Search results for "Official language"
showing 10 items of 19 documents
Language Planning in Latvia as a Struggle for National Sovereignty
2018
Focuses in particular on the language policies of the Second Independence period, directed at ensuring the Latvian language the status of sole official language of the country. The chapter also examines the Russian-Latvian ethno-linguistic ‘cleavage’ in the context of the new language policies.
The Slovak Nation: From Czechoslovakia to Slovakia
2009
This chapter differs in composition from the two previous ones devoted to the politics of language in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the short 20th century. With the exception of the brief wartime interlude of independent Slovakia (1939–1945), the Slovak nation found itself residing in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1992. This necessitated the representation of much Slovak history, and the vicissitudes of Czech-Slovak relations in the previous chapter, which nominally was devoted to matters Czech. It would soon be demonstrated that the past of the common state of the Czech and Slovaks could not be seamlessly divided into separate Czech and Slovak parts. Likewise, numerous international even…
The Polish Case: From Natio to Nation
2009
The reader may ask why I chose to deal first with the Poles and their language politics. In Chapter 2, I focused first on Czech out from the four Central European languages to which this book is devoted. I took as a guideline the fact that the initial documents written in Czech predate those jotted down in Hungarian (Magyar), Polish, or Slovak. Here, however, I decided that continuity of literary tradition and the use of an idiom as an official language allows me to concentrate on Polish first. With this approach I do not wish to rank these four languages along some imaginary scale of importance or quality; not at all. Simply, I stress the use of a language in public and political sphere as…
The Broader Linguistic and Cultural Context of Central Europe
2009
Central Europe is an extremely malleable concept. It denotes a region whose political shape has been changing dramatically throughout the last millennium since the emergence of the first polities. This work focuses on the rise and political uses of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. But this would mean tearing away the roots of the sociolinguistic reality that surrounds and has deeply interacted with the everyday realities of Slovak-, Polish-, Magyar- and Czech-speakers. The resulting picture would agree with the predominant ethnonational thinking about Central Europe as an area neatly divided among the nation-states that contain the corresponding nations speaking exclusively in their own l…
The Czech Case: From the Bohemian Slavophone Populus to Czech Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation
2009
Bohemia emerged as a separate polity after the Magyar conquest of Greater Moravia. The Frankish protection that extended to Bohemia attached this country to the empire, while Moravia became a province permanently linked to the Principality of Bohemia in the late 1020s. In 1079, Moravia was organized as a margraviate. Usually sons or younger brothers of the Bohemian princes reigned as margraves of Moravia, which emphasized the separateness of Moravia vis-a-vis Bohemia. A similar arrangement developed in Poland-Lithuania where sons or younger brothers of the King of Poland ruled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Třestik 1999: 140).
LEGAL COMMENTS IN RELATION TO THE LATGALIAN WRITING LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL VARIETY OF LATVIAN
2012
<p>The paper is aimed at provision of legal assessment of the Latgalian language as a variant of Latvian, using mainly the analytical and historical method.</p><p>Notwithstanding the fact that the Official Language Law recognizes that the Latgalian language is a variant of the Latvian language, there is no absolute clarity with regard to the status of this language and its practical use in formal communication. Also the attitude from public authorities is inexcusably inappropriate – as far as declaring the Latgalian language to be a foreign language. However, from historical point of view the Latgalian language was recognised and applied in official communication, includin…
Language in Central Europe: An Overview
2009
The linguistic picture of Central Europe, as we know it, started forming in the 6th to 9th centuries. The coming of the Slavs (or rather the spread of their language and way of life to unrelated various ethnic groups) marks the beginning of this caesura that largely closed in 896 AD when the Magyars crossed the Carpathians into Pannonia. This event gradually divided the hypothetically continuous area of Slavic settlement into a southern section, extending from contemporary Slovenia to Bulgaria, and into a northern section, which coincided with the areas from the Elbe in today’s eastern Germany to the upper Volga in northeastern Russia. In the west, the Magyar-speakers skirted the East and …
What Counts as ‘Good’ Academic Writing? The Interplay of Writing Norms in International Higher Education
2021
English medium instruction (EMI) programmes have become common contexts of English use for academic purposes worldwide. They tend to combine students and teachers with very varied linguistic, national and academic backgrounds who use English as a lingua franca rather than the official language of the institution. In this chapter, I discuss literature on the interplay of different kinds of norms for academic writing relevant to EMI contexts (e.g. linguistic, cultural, disciplinary), whilst providing examples from an ethnographically oriented study of academic literacy on an international master’s programme in Finland (reported on previously e.g. in McCambridge, Norms and ideologies of academ…
The Hungarian Nation: From Hungary to Magyarország
2009
This chapter’s title is a linguistic pun that needs explanation. Magyarorszag means ‘Hungary’ in Magyar. But scholars writing in languages that used to be minority ones in the Hungarian section of Austria-Hungary are careful to distinguish between multiethnic historical Hungary and the ethnically Magyar nation-state that emerged after World War I. Obviously, this distinction originated due to the 19th-century insistence on the part of Magyar politicians that the Magyar language should be spoken by all the inhabitants of the multiethnic and multilingual Kingdom of Hungary. But one can find the first recorded instance of conscious distinguishing between Hungaris and Magyaris in the 1778 Latin…
Parental discourses of language ideology and linguistic identity in multilingual Finland
2018
Finland is officially a bilingual country but it is in practice multilingual. In the current study, we examined how mothers and fathers of mixed-language families linguistically identified themselves and others, and how ideological discourses and concepts historically and socially situated in Finland circulated through the parents’ talk. The parents of three families in which at least Finnish, Swedish and English were used on a daily basis were interviewed. A discourse nexus approach showed that the concept of ‘mother tongue(s)’ played a central role and that although all family members were in practice multilingual, there was a strong tendency across the couples to identify themselves and …