"Think 22nd Century Linguistic Rights"
"Think 22nd Century Linguistic Rights"
What Language Should a Nation Officially Call Its Own?
- Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights a statement that argues for the protection and encouragement of minority languages.
- ISSUES AND OPINIONS
Language Policy - n. and Whoever Owns the Language Owns the Conversation
Standard English is the language of commerce, the language of the administrator.
It will be the problem of the millennium to solve the post imperialist notion of superiority / inferiority . It is the American tragedy of racism, the underclass, class inclusion vs. exclusion in a capitalist system.
"Language emits a social message and an intellectual message about the sender," Mamie Hixon, director of West Florida's Writing Lab and an assistant professor of English, told the Pensacola News Journal. "It's the barometer by which we measure a person's professional credibility."
- Interference or Separation? by Dr. Jeff Siegel
The “standard” is the variety of language used in writing and the mass media - the variety you need if you want to get a college education or a high-paying job. It is the variety of the powerful, unmarked by any features associated with a particular powerless group. But people have come to believe the standard variety is inherently better than other varieties - more logical, more precise, even more beautiful. The result is that these other, nonstandard varieties have become stigmatized by society at large.
- Pidgins and Creoles and other Stigmatized Varieties
Stigmatized varieties include social dialects, such as “working class English”; regional dialects, such as Appalachian in the USA, and ethnic or minority dialects such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Australian Aboriginal English. Pidgins and creoles, such as Melanesian Pidgin and Hawai‘i Creole English, are also stigmatized, as they are often considered to be degenerate varieties of the particular standards to which they are lexically related.
Of course, linguists have shown that these varieties are legitimate, rule-governed forms of language and in no way intrinsically inferior (e.g., Labov, 1969). But as Mackey (1978, p. 7) has noted, “Only before God and linguists are all languages equal”, and because of continuing negative attitudes, the usual educational policy is to keep stigmatized varieties out of the classroom. This is in spite of the large amount of research showing that children learn better in a variety of language that they are familiar with (e.g., Thomas & Collier, 1997).
Besides the belief that stigmatized varieties are illegitimate languages, there are two general justifications for such policies. First, there is the notion that you shouldn’t take time away from learning the standard, which is after all, the language of education and the key to success (the “time-on-task” argument). But the main justification is that using a stigmatized variety in education will actually interfere with students’ acquisition of the standard (the “interference” argument).
Several scholars (e.g. Snow, 1990; Cummins, 1993) have already examined the time-on-task argument and show that it is not justified. The purpose of this article is to critically assess the interference argument. It starts off by presenting some views on interference and the justification for them. Then it describes the results of research on educational programs using stigmatized varieties. The rest of the article discusses some possible explanations for these results, drawing on research from psycholinguistics and from second language acquisition theory and practice.
- From The Islands To The Classroom and Back
- What Governments Give Dialect Official Recognition? Source - Mikael Parkvall Institutionen för lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM (rum 276)
To begin the discussion we might want to start out by asking what exactly do you mean by "language"? And you may want to consider how many people actually speak this "tiny obscure" language.
Then Consider the Following:
a) In about half of the world's countries, the major language(s) actually spoken by the people is also used for official purposes, including teaching. The average GDP per capita in these countries is over 11,000. USD. The average literacy rate is around 90%.
b) In the rest of the world, a diglossic relationship reigns, usually involving schooling in a language other than that spoken natively by the pupils. The average GDP per capita in these countries is well below 6000 USD, and the literacy rate is 68%.
c) The United Nations ranks countries according to a "human development index", which combines indicators such as life expectancy and health with economical and educational factors. 173 countries are thus ranked. The top 10 countries (Norway, Sweden, Canada, Belgium, Australia, USA, Iceland, Netherlands, Japan, Finland, in that order) all use their respective majority languages for all purposes. The least developed countries (still by the UN metric), on the other hand, almost without exception do not give their indigenous languages any recognition whatsoever.
d) Jamaican has about ten times as many speakers as Icelandic does. Note how many people are actually speaking creole, obviously not a "tiny obscure" language.
- An Army, A Navy, and Ebonics
Ohio State University This paper is the written version of presentations in Helsinki and Joensuu, Finland in 1997. A summary appears in the final section.
- Bring Aboriginal Cultures into the electronic age. "It's a form of democratization. It allows smaller groups a voice at a lot of different levels. Most computers, cannot support the phonetic syllabic characters used to represent Inuktitut in written language.
- Watch the movie called Rabbit Proof Fence Imperialism to Colonization Strategies of Rule
What is humanitarianism in a colonial context and you can start questioning the arrogance of colonialism. - A True Story about Australian history and the practice of displacement that lasted from 1905 to 1971 was inspired by the belief the government was 'rescuing' the children from what it felt was a life of illiteracy and poverty. The children were placed in state homes and were trained to be maids or farm workers. The government hoped that eventually the children would be integrated into the white society. Story written by Doris Pilkington Gaimara, daughter of Molly Craig, who was 14 (& acted exactly like the US underground railroad conduct er Harriet Tubman) when Molly and two other girls walked over 1500 miles across the country in 1931 to escape the camp. in Australian History of the aboriginal children (half casts) stolen from families then taken to camps where they are forced to speak english only etc. One 14 year old girl leads the other two back home across a 1000 miles over 9 weeks time avoiding the tracker. This was an Australian first nation "underground railroad" story of runaway slaves for the colonial power. And the girls had to do this twice in their life. This colonial practice of destroying the fabric of aboriginal culture was practice up to 1970.
- CULTURES OBSERVATIONS DATABASE
The Cultures Observations Database is an open database of observations made by travellers and other observers, from ancient times to the present day, describing the behaviour of people in other (and their own) cultures. These observers may include anthropologists and other professionals, but are mainly ordinary people who have been in a position to note variances of behaviour between their own cultures and others.
