New Speakers, Familiar Concepts? New Speakers and the Dynamics of Late Modern Society (original) (raw)
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New speakers and language ideology: some observations and suggestions
2018
Celtic Sociolinguistics Symposium 2018, NUI Galway Proponents of the 'new speaker' concept have heralded a shift away from language learning ideologies that focus on emulation of native-speaker models, which they describe as 'essentialism' (O'Rourke and Pujolar 2013; O'Rourke and Walsh 2015), or 'native authenticism' (Hornsby and Quentel 2013). These ideologies are presented as potentially harmful and counter-productive both to native speakers (by romanticizing and museifying them) and to second-language learners and speakers (by stigmatizing hybridized new speaker varieties and focusing on language deficits rather than skills). It is claimed by new speaker scholars that more 'social constructionist' ideologies are gaining ground among some L2 speaker communities, and that these offer a path away from more essentialist models. However, as these scholars also acknowledge, 'essentialist' deference to native-speaker models remains a prominent strand in the ideologies of new speakers. Focusing on the Celtic languages, this paper will argue that the case against 'essentialist' ideologies may be reductive and overstated, and that new speaker scholars have not adequately considered how a shift away from native-speaker models might play out in practice, e.g. in corpus planning and pedagogy. 'Essentialist' or 'native authenticist' ideologies may potentially have benefits in language learning, identity construction, and in some cases are clearly closely linked to deeply-held motivations for acquiring the second language. 'Native authenticists' are often among the most committed language activists and may play an out-sized role in development of resources and networks. Scholars should pay more attention to ways in which ideological clarification might take place, bringing actors with differing language ideologies and backgrounds together constructively.
New Speakers, Familiar Concepts?
2018
This chapter introduces the reader to the concept of the new speaker. The new speaker paradigm is presented firstly as a development on previous paradigms that often considered so-called non-native speech and its users within a deficit framework, and which did not fully acknowledge the full sociolinguistic competence of non-traditional language users. The late modern sociolinguistic landscape in which new speakers function is briefly sketched before focusing on the immediacy associated with research on new speakers of minority languages. Following a discussion of the role of new speakers for the continued vitality of minority languages, the structure of the volume is outlined.
Language policy and ‘new speakers’: an introduction to the thematic issue
Language Policy, 2019
In recent years, sociolinguistic research on minority languages in Europe, particu-larly in the Galician context, has chiefly contributed both theoretically and empiri-cally to the growing attention given to ‘new speakers’, as well as to the emergence of a European research network in 2013 entitled ‘New Speakers in a multilingual Europe: Opportunities and challenges’ (www.nspk.org.uk). As documented in spe-cial issues and edited volumes, the research activities in the network not only aimed at adding the term ‘new speaker’ to the growing pool of analytical terminology in critically oriented sociolinguistics. Employing ‘new speaker’ as a lens rather than as a clear-cut notion is what we—as editors—had in mind when giving shape to this volume, drawing on discussions during the final phases of the above-mentioned research network. This seemed especially useful because such a broad take on ‘new speakerness’ opens up avenues for comparative research under a common label. In sum, it is certainly worth the effort to continue delving deeper into the notion of ‘new speakers’, and particularly to do that from the perspective of language policy. The articles collected in this thematic issue aim at contributing into that direction.
New Speakers and Language Policy
Oxford Handbooks Online
This chapter looks at language policy through the new speaker lens, exploring the many ways in which research on new speakers links to the discursive and ethnographic approaches that have recently come to the fore in the language policy literature. Following a brief discussion of how the new speaker concept facilitates a reconsideration of traditional approaches to language policy and planning (LPP) in minority language settings, the chapter surveys LPP research in new speaker contexts, summarizes the challenges facing research on new speakers, and discusses the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this research. Noting that new speaker studies are not only situated in minority settings, the chapter concludes with a look at emerging areas of research beyond minority language contexts.
‘New speakers’ and language policy research: thematic and theoretical contributions to the field
Language Policy, 2019
In this article, we reflect on the extent to which ‘new speaker’ research feeds into recent theoretical discussions in language policy scholarship, especially in con‑nection to the discursive and ethnographically oriented perspectives which of late have become increasingly prominent. We begin with a brief overview of the ‘new speaker’ concept, its theoretical and empirical origins, and then we situate the dis‑cussions on ‘new speakers’ against the background of traditional language policy research. Thereafter the bulk of the article is dedicated to developing two main argu‑ments: first, we provide an overview of the language policy themes that are already present in ‘new speaker’ research; and secondly, we elaborate on how ‘new speaker’ studies can contribute to current discussions in the field of language policy. We conclude with a short overview of future research directions that, in our view, can strengthen the link and the mutual benefits of the connection between ‘new speaker’ and language policy scholarship.
Linguistics and Education, 2004
The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (STSLA) by David Block deals with one of the major areas of investigation in applied linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA). SLA concerns itself with how individuals, both children and adults, learn natural languages other than their primary language. To understand this book, however, it is necessary to have some information about the context within which the book's arguments are advanced, so this review will begin with an attempt to do just that. SLA has, almost from its inception, suffered a kind of epistemological bifurcation. As far as I know, the first discussion in print of this (unequal) division was by Ochsner (1979). In his paper, he described the two modes of scholarly inquiry in the field: the dominate and preferred mode, the controlled experiment; and its poor relation, the non-experimental mode, including ethnographies, case studies, and diary studies. Both "research attitudes" said Ochsner, have respectable roots in antiquity (as well as in our prejudices and biases) and both traditions have a place in SLA. He saw the controlled experiment as being more appropriate for inquiry into language acquisition, and non-experimental qualitative methods as being more efficacious for inquiry into language use. As Ochsner put it, "What we should have for SLA research is the means to alternate between two kinds of equal research; one for the objective, physical data and one for subjective, unobservable facts" (p. 61). In other words, said Ochsner, we must develop ".. . a perceptual bilingualism; that is, the ability to study SLA from at least two points of view" (p. 71). He concluded his paper with the ironic observation that SLA, a field that presumably valued bilingualism, seemed so intent on remaining "monolingual" metaphorically speaking, when it came to pursuing research. Over the next 20 years, the experimental model remained the dominant mode of inquiry, but bit by bit there was an increasing interest in more socially sensitive, ecological investigations of SLA, inspired in no small measure by scholars from other fields, such as Elinor Ochs from anthropology and Emmanuel Schegloff from sociology. By 1995 the interest had gained sufficient momentum to be reflected in the program of the annual meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguists and to come to the attention of TESOL Quarterly, a premier journal for applied linguistics. The journal put out a special issue on qualitative research, which, Anne Lazarton, one of the co-editors of the special issue, argued was evidence of a kind of coming of age of qualitative research in applied linguistics (1995, p. 455). In her paper, Lazarton concluded that this type of research was becoming more visible and credible in the field and that among applied linguists there
Natives, as anthropologists like to imagine them, are (…) rapidly disappearing (Appadurai 1988, p.39) In this paper, we review the debates about " new speakers " of regional minority languages in Europe and discuss how they can be understood as a phenomenon that challenges the linguistic ideologies that emerged with the development of nation-states, industrial capitalism and colonization. We apply the term " new speakers " to a variety of labels used in contexts such as Wales, Ireland, the Basque Country or Brittany to people who do not learn the local language through conventional family transmission, but more typically through education, e.g. bilingual or immersion schools or adult language courses (O'Rourke et al. 2015). It is not a new phenomenon in the sense that such profiles of speakers have always existed. What is new is the fact that the numbers of new speakers have become so large that they emerge as a distinct social category in these contexts. The ways these new speakers learn and the ways they speak these minority languages is perceived as noticeably different from what made up these linguistic communities in the past. As such, their presence unsettles the inherited ideological repertoires that articulated language, identity, authenticity and national belonging in the modern period. From this viewpoint, they constitute –we argue-one more amongst the many dissonances that contemporary sociolinguistics has identified in the received notions of languages as bounded entities inscribed in communities and territories in specific ways. The leaders of the COST New Speakers network have attempted (and only partially succeeded) to query researchers in other areas such as the sociolinguistics of migration or " world Englishes " so that they explored the connections between contentions over identity, authenticity and linguistic ownership in European minority language contexts and their own material. Given the fact that new speakers are by definition " non-native " speakers in the strict sense, the label can arguably be applied to examine other issues occurring around the emergence of new profiles of speakers due to migration, the appropriation of English in former colonies and also the internationalization of English. Thus, in this paper, we review mostly research on European territorial minorities; but we also spell out how we see the potential connections with these other fields within a wider theoretical framework. The concept of " the native " becomes therefore important in this context, and it connects with wider debates on the " native " in linguistics and anthropology about the politics that inform these disciplines. Our argument is that ideologies of nationalism and colonialism help understand why the category of " native speaker " provides the basis for ideological and political tensions that emerge in different though connected ways both in minority language contexts in Europe and North-America, and in former British colonies. We look at the ways in which these tensions are played out both in relation to language policies and on how academic disciplines like sociolinguistics, applied linguistics or linguistic anthropology inform the politics of language in these contentions.