Neo-Speakers

From a peak of over 1 million speakers in 1950, Breton, a severely endangered Brythonic Celtic language in Brittany, northwestern France, now has probably under 200,000 speakers, with numerous semi-speakers and rusty speakers, and approximately 0.2-0.3% literacy (ability to write a simple personal letter) in Breton among native speakers. Practically all natural transmission by native speakers ceased between the 1950s and 1970s, so the great majority of native speakers are now over 60 years old. The language further suffers from an absence of standardization among native speakers (there is considerable dialectal fragmentation; most speakers know only their local dialect). There are three competing orthographies, with the linguistically least appropriate (ZH) accounting for 85% of users, the vast majority of whom are non-native learners. Language activism, confined largely to learners since the 1920s, began to expand significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to the establishment of all-Breton Diwan immersion schools and public Div Yezh and private (state-assisted Catholic) Dihun bilingual schools. However total numbers in these three Breton-language streams come to less than 3% of school-age children in Brittany. The dominant language among learners, both children and adults, is an artificial standard with numerous, and to native speakers, impenetrable neologisms, but strong French phonetics, syntax and phraseology. While no one factor, apart from the lexicon, impedes communication between learners and traditional speakers outright, the cumulative effect is to make intercomprehension laborious, and usually unfeasible in practice. With the exception of 5-10% of learners, most neo-speakers do not readily understand traditional speech. Traditional speakers tend to be ashamed of their language, and reluctant to speak it to those who do not master their own particular variety fluently. Neos, on the other hand, often explain away their lack of facility with native-like Breton by claiming that it is so " degenerate " that it is not worth saving, and that no matter how faulty their own Breton, as they say in Ireland: Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste 'Better to have broken Irish than clever English'. The rather extreme Breton situation, where native Breton speech is now rarely heard in public and is all but inaccessible to learners, raises the question as to how feasible it is for a whole cohort to revitalize a language without intensive contact with native speakers. Part of the answer may lie in redesigning teaching materials to make native-like Breton more readily available to learners, and in tweaking the written standard to allow more faithful reflection of the living dialects.

From a peak of over 1 million speakers in 1950, Breton, a severely endangered Brythonic Celtic language in Brittany, northwestern France, now has probably under 200,000 speakers, with numerous semi-speakers and rusty speakers, and approximately 0.2-0.3% literacy (ability to write a simple personal letter) in Breton among native speakers. Practically all natural transmission by native speakers ceased between the 1950s and 1970s, so the great majority of native speakers are now over 60 years old. The language further suffers from an absence of standardization among native speakers (there is considerable dialectal fragmentation; most speakers know only their local dialect). There are three competing orthographies, with the linguistically least appropriate (ZH) accounting for 85% of users, the vast majority of whom are non-native learners. Language activism, confined largely to learners since the 1920s, began to expand significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to the establishment of all-Breton Diwan immersion schools and public Div Yezh and private (state-assisted Catholic) Dihun bilingual schools. However total numbers in these three Breton-language streams come to less than 3% of school-age children in Brittany. The dominant language among learners, both children and adults, is an artificial standard with numerous, and to native speakers, impenetrable neologisms, but strong French phonetics, syntax and phraseology. While no one factor, apart from the lexicon, impedes communication between learners and traditional speakers outright, the cumulative effect is to make intercomprehension laborious, and usually unfeasible in practice. With the exception of 5-10% of learners, most neo-speakers do not readily understand traditional speech. Traditional speakers tend to be ashamed of their language, and reluctant to speak it to those who do not master their own particular variety fluently. Neos, on the other hand, often explain away their lack of facility with native-like Breton by claiming that it is so " degenerate " that it is not worth saving, and that no matter how faulty their own Breton, as they say in Ireland: Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste 'Better to have broken Irish than clever English'. The rather extreme Breton situation, where native Breton speech is now rarely heard in public and is all but inaccessible to learners, raises the question as to how feasible it is for a whole cohort to revitalize a language without intensive contact with native speakers. Part of the answer may lie in redesigning teaching materials to make native-like Breton more readily available to learners, and in tweaking the written standard to allow more faithful reflection of the living dialects.

Attempts at revitalising endangered languages often centre on teaching the language to new speakers (NS) of all ages. NS have recently attracted increased attention, not least because of their possible role in determining the future of the language. The emergent literature on NS often mentions a divergence between new speaker language (NSL) and the language of ‘traditional speakers’ (TSL). However, little empirical analysis has been undertaken to evaluate these observations.

This thesis is a corpus-based study of the morphosyntax of NSL. Nearly three years’ worth of judgement-sampled data are taken from an online community who use Facebook to learn Louisiana Creole, a critically-endangered creole language. The morphosyntax of NSL is compared to that of TSL to investigate the extent to which the two diverge. The thesis discusses possible mechanisms behind this divergence. Additionally, subcorpora are used to examine the evolution of NSL over time, and to determine whether the language of the teacher is an important factor in shaping NSL.

The individual interlanguages of NS may converge to create a normalized variety recognisable as NSL. The morphosyntax of NSL appears to be shaped by processes of Second Language Acquisition (e.g. transfer, simplification). Critically, however, NSL is also heavily influenced by the sociolinguistic context of language revitalization (e.g. using certain morphosyntactic forms to index a distinctive group identity).

MPhil Thesis, University of Cambridge

From a peak of over 1 million speakers in 1950, Breton, a severely endangered Brythonic Celtic language in Brittany, northwestern France, now has probably under 200,000 speakers, with numerous semi-speakers and rusty speakers, and approximately 0.2-0.3% literacy (ability to write a simple personal letter) in Breton among native speakers. Practically all natural transmission by native speakers ceased between the 1950s and 1970s, so the great majority of native speakers are now over 60 years old. The language further suffers from an absence of standardization among native speakers (there is considerable dialectal fragmentation; most speakers know only their local dialect). There are three competing orthographies, with the linguistically least appropriate (ZH) accounting for 85% of users, the vast majority of whom are non-native learners. Language activism, confined largely to learners since the 1920s, began to expand significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to the establishment of all-Breton Diwan immersion schools and public Div Yezh and private (state-assisted Catholic) Dihun bilingual schools. However total numbers in these three Breton-language streams come to less than 3% of school-age children in Brittany. The dominant language among learners, both children and adults, is an artificial standard with numerous, and to native speakers, impenetrable neologisms, but strong French phonetics, syntax and phraseology. While no one factor, apart from the lexicon, impedes communication between learners and traditional speakers outright, the cumulative effect is to make intercomprehension laborious, and usually unfeasible in practice. With the exception of 5-10% of learners, most neo-speakers do not readily understand traditional speech. Traditional speakers tend to be ashamed of their language, and reluctant to speak it to those who do not master their own particular variety fluently. Neos, on the other hand, often explain away their lack of facility with native-like Breton by claiming that it is so "degenerate" that it is not worth saving, and that no matter how faulty their own Breton, as they say in Ireland: Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste 'Better to have broken Irish than clever English'. The rather extreme Breton situation, where native Breton speech is now rarely heard in public and is all but inaccessible to learners, raises the question as to how feasible it is for a whole cohort to revitalize a language without intensive contact with native speakers. Part of the answer may lie in redesigning teaching materials to make native-like Breton more readily available to learners, and in tweaking the written standard to allow more faithful reflection of the living dialects.

In minority language contexts, the aim of language policy and planning initiatives is frequently to enhance their survival prospects by increasing individuals’ knowledge and use of such languages in a variety of social contexts. The success of such policies depends on a variety of factors. These include the ability of policy to encourage maintenance of the language amongst existing speakers (the so-called ‘native’ speakers of the language) and its revival amongst individuals in the community who no longer speak it and who have become ‘native’ speakers of another language, typically, the dominant language. However, the task of policy makers and language planners is often made more difficult by sociolinguistic, socio-economic, socio-geographical and ideological differences between ‘native’ speakers and ‘non-native’ newcomers to the language. Rather than forming a unified speech community, ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speakers of the minority language very often see themselves as being socially and linguistically incompatible. The purpose of this article is to examine the native-non-native dichotomy in two minority language contexts: Irish in the Republic of Ireland and Galician in the Autonomous Community of Galicia.

En contextos sociolingüísticos regresivos, el objetivo básico de las iniciativas de política y planificación lingüística consiste en aumentar el horizonte de expectativas de las lenguas socialmente minoritarias, a través de propuestas encaminadas a aumentar su conocimiento y dominio en contextos cada vez más diversos. El éxito de tales políticas depende de diversos factores. Entre ellos destacan dos estrategias: la potenciación del mantenimiento de la lengua entre los hablantes ya existentes (los llamados hablantes nativos o tradicionales) y el fomento del uso activo entre personas que, dentro de la comunidad, han tenido otra lengua como lengua materna, por lo general la lengua socialmente mayoritaria.

Although Galician survived several centuries of language
contact with Spanish, a combination of sociopolitical
and socioeconomic factors in the latter half of
the twentieth century has accelerated the process of
language shift. Language policy interventions since the
1980s have, however, attempted to curb this trend in an
effort to maintain the language in areas where it continues
to be spoken and to revive it elsewhere. While
there has been a decline in the number of traditional
native speakers, there has been a revitalization of the
language amongst certain younger, urban, middleclass
and traditionally Spanish-speaking sectors of
Galician society. These neofalantes, or "neo-speakers"
of Galician, frequently find themselves negotiating
their right for linguistic space amongst native speakers
of Spanish and Galician. In this paper we explore this
linguistic space through an analysis of contemporary
discourses both about neo-speakers and by neo-speakers
of Galician. These discourses were generated from
three discussion groups consisting of native and neospeakers
of Galician. In our analysis of the data, we look
at the role of the new speaker as a legitimate and legitimized
speaker (Bourdieu 1982). The study concludes
that the sociolinguistic space occupied by new ways
of speaking and new speakers requires greater social
recognition.

While in many indigenous minority language situations traditional native speaker communities are in decline, new speakers are emerging in the context of revitalization policies. Such policies can however have unforeseen consequences and lead to tensions between newcomers and existing speakers over questions of ownership, legitimacy and authenticity. This paper examines these tensions in the case of Galician in north-western Spain, where “new speakers” have emerged in the context of revitalization policies since the 1980s. The subsequent spread of the language outside traditional Galician strongholds and into what were predominantly Spanish spaces, complicates the traditional ideology about sociolinguistic authenticity and ownership and raises questions about who are the legitimate speakers of Galician, who has authority and the potential tensions that such questions generate. To illustrate the tensions and paradoxes which new and native speakers face in this post-revitalization context, we draw on three discussion groups consisting of sixteen young Galicians.

Genova capitale dei provini per attori e artisti: grazie all'associazione teatrale G.A.G. (Giovani Artisti Genovesi) a luglio si terrà Actors&PoetryFestival, 4° Edizione, un mercato degli attori che arrivano da tutta Italia per vincere contratti di lavoro con le produzioni http://www.ilsecoloxix.it/p/cultura/2015/06/20/AR0CzJrE-artisti_audizioni_contratti.shtml