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This article suggests that much of the use of the Navajo language in contemporary Navajo written poetry, especially English dominant poetry, serves as an icon of proper Navajo usage. It is a purist view of the Navajo language. Navajo poetry is implicated, even if tacitly, in a discourse of linguistic purism that is tied to an oppositional linguistic ideology that sees Navajo and English as discrete and distinct “objects.” Navajo poetry erases the contemporary sociolinguistic diversity - including bilingual Navajo - on the Navajo Nation. And in so doing, it closes off parts of Navajo sociolinguistic realities and in its stead creates an imagined Navajo language community.

Portuguese language students in the United States typically also speak Spanish, and Portuguese programs, influenced by ideologies of linguistic purism, ceaselessly battle against its interference. This article describes a qualitative study of the treatment of Spanish utterances—called taquitos by participants—in a beginner-level Portuguese class. It presents the classroom as a space of language socialization where students are apprenticed into a culture of strict language separation that demonstrates our field's monolingual bias. Microanalysis of videorecorded classes shows how error correction practices socialize students into upholding monolingual immersion through constant vigilance and mobilization against taquitos. Gaze, body orientation, and gestures as attention markers reveal a taquito hot seat that marginalizes and places Spanish-speaking students in intense negative focus for not producing Portuguese in “uncontaminated” forms. Given the harm such practices may cause, the article urges the field to examine our rigid insistence upon artificial classroom monolingual immersion and promote flexible, strategic translanguaging for more effective world language pedagogy.

Summary The discovery of Karl Tekusch as a key player and significant link in the history of Austrian and German linguistic purism is the subject of this article. Tekusch was the last chairman of the Vienna Branch of the Deutscher Sprachverein (DSV), from the Austrian Anschluss until its dissolution, and he was also the first chairman of its post-WWII successor, the Viennese Verein Muttersprache, which is still active today. The existence of the hitherto lesser-known Germanischer Sprachverein, founded and chaired by Tekusch for 15 years, proves that the alleged ’gap’ in organised Austrian linguistic purism does in fact not exist, and that Austrian linguistic purism must indeed be regarded as a continuous phenomenon. Strongly influenced by the völkisch movement and later the national socialists, Tekusch had developed and continuously worked on his concept of Sprachechtheit, ‘linguistic authenticity’. The concept was very influential on purist organisations in Austria and Germany until at least the late 1970s. Moreover, Sprachechtheit was discussed beyond the realm of linguistics purism, by academics in German Philology, Sociology, Social Psychology, and German Folklore Studies / European Ethnology.

These are materials to our article that reports on a study whose aim was to analyze the relation between the level of declarative purism and the preference for a particular loanword adaptation technique.

After the 2016 spelling reforms deleted the accent circumflex from some French vowels, on right-wing French Twitter, the circonflexe reappeared in the center of the French flag – echoing the flag of Vichy France. Tweets with the hashtag #JeSuisCirconflexe resemiotized the accent circumflex as icon of a lost Frenchness, or voiced the racial other in a colonial faux pidgin to frame them as illiterate and brutish. Drawing on research on resemiotization (Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen & Elina Westinen. 2014. Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In The language of social media, 112–136. London: Palgrave Macmillan) and raciolinguistics (Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2). 149–171), this article explores how constructions of mock youth French use raciolinguistic tropes to imagine a language of social decline, connecting linguistic purism to racist myths of white genocide and the great replacement. Despite this, youth invert the imagination of their illiteracy, using playful language and satirizing white speech (Rosa, Jonathan. 2016b. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2). 162–183) to contest French nationalism – reframing #JeSuisCirconflexe as #JeSuisSirCornflakes.

In Maningrida, northern Australia, code-switching is a commonplace phenomenon within a complex of both longstanding and more recent language practices characterised by high levels of linguistic diversity and multilingualism. Code-switching is observable between local Indigenous languages and is now also widespread between local languages and English and/or Kriol. In this paper, I consider whether general predictions about the nature and functioning of code-switching account for practices in the Maningrida context. I consider: (i) what patterns characterise longstanding code-switching practices between different Australian languages in the region, as opposed to code-switching between an Australian language and Kriol or English? (ii) how do the distinctions observable align with general predictions and constraints from dominant theoretical frameworks? Need we look beyond these factors to explain the patterns? Results indicate that general predictions, including the effects of typological congruence, account for many observable tendencies in the data. However, other factors, such as constraints exerted by local ideologies of multilingualism and linguistic purism, as well as shifting socio-interactional goals, may help account for certain distinct patterns in the Maningrida data.

The Status of Turkish Loanwords marama and maramica in Modern Croatian The present article aims to investigate the status, frequency and function of Turkish loanwords marama and maramica in modern Croatian. This study attempts to compare views of Croatian linguists on these lexemes with their practical usage recorded in online corpora. The analysis demonstrates that a purist language policy applied in Croatia, especially in the 1990s, resulted in a change of status of marama and maramica in standard Croatian: these originally stylistically neutral lexemes came to be regarded as regionalisms, “worse” words or even Serbisms. On the other hand, the corpus study under discussion indicates that the loanwords marama and maramica are still popular in journalistic and official texts, where they appear in a number of new contexts. Status turcyzmow marama i maramica we wspolczesnym jezyku chorwackim Glownym celem publikacji jest zbadanie statusu, frekwencji i funkcji turcyzmow marama i maramica we wspolczesnym jezyku chorwackim. Artykul stanowi probe konfrontacji poglądow na temat badanych leksemow, formulowanych przede wszystkim przez chorwackich lingwistow, z uzusem poświadczonym w korpusach jezykowych. Badania pokazują, ze purystyczna polityka jezykowa prowadzona w Chorwacji, przede wszystkim w latach 90. XX wieku, skutkowala zmianą statusu wspomnianych slow w standardowym jezyku chorwackim: te początkowo neutralne stylistycznie wyrazy zaczeto określac mianem regionalizmow, form gorszych, a nawet serbizmow. Z drugiej strony analiza korpusu pokazuje, ze leksemy marama i maramica są nadal bardzo popularne w tekstach publicystycznych i urzedowych, gdzie pojawią sie w licznych nowych kontekstach.

In February 2016 the French spelling reform of 1990, which introduced changes to approximately 2,000 words, became the object of discussion online, after it was announced that the new spellings would be included in textbooks from September. Analysing a corpus of tweets, containing key terms from the online discussion, JeSuisCirconflexe; ognon and réforme orthographe, this study gives an insight into the reactions to this governmental linguistic intervention, the recurring themes in their discourse and how this can be interpreted as prescriptive or purist behaviour. Although previous studies have extensively analysed reactions to the 1996 spelling reform in Germany, little research has considered online lay-reactions to the French reform. Given observations that online interactions differ in many ways to equivalent offline interactions, this study can form a point of contrast to previous studies conducted in offline contexts, thereby enriching the existing literature in this field. It is also often claimed that France is a country in which linguistic purism is deeply entrenched; this article will seek further evidence for these claims.

Aversion to loanwords may express itself in various ways: deliberate and motivated by ideology of linguistic purism or more implicit and motivated by the strength of one’s national identification and ethnolinguistic vitality. A study of Polish philology students assessed their tendency to choose loanwords versus synonymous native words. The results supported a two-path model of linguistic purism. Social identity (strength of identification) directly predicted avoidance of loanwords, whereas ideological concerns (conservative political views) predicted it indirectly, through purist ideology.

In this article, we provide a systematic study of the extent and influence of the ideology of purism in Afrikaans historical linguistics. The study takes the form of a critical discourse analysis that indicates how the nationalistic, puristic ideologies of Apartheid were transferred – implicitly and explicitly – to linguistic descriptions of the history of Afrikaans. We firstly engage in a discussion of purism – specifically genetic and sanitary purism – and the role of nationalism in linguistic purism. We then divide the historical linguists of Afrikaans into three categories that do not correspond to certain periods very strictly, but follow a chronological order to some extent: the pre-philological, philological, and alternative schools of thought. Finally, we trace how Afrikaans historical linguistics practiced significant erasure in the name of purism at first, transferring certain aspects of nationalism and purism to scientific inquiry, to then become less puristic and more inclusive with ti...

Research into linguistic purism often reflects a critical, if not contemptuous attitude towards its subject of inquiry. The reasons for this are purists’ prescriptivist stance, as well as their frequent association with ethno-linguistic nationalism, an ideology in moral disrepute. We argue that this approach of purism produces blind spots. Following Pratt’s suggestion, we reconsider linguistic purism in this article as the effect of a utopian discourse and show how a desire for (linguistic) purity is at the very heart of the project of modernity. We apply our theoretical framework to the history of purism in modern Flanders (nineteenth to twenty-first century).

The focus of this paper is on language attitudes towards English words and phrases in the Croatian language. In order to prevent loanwords, linguistic purism has arisen as a theory about what languages should be like. The tradition of linguistic purism in Croatia has been shaped by various socio-historical factors. English may be viewed as a language of opportunity, or as a threat to the survival of other, usually minority and endangered, languages. In order to provide an insight into the use of English words and phrases in the Croatian context, a questionnaire about language attitudes and awareness was conducted on 534 participants. The aim of the questionnaire was to determine participants’ language attitudes and familiarity with English words and phrases. The results show that although people in Croatia generally like English, many of them are not familiar with English words, especially older participants and those with little or no knowledge of the English language. Moreover, the results indicate that the younger generation is more inclined towards English than the older generation; however, they are not as familiar with Croatian equivalents as they claim.

Significant social and political shifts cause basic changes in a language culture such as the abolition of old models of writing, speaking, and the establishment of a new model of language usage, which leads to the emergence of puristic reaction to language processes. This paper examines various manifestations of purism in the metadiscourse on modern Russian language and analyzes how they overlap with the purism in the Soviet language policy.

1. Introduction The paper sets out to investigate one of the assertions pertaining to Richard Rolle's Psalter translation, and more precisely to its linguistic layer, phrased by Partridge (1973: 21) in the following manner: "Rolle adhered with fidelity to the Latin original, using the simplest and most proper English wherever possible, except when his native language failed him, and he was compelled to latinize" The excerpt quoted above leads the reader to deduce that Rolle's rendition would employ almost exclusively vocabulary of native origin, except for instances where no proper item with native etymology presents itself in a particular context and Rolle is forced to use a Latin-derived word. Such an interpretation, however, would amount to ascribing Richard Rolle the ideas nowadays covered by the term linguistic purism, albeit of a mild form. (1) There are a number of issues inevitably entailed in this assumption. Firstly, Rolle would need to have a 'linguistic' knowledge extensive enough to enable him to differentiate between lexical items on the basis of their etymology. Secondly, it would take an extremely disciplined and individualistic translator, if one takes into account also other (nearly) contemporaneous Psalter renditions, allegedly replete with loanwords, to incorporate such an endeavour into the task of Bible translation, especially if Rolle's primary focus was providing as close a rendition of the original as possible (Bramley 1884: 3-5). Thirdly, he would need to be exceptional or even isolated in his linguistic views since the Middle English period was a time when not only the term linguistic purism, an 18th-century French coinage (McArthur 1992: 827), would sound foreign. It seems that its denotatum itself would not be understood, let alone met with acceptance in the contemporary society of the time (cf. Section 3). In fact, such an attitude to language would be first observed in England only in the 16th century, i.e., two centuries after Rolle completed his rendition (McArthur 1992: 827). Interestingly, Partridge (1973: 21) presents no evidence to corroborate his claim and since the assertion itself--old as it is--has never been either confirmed or openly rejected, I undertook to address this issue. Admittedly, Rolle's linguistic convictions would be impossible to gauge in a straightforward manner, which is why one needs to establish a point of reference from which to measure Rolle's alleged linguistic purism and more accurately his faithfulness to the vocabulary of native provenance. Therefore, I decided to analyse the text while juxtaposing it with the remaining 14th-century prose Psalter renditions in relation to which Rolle's translation would be identified, if Partridge's (1973: 21) claim were correct, as most exceptional. The translations in question are the Wycliffite Bibles and the Middle English Glossed Prose Psalter, of which the former are asserted to be overtly influenced by the Latin text they render (Condit 1882: 64-73, Delisle and Woodsworth 1995: 32, Norton 2000: 7, Daniell 2003: 76-80) and the latter is considered to be deeply indebted both syntactically and, more importantly, lexically to a 'French source' (Reuter 1938). As a result, the paper aims to analyse the lexical layer of the text in search of the evidence, or lack thereof, which sets Rolle's translation lexically apart from the other renditions. Such a study is to be conducted on the basis of the nominal layer of the first fifty Psalms of the four relevant texts, scrutinised in relation to their common Latin source text, as only the juxtaposition of all of these enables one to (dis)prove the claim cited above. The structure of the paper is the following. Succinct information regarding each of the texts employed in the research is presented in Section 2. This is followed by an overview of the contemporary theory of translation set against a broadly sketched linguistic map of contemporary England (Section 3), as these are indispensable if one aims at providing a wider context from which to view the data. …

This article deals with the process of language purism and the presence of Serbisms in Croatian. We attempt to show whether the speakers of Croatian know and use specific lexical items that are generally considered to be more characteristic of Serbian usage. For this purpose we use two data sources: a corpus of Croatian and a questionnaire survey. The results show that the speakers of Croatian are aware of the differences between Croatian and Serbian to a large extent. Even though they mostly do not use them, most speakers do know the meaning of lexemes that were used in the Serbo-Croatian period. This leads to the conclusion that the process of “cleansing” Croatian is being successfully implemented (but is far from completion). However, we argue against the justifiability of this process. Članek se ukvarja s procesom jezikovnega purizma in prisotnostjo srbizmov v hrvaščini. Skušamo ugotoviti, ali govorci hrvaškega jezika poznajo in uporabljajo leksikalne elemente, za katere na splošno velja, da so bolj značilni za srbščino. V ta namen smo uporabili dva vira podatkov: korpus hrvaškega jezika in anketni vprašalnik. Rezultati kažejo, da se govorci hrvaškega jezika v veliki meri zavedajo razlik med hrvaščino in srbščino. Večina govorcev sicer pozna pomen leksemov, ki so bili uporabljani v srbohrvaškem obdobju, a jih večinoma ne uporabljajo. Zaključimo lahko, da se proces čiščenja hrvaščine uspešno izvaja (četudi še zdaleč ni dokončan), pri čemer avtor nasprotuje upravičenosti tega postopka.

Based in part on his recent book Čiji je jezik? (Who does Language Belong to?), the author reviews the intricate relation of language, ideology, and politics in Croatia in the last 20 years, including new examples and analyses. The article emphasizes problems related to Croatia specifically, which might be of interest to foreign Slavists and linguists, while the monograph (in Croatian) deals with the problems of language, society, politics, ideology, and sociolinguistics in general. Izhajajoč deloma iz osnovnih tez svoje pred kratkim izšle knjige Čiji je jezik (Čigav je jezik?) avtor podaja pregled zapletenega odnosa med jezikom, ideologijo in politiko na Hrvaškem v preteklih dveh desetletjih, vključno z novimi primeri in razčlembami. Razprava se osredotoča na vprašanja, povezana s Hrvaško, ki so lahko zanimiva za tuje slaviste in jezikoslovce, medtem ko se knjiga (v hrvaščini) ukvarja s problemi jezika, politike, ideologije in družbenega jezikoslovja na splošno.

Language, Society and Identity in Early Iceland Stephen Pax Leonard (2012) [Publications of the Philological Society, 45] London: Wiley-Blackwell. Pp. 198 ISBN 978-1-118-29496-31 IntroductionThe Icelandic language is famous for its morphological and lexical conservatism and for the dramatic success of puristic efforts in modern times. Iceland is also noted for the intensity and continuity of its written tradition starting in the twelfth century CE. The first written records, from the 12th century A.D., postdate by only a few hundred years what has been thought - notwithstanding a few potentially older archaeological finds - to be essentially the first human settlement of the island, by settlers from Norway (many coming via the British Isles) in the 9th century A.D.A similarly striking but less discussed feature of Icelandic is the nearly complete lack of dialectal variation observable in the modern language or in the 900-year written record, although Icelandic's closest living relatives, Norwegian and Faroese (the latter reflecting another insular settlement from a similar time period), show substantial variation. Stephen Pax Leonard sets out to explain the unity of the Icelandic language, as an instance of 'the problem of accounting for linguistic homogeneity ... in a tabula rasa situation' (52). He mentions a partial analogue in the much later New Zealand English (71) (cf. e.g. Trudgill, Gordon, Lewis and MacLagan, 2000), which shows little dialectal variation, although New Zealand had more continuous immigration and social stratification than early Iceland and an indigenous Maori population.The second goal of Leonard's study is to reconstruct the role of language in the establishment of social and political structures and the emergence of an Icelandic linguistic identity. In this context, he addresses a few specific areas, such as Icelandic social and legal structures and associated vocabulary (91-115), the terms donsk tunga 'Danish tongue' and norrae na 'Norse' as language labels (121-124), pronoun use in legal texts (128-136) and spatial reference (136-143). Leonard has published separate articles on some of these topics.He takes care to distinguish this early Icelandic linguistic identity from a 'national' identity in the modern sense, emphasizing that 'any notion of statehood at the time is likely to have been based on the single person of the monarch' (102). Although Iceland's famous kinglessness until the union with Norway in 1262 suggests a different type of identity formation, the degree to which this can be viewed as 'national' is a discussion which Leonard carefully sidesteps.The conservatism of the Icelandic language and the long written tradition, with an emphasis on the medieval heritage, are central to Icelandic national identity in modern times (as summarized by Leonard on p. 11). He says 'the dialectal homogeneity of Icelandic became subsequently an identity factor in itself' (32) without specifying when this occurred. The work is in implicit dialogue with the modern discourse of linguistic purism and identity in Iceland. Leonard strives to avoid anachronism by focusing on the early period, but the relationship with the modern situation is also interesting. It is refreshing to see the subject treated by a non-Icelander with respect for Icelandic culture but some distance from the ideology.2 Reasons for Icelandic homogeneityAccording to Leonard (88), a decisive factor in the unity of Icelandic is the settlement pattern of isolated farmsteads, unlike the villages which emerged in Norway and the Faroes (cf. also Helgi Guðmundsson, 1977:319). In addition to ecological circumstances, formation of towns was deterred by the anti-vagrancy law vistarband ('obligation for annual farm employment') which originated during the commonwealth period (930-1262 A.D.) and lasted into the nineteenth century (Einar Laxness, 1995:vol. 3, 130-132); it required those who did not own sufficient property to qualify as independent farmers to affiliate themselves with larger farms as tenant farmers or seasonal workers. …

This article offers an integrational linguistic critique of the way in which the notions of linguistic diversity and language loss/death are theorised within orthodox linguistics. The fundamental issue concerns the ontological status of languages. While orthodox approaches take the existence of separately identifiable languages or language varieties (lects) as a foundational theoretical postulate even in the absence of any consistent definitional criteria, from an integrational perspective languages are nothing more than second-order metalinguistic abstractions from actual language practices. Consequently, any theory of first-order linguistic diversity based on the enumeration of individual languages is automatically suspect. Furthermore, since languages do not exist as ontological realia, it cannot be the case that linguistic diversity is declining due to language loss. To suppose otherwise rests on a conflation of the linguistic and the metalinguistic, a failing endemic to orthodox linguistics. The discussion concludes by offering an integrational view on some of the epistemological and language-political issues which commonly surface in discussions of linguistic diversity and language loss.

Contemporary globalized society is characterized by mobility and change, two phenomena that have a direct impact on the broad linguistic landscape. Language proficiency is no longer seen as a monolithic phenomenon that occurs independently of the linguistic repertoires and trajectories of learners and teachers, but rather shaped by uneven and ever-changing competences, both linguistic and cultural. In the European context, research conducted over the past 20 years in multilingual realities of local communities and societies has brought to the forefront the notion of plurilingualism, which is opening up new perspectives in language education. In North American academia, the paradigm shift from linguistic homogeneity and purism to heteroglossic and plurilingual competence in applied linguistics has been observed in the emergence of such concepts as disinventing languages, translanguaging, and code-meshing. Starting from a historical perspective, this article examines the shared principles upon which such innovative understandings of linguistic competence are based. In particular, it investigates the specificity of plurilingualism as an individual characteristic clearly distinct from multilingualism in the light of different theoretical lenses. The author discusses the potential of such vision together with its implications. Finally, this article offers pedagogical implications for English language education in the North American context, and suggests ways to investigate the new active role that English language learners and teachers can adopt in shaping their process of learning English.

Contemporary TESOL methodologies have been characterized by compartmentalization of languages in the classroom. However, recent years have seen the beginning signs of paradigmatic change in TESOL methodologies that indicate a move toward plurilingualism. In this article, the author draws on the case of Hong Kong to illustrate how, in the past four decades, deep-rooted ideologies of linguistic purism combined with dominant TESOL knowledge claims have made it difficult to develop locally appropriate methodologies. She outlines the innovative work of some teachers who build up plurilingual pedagogies in content classrooms despite these difficulties, and on this basis proposes suggestions for future work.

It is often claimed that France is a particularly purist country; the Académie française is seen to be representative of a purist outlook and popular works such as Étiemble's attack on English influence Parlez vous franglais? (Étiemble, 1964) have served to bolster this view. However, this claim has not been empirically verified. In order to determine whether or not the rhetoric around purism in France matches the reality, we developed a questionnaire to investigate whether or not ordinary speakers of French in France are purist, taking the theoretical framework in George Thomas's Linguistic Purism as a base (Thomas, 1991). This questionnaire was distributed online to a random sample of participants in France. To contextualise the findings, the questionnaire was also distributed to French speakers in Quebec. The results of the study show that, contrary to expectations, the French respondents display only mild purism and the Québécois respondents are more purist in the face of English borrowings (external purism). However, the French respondents are more concerned with the structure or ‘quality’ of the French language itself (internal purism) than their Québécois counterparts. This study also highlights some problems with Thomas's framework, which requires some modification for future research.

The aim of this article is to explore the interconnection between language, linguistic human rights (LHR), and law through an analysis of the Ndebele use of isihlonipho sabafazi (women's language of respect) in a courtroom setting. Using a cultural approach to discourse as an interpretive framework, the analysis illustrates that the LHR framework is not adequately sensitive to gendered forms of language discrimination. LHR is predicated on the protection of languages of minority ethnic groups and does not take into consideration gendered intra-group differences, leading to the sidelining of intra-linguistic variation, which exposes some members of the same linguistic community to intra-linguistic discrimination. Using isihlonipho sabafazi as a case in point, the article argues that this form of language use is a type of gender discrimination that contributes to women's linguistic exclusion and social marginalization. Given that language is not only a tool for communication but also central to culture, the...

Despite numerous positive aspects of the global development of language-as-right orientation, we argue that its application is rooted in methodological nationalism, i.e. the idea of society being equal to a nationstate (Chernilo 2006), and the monoglot ideology based on the idea of one proper version of a historically and politically privileged dialect carrying the status of a language. This dominant preconception of social phenomena thus leaves many varieties in a legislative vacuum. As a consequence, language rights, often in the form of more or less mandatory legal instruments, concern only a (politically established) few. When this institutional inadequacy is paired with the existing orders of indexicality, then these varieties face marginalisation processes that render language use even more unsustainable. To address the issue of language sustainability, we analyse the language-as-right, language-as-resource and language-as-problem orientations in Croatia on the case of the Arbanasi, a community of descendants of Catholic albanophones who settled in the periphery of Zadar in the 18th century and whose group identity is marked by significant language loss. We analyse how speakers and community members themselves perceive marginalisation processes, especially concerning linguistic (in)justice that stems from the policies that hinder sustainability of Arbanasi language use in the long run.

The media have become a key site for the production and reproduction of language ideologies in modern societies. This is typically reflected in language ideological debates in 2010 in the Chinese media. In 2009, an article entitled “English ants are digging holes in the Chinese levee” got wide media coverage and aroused much controversy in the Chinese media in the following year. The crusade for linguistic purism ended with the promulgation of new regulations banning China’s media organizations and publishers from randomly mixing foreign languages with Chinese in publications. The present study aims to explore the inherent language ideologies naturalized in the debates of Chinese linguistic purism and various strategies adopted for the construction of the ideologies. The findings reveal that the ideology of “one nation and one language” and standard language ideology play an important role in the sociolinguistic imagination of a homogeneous Chinese society and protection of “pure” Chinese against English invasion. It is hoped that the present study will contribute to language ideology studies and shed new light on Chinese sociolinguistic studies.

The second half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence in Québec of a number of societies for the protection or promotion of the French language. Since the 1990s, new societies have increasingly been established online, with older ones also creating an online presence. Most of these societies publish journals which appear several times a year. An earlier study (Walsh 2013) has shown that the type of metalanguage used and the major preoccupations reflected by these societies on their websites and in their journals can be seen to reflect a moderately purist attitude (based on the theoretical framework for evaluating and measuring purism outlined by George Thomas 1991). This article presents the results of a similar investigation of a sample of chroniques de langage, columns dealing with questions of language, which appear regularly in journals and newspapers. The content and metalanguage of chroniques from two periods (1880–1889 and 1940–1949) will be compared, to determine whether the current-day purism displayed by Québécois language societies is reflected in an earlier period.

An informal organisation that is becoming quite influential in the spread of Italian in Italy, as well as abroad, is the Accademia della Crusca which began its activities during the Renaissance, under quite different auspices. Founded in Florence in 1582–1583, this Academy was inspired by the theories of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian who felt that the best models for literary works were those of the old Tuscan writers of the Trecento. In 1590 its members set out to select and define the words and norms in the works of the great Tuscan writers, especially in Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. This project led to the compilation of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612), the first modern language dictionary. It was produced to provide the models of the literary language: a rationale due to the paradoxical condition of Italian, a language with a great literature but without a nation state. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Accademia exercised an editorial role on the linguistic qualities of literary texts for publication, based on the puristic distinction between those forms and words which could be included, and those considered impure which were to be excluded. The last Presidents have secured for the Accademia the new role of leader of national awareness on issues of corpus and status planning with regard to the contemporary Italian language, both in Italy and abroad. In addition, they have engaged the Accademia for the first time in language-planning activities, sometimes in support of Italian in Italy, sometimes in defence of Italian in Europe.

This article analyses language insertion as a bilingual communicative practice, applying a functional, speaker-focused approach to the study of sociolinguistics and language contact. The article is based on a study of contact phenomena in a formerly diglossic region in Northern Germany, where the previously spoken language – Low German – is in the process of being replaced by the dominant standard variety, German. It examines regional publications in order to establish the linguistic techniques by which Low German elements are incorporated into the Standard German texts and the communicative purposes that they serve. The paper concludes that in the process of language shift an emblematic repertoire from Low German is created which can be applied into the dominant contact language, German, for specific communicative purposes.

The Travel Diary of N. Demidoff is a valuable source of observations of the process of penetration into Russian of foreign onomasticon because it is both written in view of its publication, thus respecting certain rules of language, and at the same time it is a travel diary, reflecting the peculiarities of the conversational speech of that time. The abundance of foreign proper names and other international words proves that the author does not adhere to the idea of linguistic purism and considers the foreign vocabulary as an opportunity to expand the representation in Russia of the overseas world. The process of linguistic interaction concerns various levels of the recipient language: phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, syntactic constructions. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the onomastic system is most permeable to the influence of foreign languages, since the proprial unit is matched with a new object and concept borrowed from another culture. This is the viewpoint, from which we will approach the analysis of proper nouns in the Travel Diary of N. Demidoff.

This article deals with language contact between a dominant standard language – German – and a lesser-used variety – Low German – in a situation in which the minoritised language is threatened by language shift and language loss. It analyses the application of Low German in forms of public language display and the self-presentation of the community in tourism brochures, focusing on bilingual linguistic practices on the one hand and on underlying discourses on the other. It reveals that top-down and bottom-up approaches to implementing Low German in public language display show a remarkable homogeneity, thus creating a regional ‘brand’. The article asks whether a raised level of visibility will in itself guarantee better chances for linguistic maintenance and survival of the threatened language.

S'ncamtho is an urban youth variety which uses Zimbabwean Ndebele as its matrix language. The youth language has had influences on the Ndebele language over time. This article argues that Ndebele benefits from S'ncamtho, its urban youth variety in terms of vocabulary although efforts at linguistic purism often moderate this contribution. The article avers that S'ncamtho terminology creates synonyms and polysemy in some cases whereby S'ncamtho lexis become as popular as the Ndebele counterpart and in some cases the S'ncamtho lexemes are more popular. The article goes on to evaluate the treatment of popular S'ncamtho terminology in the only Ndebele monolingual dictionary Isichazamazwi seSiNdebele (ISN) and gives recommendations on standardising some S'ncamtho terminology in Ndebele. The article is motivated in part by the debate that arose after the S'ncamtho term for prostitute umahotsha was included in a grade seven (primary school) examination. However, looking closely at S'ncamtho and Ndebele it is not linguistically and socially possible for S'ncamtho and Ndebele to share space and speakers and remain independent of each other’s influences on the other.

Minority-language planning and efforts to revitalise endangered languages have been criticised for following a model of language planning common to majority languages, i.e. promoting a prescriptive standard which reproduces hierarchies and hegemonies and diminishes linguistic diversity. An alternative is the concept of ‘polynomic’ languages, a pluralistic model of language without a single prestige variety or functional distinctions. This model is used in the teaching of Corsican. Research into the indigenous language variety of Guernsey reveals ‘folk linguistic’ acceptance of a regional variation as a source of richness, which suggests that a polynomic approach might be applicable. At the same time, notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are ingrained from Western-style education. Linguistic purism is also on the increase in reaction to perceptions of language change. This paper compares language planning in Guernsey and Corsica in the light of these challenges and discusses whether a polynomic model of language...

The book of Latin stylistics Syntaxis ornata seu de tribus Latinae linguae virtutibus (1754) deals with the three virtues of Latin — purity, refinement and richness. The attention is focused on the issues of word and sentence purity on the background of the vernacular languages of Hungary in the 18th century. The author emphasizes how to avoid lexical and syntactical barbarisms and solecisms. This paper presents the most frequent mistakes made in Latin bases on the extensive lists in the book, which also allow the investigation of the analogies and differences between classical and neo-Latin syntactic structures. Principally, these occur in the predominant use of the conjunction quod instead of ut and of infinitive forms. The grammar book is also significant from the perspective of modern philology, as it also observes the progress and reciprocal influence of the domestic — German, Hungarian and Slovak — vocabularies.

This paper discusses the relationship between entrenched beliefs about language (‘language ideologies’) and the linguistic system, and considers how conflicts between propositional and procedural knowledge about language have an effect upon the way in which language is regulated within society. It examines the epistemological foundations for drawing a distinction between language ideology and the linguistic system, and discusses the way in which the conflicting influences of these two aspects of language behaviour create the framework by which language is regulated in both academic and institutional contexts. Drawing upon critical insights provided by theoretical work in linguistic anthropology, and combining these with a philosophical consideration of language behaviour, the paper poses the question of whether there is a fundamental interdependency between patterns of entrenched belief about language and the nature of language itself. It then examines the implications of such a question for our understanding of the role that language plays in the lived experience.

This paper re-examines the notions of “linguistic purism” and “linguistic nationalism” with respect to public discourses of language cultivation in recent years in a number of Germanic-speaking countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and, briefly, Norway). In particular, the paper considers domain protection and attitudes to spelling variability and spelling reform. While in Germany linguistic nationalism and linguistic purism meet in speaker attitudes towards loanwords and spelling reform, in other Germanic-speaking countries linguistic nationalism may also take different forms, and linguistic purism may have other targets and motivations.

In a time of rapid shift and loss of smaller, regional and minority languages it becomes apparent that many of them continue to play a role as post-vernacular varieties. As Shandler (2006) points out for Yiddish in the United States, some languages serve the purpose of identity building within a community even after they have ceased to be used as a vernacular for daily communication. This occurs according to Shandler through a number of cultural practices, such as amateur theatre, music and folklore, translation, attempts to learn the language in evening classes, etc. This paper demonstrates that the paradigm developed by Shandler for Yiddish can be applied to other linguistic communities, by comparing the post-vernacular use of Yiddish with Low German in Northern Germany. It focused on the linguistic strategies that individuals or groups of speakers apply in order to participate in a post-vernacular language community.

Este artigo promove uma refl exão sobre questões sociolinguísticas pertinentes à variação e estigmatização linguística no ensino e aprendizagem de português e alemão, em comunidades bilíngues de contato alemão-português. Esta refl exão fundamenta-se nos estudos sobre bilinguismo, política linguística, variação linguística e especialmente sobre atitudes e concepções linguísticas, e discute as implicações sociais e pedagógicas dos valores e modelos de prestígio nas comunidades. Primeiramente, aborda questões relacionadas às políticas linguísticas dirigidas às línguas de imigração, particularmente, às variedades alemãs, e à formação de crenças e atitudes linguísticas. Em seguida, discute algumas implicações sociais e pedagógicas da discrepância existente entre a manutenção dos padrões linguísticos vigentes de um lado, e de outro o bilinguismo societal e a variação inter e intralingual, bem como a estigmatização linguística e atitudes e preconceitos linguísticos no ensino e aprendizagem de português e alemão. A análise aponta para confl itos identitários e educacionais que se refl etem nas atitudes de solidariedade e de distinção linguística em relação ao uso e à avaliação da variação linguística, bem como no tratamento conferido às variedades linguísticas e aos traços de fala de suas comunidades. This article promotes a refl ection about sociolinguistic questions regarding language variation and linguistic stigmatization in teaching and learning Portuguese and German, in bilingual communities with German-Portuguese contact. This refl ection is rooted in Sociolinguistics, specifi cally in studies about bilingualism, linguistic policy, language variation, and mostly in studies about linguistic attitudes and prejudices, and discusses the social and pedagogical implications of the values and models of prestige in the communities. It discusses questions regarding linguistic policy towards immigration languages, in particular German varieties, and the establishment of linguistic attitudes and beliefs. To conclude, it discusses some of the social and pedagogical implications of the existing discrepancy between maintaining current linguistic patterns on one side, and inter and intralanguage variation and social bilingualism on the other side, as well as linguistic stigmatization and linguistic attitudes and prejudices in teaching and learning Portuguese and German. The analysis points to educational and identity confl icts which are refl ected in speakers’ attitudes of solidarity or linguistic differentiation regarding the use and rating of language variation, as well as in the treatment dispensed to the linguistic features of their communities.

In the last days of March 2007, the beautiful and captivating colombian city of medellín hosted an often bland yet, on this occasion, surprisingly media-appealing event: surrounded by a generous cohort of reporters, the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language was holding its regular conference, the thirteenth since its conception in 1951. The gathering began on the twenty-first and culminated three days later, at the Teatro Metropolitano, with what could arguably be described as one of the most highly publicized events in the history of the Spanish language: the official approval of the Nueva gramática de la lengua española ‘The New Grammar of the Spanish Language’ (henceforth NGLE). The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, and the head of the Spanish monarchy, King Juan Carlos I, presided over the ceremony, providing the occasion with the solemnity (and media pull) that it so critically required. After a series of opening remarks and speeches, the king stood, faced the academicians—one from Spain, one from the Philippines, and twenty from the Americas—and, as he called their names individually, asked, “¿Aprobáis la Nueva Gramática?” ‘Do you approve the New Grammar?‘ Each in turn, with a distinguished assembly of politicians, businessmen, and publishers as witnesses, rose and answered with a simple yet unequivocal “Sí.”

This article examines how ideologies of language purism are reformatted by creating interdiscursive links across spatial and temporal scales. I trace convergences and divergences between South Asian and Quebecois sociohistorical regimes of language purism as they pertain to the contemporary experiences of Montreal's Tamil diasporas. Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils in Montreal emphasize their status differences by claiming that the former speak a modern “vernacular” Tamil and the latter speak an ancient “literary” Tamil. The segregation and purification of these social groups and languages depend upon the intergenerational reproduction of scalar boundaries between linguistic forms, interlocutors, and decentered contexts. [Tamils, Quebec, diaspora, linguistic purism, spatiotemporal scales]

Linguistic nationalism was a decisive linguistic ideology all through the nineteenth century. Consequently, by its very nature, it determined thinking about language throughout the entire period, and thus, linguistic behavior, as well. Based on metalinguistic data, this paper attempts to reconstruct the form of existence of this linguistic ideology in Hungary in the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918). The author’s aim is not to explore and contrast the various prominent and less prominent individual views of the period but rather to reconstruct and explain the general, collective system of ideas and values that underlies their apparent multiplicity and which is more or less constant throughout the period at hand. The paper hence wishes to contribute to a significant and neglected domain of historical sociolinguistics, the recognition of the history of linguistic awareness.