Language Ideology, Policy, and Practice

Language Ideology, Policy, and Practice

Focus on Minoritized Languages Past and Present

Samantha M. Litty and Nils Langer (eds)

PETER LANG
Oxford - Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - New York

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024051409

Cover image: Multilingual page from the Ranzelberger Gästebuch ‘Ranzelberg Guestbook’ (112r), depicting entries from 1845 written in German, with the “Motto” in the third line appearing in North Frisian, and a direct response in Danish. Image provided by the Nordfriisk Instituut.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISSN 2296-1909

ISBN 978-1-80374-556-5 (print)

ISBN 978-1-80374-557-2 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-80374-558-9 (ePub)

DOI 10.3726/b21997

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, Oxford, United Kingdom

info@peterlang.com – www.peterlang.com

Samantha M. Litty and Nils Langer have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

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This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the editors

Samantha M. Litty is a Research Associate at the Institute for Frisian Studies and Minority Research at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, where she is leading a German Research Foundation (DFG) funded project which focuses on the historically quintolingual Duchy of Schleswig.

Nils Langer is Professor of North Frisian and Minority Studies at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. He is a founding member of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN) and studies why people get upset about how other people speak.

About the book

This book combines studies of a broad range of minority and minoritized languages from the past and present to examine the dynamics of changes in the status of language use and language perception. They address two fundamental questions of sociolinguistics, namely,

A. How is linguistic variation at speaker and/or community level structured so that certain variants and varieties have a particular indexical value whereas others do not?

and

B. What language ideologies underpin our perceptions of the linguistic world, i.e. how do we perceive the way we speak, and/or the way other people speak, and what do we do with this perception?

Chapters include discussions of a large number of languages, some of which have largely been ignored in much scholarly discussion, such as Californian Spanish, Maritime Sign Language, or Danish and Frisian in the Duchy of Schleswig, as well as marginalized varieties of bigger languages, such as Scots or Nynorsk. The chapters, many of which were presented at the 2022 HiSoN conference in Murcia, offer insights into processes of stigmatization and promotion and offer a comprehensive comparison between seemingly different case studies focused on a core set of research questions.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.