[Ura-list] SLE 2024 workshop: Young speakers of indigenous languages

[Ksenia Shagal]

Dear colleagues,

we are planning a workshop dealing with young speakers of indigenous
languages at the SLE conference in Helsinki (21–24 August 2024), and we are
looking for potential contributors. If you are interested, please get in
touch with us before 13 November 2023 (see the current version of the
workshop proposal below or at
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2023/10/Young-speakers-of-indigenous-languages.pdf
).

On behalf of the organizers,
Ksenia Shagal
Professor of Uralic Studies
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

***
*Young speakers of indigenous languages*

*Key words: *language endangerment, indigenous languages, revitalization,
young speakers, language change

*Workshop description*

According to recent estimates, over 40 percent of the world’s languages
currently face endangerment (see https://endangeredlanguages.com/about/),
especially indigenous languages in different parts of the world. Without
intervention, approximately one language a month will stop being spoken in
the next 40 years (Bromham et al. 2022). This typically happens when a
language is not being learnt by children as their first language, or it is
gradually being replaced by another language, which becomes the dominant
one for the younger generation. In some cases, as a result, the language
falls into almost complete dormancy after several decades. In other cases,
language communities and linguists undertake revitalization efforts that
encourage particularly the younger speakers to reclaim the language and
support the intergenerational transmission.

Language revitalization, however, encompasses an important paradox. While
it aims at re-establishing the language in the speech community, in doing
so, it often causes at least partial changes in the structure of the
language. The language production of the people who have not previously
used a minority language will differ from the traditional competence. In
our workshop, we would like to focus on the peculiarities that the speech
of these people might show, and on the methods that best allow us to
document, describe, and analyse their speech.

In terms of structure, more is known about the speech of people losing the
minority language, the so-called ‘semi-speakers’ (Dorian 1982; Grinevald &
Bert 2011). However, the documentation and revitalization of a language can
start at varying stages of the language shift, and often it deals primarily
with bilingual speakers whose competence was very different to begin with.
Many language activists are ‘new speakers’, who did not acquire the
minority language from the family and learn it intendedly. Importantly, the
non-family transmission among new speakers does not prevent them from
acquiring fluency, choosing the minority language as their preferred medium
of daily communication, or raising their children as bilingual (see, e.g.,
O’Rourke & Nandi 2019 on the Galician parents’ community).

Although there have been many works on ‘new speakers’ in recent years
(O’Rourke et al. 2015; Smith-Christmas et al. 2018), they deal primarily
with attitudes to language and other sociolinguistic issues but have little
to do with linguistic analysis (though see Rodríguez-Ordóñez 2021). At the
moment some features seem to be properties of the speech of the young, for
example non-standard word order in Kalmyk (Baranova 2023), but it is
possible that these features may be consolidated in the future. It can lead
to structural changes in the minority language: for example, the revived
Cornish has a new form to express possession with abstract nouns that
differs from traditional Cornish (Arbes 2019).

Naturally, among young speakers of indigenous languages facing endangerment
children are a special case. The study of their linguistic competence is
interesting from a variety of aspects, including the ways they speak, the
strategies they use, and the ways they acquire their language(s), but also
the methods with which these issues can be addressed. Since there is no
widely accepted methodology for gathering child speech and child-directed
speech, many documentation projects either completely exclude working with
children or include non-systematic occasional cases of child speech
recordings (see Eisenbeiss 2005; Hellwig & Jung 2020). On the other hand,
the speech of child speakers of indigenous languages and the child-directed
speech are extremely valuable, as they are among the components that are
vital for understanding the functioning of a language, and the respective
materials can be helpful for revitalization efforts.

The topics that we plan to discuss at the workshop include but are not
limited to the following:
● Structural peculiarities in the speech of young speakers of indigenous
languages, possibly in connection with the sociolinguistic status of the
language;
● The role of new speakers and language revitalization in language change;
● The speech of child speakers of indigenous languages;
● The methodology for documenting the speech of young indigenous speakers,
child speech, and child-directed speech.

*Call for papers*

Preliminary abstracts of no more than 300 words (excluding references) in
.doc, .docx, .rtf or .odt format should be sent before November 13, 2023,
to the workshop organizers:

ksenia.shagal at lmu.de (Ksenia Shagal)
daria.zhornik at yandex.ru (Daria Zhornik)
vladakharada at gmail.com (Vlada Baranova)
arzhaanas at yahoo.com (Arzhaana Syuryun)

Any questions or suggestions regarding the workshop are very welcome as
well.

If the workshop is accepted, it will take place at the 57th Annual Meeting
of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Helsinki, 21–24 August 2024 (for
more information on the conference see
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/). All preliminary workshop
participants will be invited to submit their full abstracts before January
15, 2024.

*References*

Arbes D. (2019). Predicative possession in revived Cornish. In L. Johanson,
L. Mazzitelli, I. Nevskaya. Possession in Languages of Europe and North and
Central Asia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Baranova V. (2023) The grassroots initiatives for revitalization of Kalmyk:
who is involved in language planning, and how? In J. Gspandl, A. Heiling,
Ch. Korb, E.J. Erling. The Power of Voice in Transforming Multilingual
Societies. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 41-58.
Bromham L, Dinnage R., Skirgård H., Ritchie A., Cardillo M., Meakins F.,
Greenhill S, and X. Hua (2022). Global predictors of language endangerment
and the future of linguistic diversity. Nature Ecology and Evololution 6.
163–173.
Dorian N. C. (1982). Defining the speech community in terms of its working
margins. In S. Romaine (Ed.). Sociolinguistic variation in speech
communities. London: Arnold. 25-33.
Eisenbeiß S. (2005). Documenting child language // Language documentation
and description. Vol. 3, pp. 106-140.
Grinevald C., Bert M. (2011). Speakers and Communities. In Austin &
Sallabank (eds): Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge:
CUP. 45-65
Hellwig B., Jung D. (2020). Child-directed language–and how it informs the
documentation and description of the adult language // Language
Documentation & Conservation. Vol. 14, pp. 188-214.
O 'Rourke B. Nandi A. 2019. New speaker parents as grassroots policy makers
in contemporary Galicia: ideologies, management and practices. Language
Policy, 18(4), 493 511.
Rodríguez Ordóñez I. (2021). The role of social meaning in contact induced
variation among new speakers of Basque. Journal of sociolinguistics 25 (4).
533-556.
Sallabank J. Marquis Y. (2018). 'We don't say it like that': Language
ownership and (de)legitimising the new speaker. In C. Smith Christmas, N. Ó
Murchadha, M. Hornsby and M. Moriarty (eds). New Speakers of Minority
Languages Linguistic Ideologies and Practices London: Palgrave Macmillan.
67-90.
Smith Christmas C., Ó Murchadha N., Hornsby M. Moriarty M. (2018). New
Speakers of Minority Languages. Linguistic Ideologies and Practices.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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