-Word discourses have been relegated and marginalized to a 'local', 'particular', or 'other' place in (or, one might argue, outside) the mainstream. To reclaim their place, the book deconstructs the rhetoric of universalism and the continued preoccupation with Western discourse in the profession, and stresses the cultural nature of discourse, both ordinary and disciplinary, as it outlines a culturally pluralist vision. Secondly, in order to take the multicultural view seriously, it explores the complexity, diversity, and forms of otherness of non-Western discourse by examining the case of China and Hong Kong's discourses of the decolonization of the latter. Far too often, non-Western discourse has been stereotyped as externally discrete, internally homogeneous, and formally containable within a 'universal', 'general', or 'integrated' model. The present work focuses on China and Hong Kong's discourses, which have been marginalized by their Western counterparts. Through culturally eclectic linguistic analysis and local cultural analysis, it identifies and highlights the specific ways of speaking of China and Hong Kong - their concepts, concerns, aspirations, resistance, verbal strategies, etc. - with respect to similar or different issues. The culturally pluralist view and analytical practice proffered here call for a radical cultural change in international scholarship on language, communication, and discourse.

How is meaning constructed discursively by participants in problem discourse? To which discursive resources do they resort in order to accomplish their complicated tasks of problem presentation and negotiation of possible solutions? To what extent are these resources related to the interactional and meaningful construction of problems and solutions?Irit Kupferberg and David Green – a discourse analyst and a clinical psychologist – have explored naturally-occurring media, hotline, and cyber troubled discourse in a quest for answers. Inspired by a constructivist-interpretive theoretical framework grounded in linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, narrative inquiry, and clinical psychology as well as their professional experience, the authors put forward three novel claims that are illustrated by 70 attention-holding examples. First, sufferers often present their troubles through detailed narrative discourse as well as succinct story-internal tropes such as metaphors and similes – discursive resources that constitute two interrelated versions of the troubled self. Particularly interesting are the intriguing figurative constructions produced in acute emotional states or at crucial discursive junctions. Second, such figurative constructions often 'lubricate' the interactive negotiation of solutions. Third, when the figurative and narrative resources of self-construction are employed in the public arena they are used and sometimes abused by the media representatives, depending on a plethora of contextual resources identified in this book.

This book is about the doing and experiencing of diagnosis in everyday life. Diagnoses are revealed as interactive negotiations rather than as the assigning of diagnostic labels. The authors demonstrate, through detailed discourse analyses, how the diagnostic process depends on power and accountability as expressed through the talk of those engaged in the diagnostic process. The authors also show that diagnostic decisions are not only made by professional experts trained in the art and science of diagnosis, but they can also be made by anyone trying to figure out the nature of everyday problems. Finally, diagnostic reasoning is found to extend beyond typical diagnostic situations, occurring in unexpected places such as written letters of recommendation and talk about the nature of communication. Together, the chapters in this book demonstrate how diagnosis is a communication practice deeply rooted in our culture. The book is interdisciplinary and unusually broad in its focus. The authors come from different experiential scholarly backgrounds. Each of them takes a different look at the impact and nature of the diagnostic process. The diagnoses discussed include autism, Alzheimer’s disease, speech and language disorders, and menopause. The focus is not only on the here and now of the diagnostic interaction, but also on how diagnoses and diagnostic processes change over time. The book can serve as an undergraduate or graduate text for courses offered in various disciplines, including communication, sociology, anthropology, communication disorders, audiology, linguistics, medicine, and disability studies.

This book is about the doing and experiencing of diagnosis in everyday life. Diagnoses are revealed as interactive negotiations rather than as the assigning of diagnostic labels. The authors demonstrate, through detailed discourse analyses, how the diagnostic process depends on power and accountability as expressed through the talk of those engaged in the diagnostic process. The authors also show that diagnostic decisions are not only made by professional experts trained in the art and science of diagnosis, but they can also be made by anyone trying to figure out the nature of everyday problems. Finally, diagnostic reasoning is found to extend beyond typical diagnostic situations, occurring in unexpected places such as written letters of recommendation and talk about the nature of communication. Together, the chapters in this book demonstrate how diagnosis is a communication practice deeply rooted in our culture. The book is interdisciplinary and unusually broad in its focus. The authors come from different experiential scholarly backgrounds. Each of them takes a different look at the impact and nature of the diagnostic process. The diagnoses discussed include autism, Alzheimer's disease, speech and language disorders, and menopause. The focus is not only on the here and now of the diagnostic interaction, but also on how diagnoses and diagnostic processes change over time. The book can serve as an undergraduate or graduate text for courses offered in various disciplines, including communication, sociology, anthropology, communication disorders, audiology, linguistics, medicine, and disability studies.

How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy.Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform.The book is awarded with the "The George Blazyca Prize in East European Studies 2008".

How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy.Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform.The book is awarded with the "The George Blazyca Prize in East European Studies 2008".

This volume presents an interactional perspective on linguistic variability that takes into account the construction of social identities through the formation of social communicative styles. It shows that style is a useful category in bridging the gap between single parameter variation and social identity. Social positioning, i.e., finding one's place in society, is one of its motivating forces.Various aspects of the expression of stylistic features are focused on, from language choice and linguistic variation in a narrow sense to practices of social categorization, pragmatics patterns, preferences for specific communicative genres, rhetorical practices including prosodic features, and aesthetic choices and preferences for specific forms of taste (looks, clothes, music, etc.). These various features of expression are connected to multimodal stylistic indices through talk; thus, styles emerge from discourse. Styles are adapted to changing contexts, and develop in the course of social processes.The analytical perspective chosen proposes an alternative to current approaches to variability under the influence of the so-called variationist paradigm.

This volume presents an interactional perspective on linguistic variability that takes into account the construction of social identities through the formation of social communicative styles. It shows that style is a useful category in bridging the gap between single parameter variation and social identity. Social positioning, i.e., finding one's place in society, is one of its motivating forces.Various aspects of the expression of stylistic features are focused on, from language choice and linguistic variation in a narrow sense to practices of social categorization, pragmatics patterns, preferences for specific communicative genres, rhetorical practices including prosodic features, and aesthetic choices and preferences for specific forms of taste (looks, clothes, music, etc.). These various features of expression are connected to multimodal stylistic indices through talk; thus, styles emerge from discourse. Styles are adapted to changing contexts, and develop in the course of social processes.The analytical perspective chosen proposes an alternative to current approaches to variability under the influence of the so-called variationist paradigm.

This wide-ranging volume explores how gender and language are used and transformed to discuss, enact, and project social differences in light of global economic and political changes in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. It presents analyses of language and gender from a broad spectrum of national contexts: Catalonia, Canada, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, Vietnam, Philippines, Tonga, and the United States.Cases studies consider language and gender in changing workplaces, schools and immigrant integration workshops, as well as in new and emerging sites for consumption and the production of identity. They also analyze the changing meanings of multilingualism, and the construction of ideologies about gender and language in colonial and postcolonial/national ideologies. The papers engage with and contribute to theoretical conceptualizations of globalization, cosmopolitanism, (post)colonialism, (trans)nationalism, and public spheres by drawing on a variety of sociolinguistic analytic strategies (variation analysis, media analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, sociology of language, colonial discourse analysis).

This original study looks at language practices in a government agency responsible for granting or denying legal status to transnational migrants in Spain. Drawing on a unique corpus of naturally-occurring verbal interactions between state officials and migrant petitioners as well as ethnographic materials and interviews, it provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between language, social heterogeneity, and practices of exclusion.The book investigates how a national agency with homogenizing views of citizenship copes with the fundamental contradiction resulting from the state's commitment to the values of pluralism, justice, and equality, and its function as the regulator of access to socioeconomic resources. By focusing on information provision, the book explores how much room there is for individual agency in institutional contexts; and shows that what happens in front-line talk has very little to do with allowing immigrants access to crucial information but rather revolves around the regimentation of language and behavior, and the enactment of social control. This publication will be welcomed by students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, language and immigration, institutional talk, and multilingualism.

This original study looks at language practices in a government agency responsible for granting or denying legal status to transnational migrants in Spain. Drawing on a unique corpus of naturally-occurring verbal interactions between state officials and migrant petitioners as well as ethnographic materials and interviews, it provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between language, social heterogeneity, and practices of exclusion.The book investigates how a national agency with homogenizing views of citizenship copes with the fundamental contradiction resulting from the state's commitment to the values of pluralism, justice, and equality, and its function as the regulator of access to socioeconomic resources. By focusing on information provision, the book explores how much room there is for individual agency in institutional contexts; and shows that what happens in front-line talk has very little to do with allowing immigrants access to crucial information but rather revolves around the regimentation of language and behavior, and the enactment of social control. This publication will be welcomed by students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, language and immigration, institutional talk, and multilingualism.

The volume addresses the enormous imbalance that exists between academic interest in politeness phenomena when compared to impoliteness phenomena. Researchers working with Brown and Levinson's ([1978] 1987) seminal work on politeness rarely focused explicitly on impoliteness. As a result, only one aspect of facework/relational work has been studied in detail. Next to this research desideratum, politeness research is on the move again, with alternative conceptions of politeness to those of Brown and Levinson being further developed. In this volume researchers present, discuss and explore the concept of linguistic impoliteness, the crucial differences and interconnectedness between lay understandings of impoliteness and the academic concept within a theory of facework/relational work, as well as the exercise of power that is involved when impoliteness occurs. The authors offer solid discussions of the theoretical issues involved and draw on data from political interaction, interaction with legally constituted authorities, workplace interaction in the factory and the office, code-switching and Internet practices. The collection offers inspiration for research on impoliteness in many different research fields, such as (critical) discourse analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics and stylistics, as well as linguistic approaches to studies in conflict and conflict resolution.

The book uses critical sociolinguistic analysis to examine the social consequences of courtroom talk. The focus of the study is the cross-examination of three Australian Aboriginal boys who were prosecution witnesses in the case of six police officers charged with their abduction. The analysis reveals how the language mechanisms allowed by courtroom rules of evidence serve to legitimize neocolonial control over Indigenous people. In the propositions and assertions made in cross-examination, and their adoption by judicial decision-makers, the three boys were constructed not as victims of police abuse, but rather in terms of difference, deviance and delinquency. This identity work addresses fundamental issues concerning what it means to be an Aboriginal young person, as well as constraints about how to perform or live this identity, and the rights to which Aboriginal people can lay claim, while legitimizing police control over their freedom of movement. Understanding this courtroom talk requires analysis of the sociopolitical and historical actions and structures within which the courtroom hearing was embedded. Through this analysis, the interrelatedness of structure, agency, constraint and change, which is central to critical sociolinguistics, becomes apparent. In its investigation of language ideologies that underpin courtroom talk, as well as the details of how language is used, and the social consequences of this talk, the book highlights the need for far-reaching changes to courtroom rules of evidence.

The book is an invitation to a genealogical understanding of the ideological and discursive processes that have emerged out of the regulation of linguistic minorities issues within an international context and, more precisely, at the United Nations. It highlights the contradictions, limits and possibilities in the elaboration of international measures within the universalist framework of human rights. The book also emphasizes the paradoxes between national interests and the elaboration of an international community - paradoxes in which minority issues fundamentally question the homogeneity of the state. It shows that despite the shift from national spaces to international ones, the fears of nation-states for linguistic minorities remain. Finally, the book reveals the importance of the reproduction of the interests of nation-states within an international organization and the reproduction of power through the legal management and regulation of minority rights in general, and those of linguistic minorities in particular.Through its presentation of the history of the United Nations, its vision of the protection of linguistic minorities, the underlying ideologies that have emerged, as well as the limits and possibilities of action, the book contributes to a better understanding of the complexity of the protection of linguistic minorities and the role of language ideologies within an international context.