Williams, C. H. (2023). Language policy and the new speaker challenge: hiding in plain sight. Cambridge University Press (original) (raw)
Language Policy and the New Speaker Challenge traces the emergence of the new speaker phenomenon as a focus of academic interest. Initially, the concept referred to speakers who learn a minoritised language outside of the home and face specific challenges to incorporate it in all domains of life. Later, the concept was extended to migrant, transnational, and refugee speakers who have to learn a nation-state language under the language regimes of a new polity. Addressing the conundrum faced by policy-makers to translate research on new speakers into mainstream policy, the monograph argues that research-led evidence provided by the COST action IS1306 new speakers network (2013-2017) has not sufficiently engaged with the policymaking domains the COST action sought to influence. Due to the fuzziness of the concept, Williams argues in the introductory chapter that academics should further concretise it for policy-makers so the latter can more easily integrate it in prospective public policy strategies. In Chap. 2, key opportunities and challenges of new speaker research are assessed with a view to increasing policy impact as well as advocating for more efforts to further explore the migrant and refugee spectrum deemed understudied. The author then examines the following minority language jurisdictions as case studies in subsequent chapters: Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre, Catalonia and Galicia. Chapter 3 extensively addresses the Welsh context by exposing policy stakeholders' scepticism about new speakers as a clear-cut category needing specific policies. Chapter 4 offers a fine-grained analysis of the polarising dynamics of the Scottish gaelic context characterised by persisting frictions between the divergent but unequivocally urgent needs to preserve fragile traditional communities and integrate new speakers to ensure the very survival of the language, all the while government agencies take a rather lukewarm approach.
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