Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 36, Issue 2, 2012

The last recorded native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777. Since the nineteenth century, amateur scholars have made separate attempts to reconstruct its written remains, each creating a different orthography. Later, following recognition under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2002, Cornish gained new status. However, with government support came the governmental framework of “New Public Management”, which emphasises quantifiable outcomes to measure performance. This built implicit pressure towards finding a single standard orthography, for greatest efficiency. There followed a six-year debate among supporters of the different orthographies, usually quite heated, about which should prevail. This debate exemplified the importance of standardisation for minority languages, but its ultimate conclusion saw all sides giving way, and expediency, not ideology, prevailing. It also showed that standardisation was not imposed explicitly within language policy, but emerged during the language planning process.

Given their internationalization and their dependence on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympic Games provide good evidence of linguistic usages in the field of sport and constitute a preferred domain for the lexical study of anglicisms, since, although French is one of the official languages of the Olympic Games, the discourse of sport generally relies on English. Representative of this tendency, the work of journalists examined here displays a variety of lexical strategies. A linguistic analysis of two Olympic sports, athletics and swimming, seems to show that sport is inextricably linked to a particular structural discourse whose tenor is regularly conveyed by journalists. Beyond linguistic barriers, it seems that the perceived nature of sport leads to the privileging of anglicisms which command unquestioned acceptance much as the values of sport do — themselves generally taken for granted without discussion.

The constitutions and legislative statutes of the fifty states in the United States are given an exhaustive screening to identify legal language defining the linguistic obligations of the state and the language rights of individuals and groups. The author suggests that in the United States, “hands-off” is good language policy not only nationwide but also statewide because states adopting a hands-off linguistic policy are consistent with the Constitution of the United States while states adopting a “hands-on” policy are in conflict with it. States adopting hands-on language legislation in their constitutions or statutes are deemed to be “nativist” because they seem unfavorable toward speakers of minority languages, while states adopting a hands-off policy are “non-nativist” because they seem favorable (or at least neutral) toward speakers of minority languages.

The present investigation brings to light some of the changes associated with the use of English and Spanish in the US Catholic Church. The first part is an examination of the process of officialization from a historical perspective, acknowledging the impact of some groups or associations in the use of vernacular languages within the Church. The second part examines the role of acculturation during this process of officialization; and the final section analyzes the use of inclusive language in the Church, as an attempt to have a more gender-balanced institution. These three elements serve to provide a more complete perspective of the reality, expansion, revitalization and maintenance of the Spanish language in the United States. The article also reveals some of the language planning policies (direct and indirect) that have made an impact on the use of Spanish within US Catholicism.

Esperanto seems to share several basic characteristics with minority languages. Tendencies regarded as basic features of the Esperanto community, such as voluntariness, non-ethnic composition, non-territorial distribution or the “internal idea” can be observed also among minority languages. It can thus be argued that phenomena and tendencies that can be observed in the case of Esperanto are even clearer or more pronounced in the case of the (other) minority languages, and vice versa. The two can function as “mirrors” for one another. Not only their aims to promote multilingualism, but also the current opportunities and problems that these strikingly similar linguistic communities face, appear to make cooperation useful and open new prospects for comparative research.