Nota Bene - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2024

The first issue of Nota BeNe explores the phenomena of evolution and revolution in language science and in language use. Linguistics has evolved over time, making it the versatile discipline it is today, and the field should continue to remain open to new perspectives and critically consider old habits and new approaches. Revolution, peaceful or violent, may emerge when it comes to questions of language, power and identity. The four thematic contributions in this volume discuss questions of evolution and revolution from different angles: by investigating attitudes on language change expressed in Austrian newspapers, by considering Francophone Belgian pupils’ performances in a popular national dictation contest, by unravelling the various denominations used in different domains to refer collectively to Canada’s First Nations, and by discussing to what extent a Dynamic Approach to language could be a more beneficial approach than the commonly adopted static perspective.

Letters to the editors of daily newspapers are often used to criticize linguistic phenomena. This paper presents an analysis of the language criticism in letters to the editors of three Austrian daily newspapers (Kronen Zeitung, Kleine Zeitung, and Die Presse), focusing on the argumentative topoi used in letters expressing negative attitudes towards the linguistic phenomena discussed. The analysis includes letters on two examples of natural language change (anglicisms, teutonisms) and on two cases of imposed language change (gender-fair language, political correctness). It is shown that while a number of topoi are used in both cases (mainly general topoi that consider any language change as bad), there are also a number of specific topoi especially in the case of imposed language change, typically claiming that most people are against those changes and that we have other, more important problems to worry about than making the language gender-fair or politically correct.

La dictée du Balfroid is a very popular dictation contest in French-speaking Belgium. Since its first edition in 1988, thousands of children in the 6th year of primary school have taken part in this event, which meets a large media audience.

In this article, we analyze a corpus of some 11,000 dictations produced during this championship. We focus on orthographic variation and phoneme-grapheme correspondences, particularly for context-sensitive graphemes such as c or g.

Over the last few years, the native peoples of Quebec have begun rejecting the general designations Indiens and Amérindiens widely used until recently to refer to them. Since the early 2000s, several events (such as the Idle No More movement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) have brought the sociopolitical issues of First Nations to the forefront in Quebec and Canada. Since these tipping points, as part of an empowerment process, indigenous peoples have expressed a preference for the general denominations autochtones and Membres des Premières Nations. The choice of a denomination stems from an attempt to acquire symbolic capital by the dominated groups. This paper offers a linguistic contribution to the understanding of this phenomenon by studying the evolution of denominations through various corpuses: legal texts, history textbooks, dictionaries, and the written press.

As opposed to static approaches, the dynamic approach (DA) emphatically distances itself from the routinised use of the concept of language (as in the English, French or Quechua language), the sole reliance on the dichotomised model of language history explained by vertical change (the Stammbaum approach) and horizontal change (the contact approach), and the eccentrification of creole language emergence. The notion of a DA to language surfaced at several points in time, reaching two climaxes, namely the advent of Wave Theory (Schmidt 1872) and the incorporation of variation in the machinery of a modular approach to grammar (Bailey 1973; Bickerton 1971; Seuren 1982). In a nutshell, the DA advocates for the polylectal nature of linguistic competence (in the transformationalist/generative semantic sense), the fluid nature of language variation over time and space, as well as for the notions of functionality and the Principle of Semantic Transparency as guiding forces throughout the history of languoids.

In this article, the basic tenets of this approach are outlined, embedded in a historical frame within the advent of Generative Semantics and variation-centred approaches to language. These tenets are illustrated with case studies from languoids used in Northwestern Amazonia, Balgo in Western Australia, as well as Senegambia in West Africa.