Eto leto svet: Estonia’s Eurovision song as a source of folk-linguistic controversy (original) (raw)
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The Anglovision Song Contest: Eurovision, Europe and the English language
The Eurovision Song Contest, whether we want it to or not, happens every year, and each year there appears to be more controversy surrounding the growing use of English-language lyrics. This dissertation explores pre-existing ideas that attempt to explain this phenomenon while also approaching the topic from a new angle. Sociolinguistic theories that are used to analyse the spread of English across the wider European continent are adapted and moulded to fit the Eurovision framework, in the hope that they will deepen our understanding of this very unique 'speech community'.
There is an established body of literature surveying the role of language policy in identity construction. This paper exposes an angle that has been understudied. It suggests that national song festivals may be seen as a tool of ‘implicit’ language policy in Estonia. Informed by expert interviews and ethnographic, this study explores the tensions arising from the dual function of the festival. On the one hand, it sustains the language as the central ethnic-national attribute of Estonians. On the other hand, the affective solidarity’ stemming from joint singing could support a stronger civic attachment to the language and state (by Russian-speaking minorities).
Language Switching in (Folk) Songs along the Slovenian-Italian Border
Tautosakos darbai , 2020
Folk songs have long been perceived as national identity markers. In Central Europe, the research of folk singing was closely linked to the national movements of the nineteenth century. Bilingual folksongs or singing in "non-national" language were omitted from the field of folklore as non-coherent practices. This paper presents a historical analysis that focuses on singing in "national" and "non-national" language in Goriška brda (the Gorizia Hills) and Venetian Slovenia along today's Slovenian-Italian border. Changing borders and people belonging to different state formations have influenced the changing social and cultural contexts and thus the use of language(s) in songs. The normality of the coexistence of different linguistic groups in border regions has long been reflected in (folk) songs even during intense political situations. Today, the Slovenian language is often used in (folk) singing in Venetian Slovenia as a heritage language.
Introduction: Language ideologies in music
Language & Communication, 2017
In this special issue, we study language ideologies in musical practices. Our aim is to explore how language, music, and social ties are co-construed in the age of transnationalism. The authors examine globally distributed strands of music in diverse linguistic settings. Among these are reggae in Vanuatu, Nigeria, and Jamaica, rap in the Nordic countries, pop in Russia, global country music, and choral singing in Trinidad. The results of these studies shed new light on local appropriations of music and language in transnational cultural spheres and the discursive processes that shape them. In this introduction we present themes and concepts that are central to this volume and give an overview of the contributions. First, we discuss some conceptual and methodological challenges of sociolinguistics in the global era. Second, we discuss the interactive formation and conceptualization of social units that have no clear-cut ethnic or national connections. These are crucial to our understanding of ways of being in today's global world. As argued later on, language practices constituted on grounds of music constitute a pertinent example of these social units. Finally, before presenting the individual contributions to this issue, we make notes on the recurrent themes they display, such as transnationality, fixity, fluidity, and place. 2. Out of the utopian box Human collectives are not eternal or natural. They are culturally constituted, conceptually construed and maintained through words and discourse. This insight has become apparent in a global era where discourses from different spheres interact on a daily basis (see e.g. Beck et al., 2003; Giddens, 2002; Papastergiadis, 2000). Language scholars have recently started to focus also on the discursive constructions on language and to question the "methodological nationalism" in linguistics, i.e. the taking-for-granted notions of ethnic and national categories in relation to language (see e.g.
The Estonian Language and Its Influence on Music: A Cognitive Sciences Approach
Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2023
Musicology may seem a specific small sector of humanitarian scholarship to the layman, but it hides variety within from highly theoretical subjects such as music theory to the fieldwork with indigenous repertoires and their performance, as found in ethnomusicology. There is a shift in contemporary musicology, its focus moving more towards studies of musical performances and the use of empirical study designs to complement the analysis of musical scores. These interdisciplinary empirical studies cross the border of humanitarian scholarship and apply the methods of the natural sciences, for example spectrogram analysis of singing and the measurement of the temporal structure of recorded music. The cognitive sciences of music (CSM) can be looked at as an umbrella term for branches of musicology that use empirical research methods and draw their research questions from music related individual and group processes. One of the major topics of CSM relates to research in linguistics. Music ...
Evicting the Speaking Subject: A Critique of Latvian Concepts of Language
Journal of Baltic Studies, 2011
This paper highlights some peculiarities of the nation-language conflation in Latvian linguistics and traces their evolution. Treating language as the perfect structure consolidating ideal speakers, linguists perceive native speakers as a homogenous community whose task is to reproduce the normative language structure. Speaking subjects are denied social agency, and divergence from the norm in communication is treated as an error. The paper argues that empirically observed language use can be explained by taking into account the pragmatic intentions of speaking subjects.
‘Un bel moretto’: Linguistic Interweavings in Songs from the Primorska Region
Traditiones, 2023
Lan sem biu u Gorici" (Last Year I was in Gorizia) is the most frequently transcribed bilingual song in which Slovenian and Italian dialect texts are interwoven. Unlike variants from Goriška Brda and Venetian Slovenia, where the song has largely been forgotten, the variants in Istria are experiencing a revival and are referred to as typical Istrian songs. The article traces the meandering transitions between different linguistic variants and local appropriations of this song.