Cover not available
Part of
Contested Languages: The hidden multilingualism of Europe
Edited by Marco Tamburelli and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in World Language Problems 8] 2021
► pp. 3–18

Chapter 1
What are contested languages and why should linguists care?

| Bangor University
| University of Turin

The literature on regional and minority languages has seen strong developments in recent years, and new frontiers have been opened on issues of minority language planning and development as well as on issues of speakers’ rights. Nevertheless, there are many varieties that are left in a sort of “linguistic limbo” within both the public and the academic domain. These are varieties that likely qualify as regional languages from an Abstand perspective (Kloss 1967), but are typically treated as “dialects” or “patois” by their respective governments, by many of their speakers and often by linguists, who typically cite the low sociolinguistic status for their terminological choice. In this chapter we discuss the characteristics of these “contested languages”, what underlies their “contestedness” and how they differ from the more widely accepted regional and minority languages. Specifically, we discuss how the very notion of regional “language” presupposes the notion “language” in opposition to that of regional “dialect”, though this supposed distinction is hardly ever tackled in any depth by the mainstream literature on regional and minority languages. Furthermore, we argue that the widespread, purely socio-political view of what qualifies as a “language” is untenable as well as undesirable in a discipline that, like linguistics, is also concerned with the structural and communicative properties of its subject matter as well as with objectivity and scientific inquiry. Throughout the chapter, we bring to the fore the need for a discussion of the notion of “language” with a focus on regional varieties and reject the supposedly sociolinguistic nature of the distinction between regional “languages” and regional “dialects”.

Article outline
  • 1.What are contested languages?
  • 2. Ausbau-centrism
  • 3.What is the contribution of this volume?
  • 4.The conclusion of an introduction
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 January 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/wlp.8.01tam
References

References

Ammon, Ulrich
1989 Towards a descriptive framework for the status/function (social position) of a language within a country. In Status and function of languages and language varieties, ed. by Ulrich Ammon, 21–106. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 Language conflicts in the European Union. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (3): 319–338. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Auer, Peter
2005 Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: a typology of European dialect/standard constellations. In Perspectives on variation: sociolinguistic, historical comparative, ed. by Nicole Delbecque, Johan van der Auwera and Dick Geeraerts, 7–42. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benincà, Paola, and Glanville Price
2000 Italy (Romance vernaculars): introduction. In Encyclopedia of the languages of Europe, ed. by Glanville Price, 251–254. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Benincà, Paola, and John Haiman
2005 The Rhaeto-Romance languages. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan
2005 Discourse: a critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chambers, Jack K., and Peter Trudgill
1998 Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Craith, Máiréad Nic
2000 Contested identities and the quest for legitimacy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21 (5): 399–413. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Edwards, John
2018 Nonstandard dialect and identity. In Identity and dialect performance: a study of communities and dialects, ed. by Reem Bassiouney, 17–34. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Extra, Guus, and Durk Gorter
2001 The other languages of Europe: demographic, sociolinguistic and educational perspectives. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Fishman, Joshua A.
2008 Rethinking the Ausbau–Abstand dichotomy into a continuous and multivariate system. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 191: 17–26.Google Scholar
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams
2013 An introduction to language (10th edition). Boston: Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
Gooskens, Charlotte, and Wilbert Heeringa
2004 The position of Frisian in the Germanic language area. In On the boundaries of phonology and phonetics, ed. by Dicky Gilbers, Maartje Schreuder and Nienke Knevel, 61–87. Groningen University.Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred
1985 Scots and Low German: the social history of two minority languages. In Focus on Scotland, ed. by Manfred Görlach, 19–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hammarström, Harald
2008 Counting languages in dialect continua using the criterion of mutual intelligibility. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 15 (1): 36–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Janson, Tore
2002 Speak: a short history of languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Joseph, John E.
2004 Language and identity: national, ethnic, religious. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kloss, Heinz
1967 ‘Abstand languages’ and ‘ausbau languages.’ Anthropological linguistics 9(7): 29–41.Google Scholar
Laitin, David D.
1992 Language repertoires and state construction in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lepschy, Giulio C.
2002 Mother tongues and other reflections on the Italian language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Chris Wen-Chao
2004 Conflicting notions of language purity: the interplay of archaising, ethnographic, reformist, elitist and xenophobic purism in the perception of Standard Chinese. Language and Communication 24: 97–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree
2005 Toward a more inclusive applied linguistics and English language teaching: a symposium. TESOL Quarterly 39 (4): 716–719. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
May, Stephen
2006 Language policy and minority rights. In An introduction to language policy: theory and method, ed. by Thomas Ricento, 255–272. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
McMahon, April, and Robert McMahon
2005 Language classification by numbers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nicholson, Jeremy K., and Ian D. Wilson
2003 Understanding ‘global’ systems biology: metabonomics and the continuum of metabolism. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2 (8): 668–676. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffry
1997 Topic… comments; double standards. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15: 667–675. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair
2006 Postmodernism in language policy. In An introduction to language policy: theory and method, ed. by Thomas Ricento, 60–76. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
2007 The myth of English as an international language. In Disinventing and reconstituting languages, ed. by Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, 90–115. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Reagan, Timothy
2004 Objectification, positivism and language studies: A reconsideration. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal 1 (1): 41–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tamburelli, Marco
2014 Uncovering the ‘hidden’ multilingualism of Europe: an Italian case study. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35 (3): 252–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tang, Chaoju, and Vincent. J. van Heuven
2009 Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested. Lingua 119: 709–732. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tosco, Mauro
2008 Introduction: Ausbau is everywhere! International Journal of the Sociology of Language 191: 1–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 The nation-state and language diversity. In Multilingualism. language, power, and knowledge, ed. by Paolo Valore, 87–101. Pisa: Edistudio.Google Scholar
2017 On counting languages, diversity-wise. In ATrA 3. Cultural and linguistic transition explored: proceedings of the ATrA closing workshop – Trieste, May 25 26, 2016, ed. by Ilaria Micheli, 234–245. Trieste: EUT.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
1992 Ausbau sociolinguistics and the perception of language status in contemporary Europe. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 2 (2): 167–177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan and Dónall Ó. Baoill
1998 Adverbial constructions in the languages of Europe (Vol. 3). Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weinreich, Ulrich
1954 Is a structural dialectology possible? Word 10: 388–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Coluzzi, Paolo, Jinke Du & Wai Sheng Woo
2023. Are Cantonese (Yue) and Hokkien (Southern Min) contested languages? Language planning and language attitudes in China and Malaysia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 september 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.