IS THE EUROPEAN LANGUAGE POLICY AN ADEQUATE ANSWER?

Welcome back folks! I’m writing you today for probably the last time… This is going to be an interesting one, so come and check it out!

edl_logo_ats

Continue reading IS THE EUROPEAN LANGUAGE POLICY AN ADEQUATE ANSWER?

The governance of our language

It seems obvious that every person should be able to choose whether to learn a new language or not, however, it is also clear that knowing another language gives people several advantages such as understanding other cultures, getting new job possibilities and simply giving more training to our brain. Therefore, it is interesting to find out how in this moving environment where technology is being advanced every single day, language is still a problem. How and with what measures should the language issues be dealt with?  Continue reading The governance of our language

Breizh, ma bro, me ‘gar ma bro (Brittany, my country that I love)

Bretagne, or as the Breton call it, Breizh, is a truly beautiful and special place. It is where my father comes from, and where all of his ancestors come from as far as we can trace back. Almost every year since I was born I have gone back to this place that never stops to fascinate me. Bretagne (or Brittany in English) and the Breton, have a truly unique connection with the ocean, giving way to some of the most beautiful and wild coasts in the world, and a strong people, proud of their culture and their heritage.

Continue reading Breizh, ma bro, me ‘gar ma bro (Brittany, my country that I love)

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES AND THE POTENTIAL OF (NEW) MEDIA

Hi there fellow bloggers, this week I’m writing about endangered languages and the role (new) media plays. This is a serious topic… English is taking over many times and what happens to the few that speak a endangered language? Do they switch back to English or another language because it is easier? Come check it out! This is interesting stuff!!!endangered-language-watch Continue reading ENDANGERED LANGUAGES AND THE POTENTIAL OF (NEW) MEDIA

Your language is on a feeding tube and a respirator. Is it time to pull the plug?

EV_Xyzyl_1040185-590x393

The image above shows two families whom are native speakers of minority languages. One  of these languages is dying, the other continues to draw crowds annually at international conferences (spoilers it’s not the one pronounced Hizzle).

Continue reading Your language is on a feeding tube and a respirator. Is it time to pull the plug?

Wallons, nous! – Us, Walloons!

Walloon and French cohabiting

One of the biggest feature of the European Union is its language diversity. Apart from the official languages, there is a large diversity of regional languages. In Wallonia, the French speaking part of Belgium, the most spoken regional language is Walloon. The numbers of speakers is constantly diminishing as younger generations, like me, speak and learn exclusively French. Nonetheless, the language is still relatively visible in various medias in Wallonia.  

Continue reading Wallons, nous! – Us, Walloons!

Russian: a minority language?

It might sound ridiculous, taking into account the vast territory belonging to Russia and the approximate number of 170,000,000 speakers around the world , but Russian is a minority language in several countries including the country where I come from- Latvia (Www2.ignatius.edu, 2015). As described in my first post, the language problem in Latvia is a very big issue which creates a lot of strikes and nationalistic struggles and the media is one of the major platforms where these issues have been initiated… Continue reading Russian: a minority language?

Media around Frisian – prospect of future survival?

 

The Frisian language today is spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland and by an ever decreasing number of people in parts of  northern Germany. The regions where Frisian is still employed by certain people has diminished, only leaving Kreis Nordfriesland, Gemeinde Helgoland, and Gemeinde Saterland, with Frisian being recognized as a regional minority language in all. The Charter for Minority and Regional Languages comprises both Nordfriesisch, the variety spoken in Nordfriesland and Helgoland, and Saterfriesisch, spoken in the latter region, and marks them as seriously endangered. What efforts are made to preserve the Frisian language in the three named regions in northern Germany? And more pressingly, what is the likelyhood of Frisian to survive?

Continue reading Media around Frisian – prospect of future survival?

A Iscola de Sardu

Welcome back! Time has come for a new post. Todays argument will be less focused on my experiences but more on linguistic diversity and its protection. I will discuss the issue in general and later I will focus on Sardinia (Italy), a beautiful region where I have been many times. There I enjoyed the incredible beaches, the breathtaking inner land and the fantastic food. I guess also the stories of the old people I met were very interesting, but about that I cannot be so sure. In Sardinia they speak a different language. For Italians that have no connections with the place and its people, it is almost impossible to understand even one word of it. Of course the first official language is Italian and everybody can understand it, but I clearly remember people talking to me in Sardo and I didn’t understand anything. However, I promised that today I will not bore you with my personal experiences, so I will highlight the main issues concerning minority and regional languages and later discuss some interesting things about Sardegna. Continue reading A Iscola de Sardu

“Its not ‘news’ (novosti) anyway he said; it’s ‘olds’ (starosti), only for an ancient people”

This extract from a journal article is a statement by a Buryatic journalist, one of the reBildschirmfoto 2015-05-20 um 11.48.56maining guardians of this old language. Buryat is spoken today by 368.807 self-reported speakers, mainly in the Republic of Buryatia and parts of Armenia and Turkey. The main problem that this language is struggling with is that Russian, the official language of the country increasingly takes up space in all different spheres in the Buryat republic. The shift in language also occurs in the media landscape. Television and radio stations are struggling to attract young journalists and the news paper ‘prose’ as Graber (2012) calls it reaches beyond the ability of the urban youth. As these stations see their staff ageing so is their audience that decreases in numbers.

Generally the Russian Federation states in its constitution in that it: “promotes the development of the national languages, bilingualism and multilingualism on the whole territory of the Russian Federation”. Therefore, minority languages are supported and protected in key functional areas like education and media. However, history has shown that a, maybe unintended, shift towards a more dominant use of Russian language in this region has occurred. Starting in the beginning of the 20th century the Buryatian region was part of the Soviet Union. Media coverage was ought to be implemented through dual media production. This meant that for example newspaper articles were translated as precisely as possible, even trying to reach the same text length. Both languages were dealt with equally with no hierarchical preference. This suggests that Buryats and Russians belong to the same public, moreover, a Soviet public that hold identical needs as an audience.

Figure 2

In the 1960s however, processes of rapid industrialisation caused a shift, disturbing the balance of a parallel public. Language loss because of a more dominant becoming Russian language resulted in a lack of competent speakers to interview and an aging language community. Buryat therefore, became more of a subordinated language that was represented differently in the media. Due to urbanisation and an increasing younger generation, which ceased to speak their native language, Russian became the language of the hard news for politics and the economy. As the public started to access more and more Russian sources, Buryat media coverage specialised in soft news and came to represent a more culturally symbolic role.

On the one hand in the 1980s and 90s nationalistic movements supported a revitalization of the Buryat language as one form of a bottom-up approach. People should become more aware of their cultural heritage and common linguistic background to promote nation building. On the other hand, almost all journalists that Graber talked to think that the Russian state is responsible for funding Buryat language presence in the media – a top-down approach. However, such a support is not very likely as Buryat is mainly spoken in the villages of the region. Such an audience holds little profits to gain from advertisements that create the main revenue of media.

For me personally it was very interesting to learn about the circumstances of such a language in a federation state system where many languages are represented. As there are so many languages spoken in this large territory I do not think that a top-down approach is realisable. Multilingualism is promoted, however a shift towards the majority language in times of globalisation cannot be halted. Therefore, I suggest that local communities must implement policies for the preservation of their own language.