Start: 2020-05-29 13:15
End: 2020-05-29 14:15
WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a talk ONLINE (MS Teams: WA Staff) "Language revitalization without native speakers: Breton and Lower Sorbian" by dr Joanna Chojnicka & prof. Michael Hornsby from the Centre of Celtic Studies (Friday, May 29, 13:15-14:15).
dr Joanna Chojnicka
Centre for Celtic Studies
&
prof. Michael Hornsby
Centre for Celtic Studies
Language revitalization without native speakers: Breton and Lower Sorbian
In this talk, we would like to present a new research project carried out at the Centre for Celtic Studies (2019-2022): “Language revitalization without native speakers: The cases of Breton in Upper Brittany and of Sorbian in Lower Lusatia”. The critically endangered languages, Breton and Lower Sorbian, are sustained in bilingual communities where many speakers are so-called “new speakers”, who have not learned the respective language as their L1/mother tongue. Still, some of them decide to send their children to Breton immersion schools or schools that teach Sorbian and, although to a lesser extent, to raise them as minority language speakers in Breton/Sorbian. In many ways, these families are separated from other Breton- and Sorbian-speaking communities where there is a much stronger tradition of intergenerational transmission (although this has been considerably weakened in the second half of the twentieth century).
Our project therefore aims to investigate how language revitalization works where the members of a particular community are non-native or new speakers. How do families who send their children to immersion schools in Rennes/Nantes view their own educational choices for their children? For those parents who speak Breton/Sorbian to their children at home, how do they make their transmission of the language work effectively? Using a wide range of qualitative and ethnographic sociolinguistic methods (sociolinguistic questionnaires, focus groups with parents and children involved in minority language education/cultural activities, semi-structured interviews with key actors in the communities and participant observation in a number of educational/recreational sites in Brittany/Lower Lusatia), the project ventures out to answer the question whether revitalization efforts without native speakers are renewing the language community or if they are in fact transforming it into a new type of postmodern community, where language plays a much more symbolic role than previously thought.
References:
Dołowy-Rybińska, Nicole. ‘Language Learners or New Speakers: The Transfer of the Breton Diwan Immersion Education Model to the Lower Sorbian Witaj Project’. Studia Celtica Posnaniensia 2, no. 1 (2017): 5–26.
Hornsby, Michael. Revitalizing Minority Languages. New Speakers of Breton, Yiddish and Lemko. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Hornsby, Michael. ‘The “New” and “Traditional” Speaker Dichotomy: Bridging the Gap’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231 (2015): 107–25.
Joanna Chojnicka holds a PhD in Latvian linguistics and an MA in Latvian philology, both from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Celtic Studies at the Faculty of English of that university. Previously she was a Fellow at the Herder Institute in Marburg, a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty 10: Linguistics and Literary Studies of the University of Bremen, where she also acted as the Managing Director of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS). Her research interests include discourse, gender and sexuality, the language of argumentation, manipulation and resistance, ecolinguistics, and discourses of language revitalization.
Michael Hornsby, PhD (Southampton, UK), DLitt (AMU Poznań, Poland) is currently head of the Centre for Celtic Studies at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He specialises in ‘new speaker’ studies, particularly from a minority language perspective. To date, his research has included investigations on the place of new speakers (or L2 language users) in contexts of revitalisation, particularly in Breton-, Lemko- and Yiddish-speaking communities of practice, and how their positions can be contested in inter-communal settings. He is also interested in how new speakers adapt their own stances as a result and adopt various legitimizing strategies in order to give meaning to their own sense of ‘speakerhood’. He is currently looking at how minority language communities have possibly been misrepresented in the past as occupying two binary ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speaker positions, and is attempting to find a more accurate paradigm to represent minority language communities in the 21st century.
You can join the talk via MS Teams (WA Staff) or contact prof. Bogusława Whyatt at bwhyatt@wa.amu.edu.pl
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