Suchergebnisse

In this chapter, I will present an analysis of how a Southern Sámi identity is performed in our late modern society, first and foremost how this identity is expressed through the use—or omittance—of the Southern Sámi language. It has been pointed out that it is more or less a miracle that Southern Sámi is still a living language. In my chapter, I will try to demonstrate how some sociocultural and political factors through history have inhibited the use of this language, while other factors have supported—directly or indirectly—the transmission of this linguistic repertoire from one generation to another. The master story of the Southern Sámi language and culture is intimately connected to the general 'climate of opinion' when it comes to minority–majority relations in Norway. The position of the Sámi population today has in several ways been fundamentally changed, compared with how the Sámi were regarded by the Norwegian majority population well into the twentieth century, as a lesser and inferior people. Some of the main aspects of my analysis will be related to contrasts like stigma versus pride, tradition versus modernity—as these values are attached to the Sámi culture. ; publishedVersion ; Copyright © 2019, The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The aim of this book is to investigate and attain new insights on how and to what extent the wider sociolinguistic context of language use and contact impinges on formal grammatical structures. The papers contained in the book approach this important problem from various points of view by focusing on language evolution and change, on multilingualism, language mixing and dialect variation, on spoken language, and on creole languages. Given the theoretical perspectives, methodological focus, and analyses, the book will be of interest to theoretical linguists as well as sociolinguists, from undergraduate students to researchers.

In this paper, I argue that linguistics is a historical science in more than one sense: Not only is the object, language, embedded in time, but so is the study of it. This has consequences for our conception of language change. A central result of previous sociolinguistic analyses of spoken Copenhagen Danish, starting with Brink & Lund 1975, is that during the latter half of the 19th century the common European low back vowel (a) was differentiated in the Copenhagen speech community into at least four different vowel qualities all of them bearing both linguistic and sociolinguistic information.