"Minor" languages

[ursula.doleschal]

Finally, by your use of the term "provincialization"
> you _are_ implying that nations whose writers employ languages other
> than the obvious English, French, Spanish, German, possibly Russian,
> etc. are in some sense "provincial."

 it makes
>>more sense to publish a scholarly book in English or German than, say, in
>>Albanian. Of course, this does not make the English or German language
>>inherently "better" than Albanian, it's simply a matter of pragmatics and
>>a question of the audience you want to reach.

Well,... To my mind there is an underlying problem linguists do not like to
tackle (just as to make the decision of what consitutes a language, by the
way, what is the measure for "mutual intelligibility" of spoken language?
In my personal view, e.g., standard German is mutually intelligible in
different parts of the German speaking territory, say Hannover and Vienna,
only because we have television etc. and therefore are used to different
ways of standard pronounciation, lexicon etc. But the case of Czech and
Slovak up to a very short time back looks very much the same), but back to
the above problem, namely: the degree of elaboration of languages that of
course are not "inherently better" but are chosen simply by a "matter of
pragmatics and a question of the audience you want to reach" to publish a
scholarly book in.

I think it cannot be overlooked that there are languages clearly lacking
certain registers, styles, texttypes (or whatever terminology you prefer)
that other languages have. On a course on language corpora of special
language I learnt that e.g. Danish does not  have a special language of
chemistry in the strict sense because researchers choose to publish in
other languages. Likewise there is no equivalent of magazines as the German
"Spiegel" or "Die Zeit" in Norway, as the market is too small. Therefore
linguists working on comparative stylistics of the two languages have some
difficulty with comparability. Then there is the problem of creating legal
terminology (e.g.) for Ukrainian nowadays, since obviously (I do not know
the details) this layer of language had been occupied by Russian before,
and so forth.

Therefore I contend that from a strictly linguistic point of view, too, one
can discern such differences as "minor" or "provincial", but we should have
other labels for them. Unfortunately  "elaborate", too, has an unfortunate
history (remember Bernstein). In any case the description of the mentioned
differences will always be interpreted as evaluative, so any term will
become unacceptable. Is it therefore better not to discuss such things in
academia?

Ursula Doleschal (ursula.doleschal at wu-wien.ac.at)
Institut f. Slawische Sprachen, Wirtschaftsuniv. Wien
Augasse 9, 1090 Wien, Austria
Tel.: ++43-1-31336 4115, Fax:  ++43-1-31336 744