The conference will be held on March 24th-26th online. The program can be found here.
Abstract of the colloquium
In many places in Europe, language revitalization is increasingly attributed to young, predominantly urban and highly mobile people who are not “native” speakers of the language in question and are not based in its traditional, rural “heartland”. In recognition of this, the panel New Speakers in the City: Language Revitalization Without Native Speakers brings together four members of a project looking at such “new” speakers of Breton in Rennes (Upper Brittany, France) and of Lower Sorbian in Cottbus (Lower Lusatia/Brandenburg, Germany), each from their own unique disciplinary perspective.
The goal of the project is to understand how language revitalization works when the members of a community undertaking it are non-native or new speakers. An important role here is attributed to language ideologies that drive, but can also inhibit, language revitalization efforts. Thus, using a variety of qualitative and quantitative 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 investigates how the key actors in these revitalization processes discursively construct and reflect on their choices and activities, goals, resources, obstacles and outcomes.
Looking at the initial data thus obtained from a variety of critical perspectives, the four research collaborators and contributors to this panel additionally aim at reexaming the terms and concepts used in the field of language revitalization research. It is not insignificant that the terms “heartland”, “native” and “new” speakers in the first paragraph were provided in quotation marks. Language revitalization efforts that are now taking place in Upper Brittany and Lower Lusatia are forcing researchers to reconsider the long-held assumptions about the native – non-native speaker distinction, about authenticity, language ownership and access, and related notions. Furthermore, the native-new speaker dichotomy needs to be carefully unpacked, since many speakers who engage with minority languages in Europe and beyond do not neatly fit into one of these categories. The panel, then, seeks to unpick what we mean when we talk about a minority language speaker, and how different actors can occupy different points on a ‘continuum of speakerhood’ and how these positions can shift, mutate or otherwise be transformed at different stages of speaker trajectories.
To discuss these issues, each of the panelists will offer their own, unique, disciplinary perspective on the common, shared project, contributing not only mutually reinforcing input, but also, hopefully, illuminating insights that can inform and enrich the other disciplines’ points of view. What is important is that each panelist will focus on a different aspect of the project in order to avoid redundancy. This way, the panel audience will be offered a unique opportunity to get acquainted with an interdisciplinary research project the strength of which is drawn from the diversity of its participating disciplines (sociolinguistics, CDA, anthropology and political science), rather than receiving an abridged overview that necessarily ignores or drastically flattens some of them.
Our contributions:
Michael - The new speaker paradigm
Nicole - Breton and Lower Sorbian: similarities and differences in the sociolinguistic situations
Joanna - Lower Sorbian in the city of Cottbus
Jeanne - Breton in the city of Rennes
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