Suchergebnisse

Russian Federation, being de jure and de facto linguistically diverse multilingual country, can be described, at the same time, as being under a strong influence of monolingual language ideology, with Russian totally domineering in most public spheres. Minority languages and especially languages of migrants lack official recognition and support, and their speakers often have to face prejudices and negative stereotypes. The paper aims at revealing language ideology prevailing in modern Russia through analysis of attitudes to languages other than Russian as they are expressed in discourse about language, i.e. metadiscourse. When approaching it, it is important to distinguish state discourse (manifestation of official language policy) and public discourse (collective attitudes towards certain sublanguages and their users expressed more or less directly). The analysis shows that over the past two decades, official language ideology in Russia has shifted from guaranteeing linguistic equality and diversity to having an emphasis on unity and purity and giving support to the Russian language. This reorientation is realized through status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning. At the level of public discourse, analysis of collective attitudes towards the languages used by non-native speakers demonstrates that a significant part of the Russian-speaking population express negative attitudes towards non-native speakers and their poor Russian language skills, which once again confirms that there is dominant monolingualism and purism in public discourse. However, language practices in Russia are gradually becoming more diverse which can become a challenge for monolingualism and purism in future.

"Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City focuses on how individuals navigate conversation in highly diversified contexts and provides a broad overview of state of the art research in urban sociolinguistics across the globe. Bearing in mind the impact of international travel and migration, the book accounts for the shifting contemporary studies to the workings of language choices of and between individuals in places where people with many different backgrounds meet and exchange ideas. It specifically addresses how people handle language use challenges in a broad range of settings to present themselves positively and meet their information and identity goals. While a speaker's experience runs like a thread through this volume, the linguistic, cultural and situational focus is as broad as possible. It runs from the language choices of Chinese immigrants to Beijing and Finnish immigrants to Japan to the use of the local lingua franca by motor taxi drivers in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, and how Hungarian students in their dorm rooms express views on political correctness uninhibitedly. As it turns out, language play, improvisation, humour, lies, as well as highly marked subconscious pronunciation choices are natural parts of the discourses, and this volume provides numerous and extensive examples of these techniques. For each of the settings discussed, the perspective is taken of personalised linguistic and extra-linguistic styles in tackling communicative challenges. This way, a picture is drawn of how postmodern individuals in extremely different cultural and situational circumstances turn out to have strikingly similar human behaviours and intentions. Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City is of interest to all those who follow theoretical and methodological developments in this field. It will be of use for upper level students in the fields of Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Linguistic Anthropology, and related fields in which urban communicative settings are the focus"--