Suchergebnisse

Forschungen zu Linguistic Landscapes stellen ein relativ junges Feld der Soziolinguistik dar, das sich der Präsenz geschriebener Sprache im öffentlichen Raum widmet. Grundlegend für die Etablierung dieser Forschungsrichtung war der Aufsatz von Landry & Bourhis (1997), der sowohl die Bezeichnung Linguistic Landscapes einführte (LL) als auch den Forschungsgegenstand definierte [.] Ausgehend von Landry & Bourhis widmeten sich zahlreiche Studien der LL aus den verschiedensten thematischen Perspektiven, unter denen Mehrsprachigkeit, Minderheitensprachen, Sprachideologie, Kommodifizierung und Tourismus eine zentrale Rolle spielten. [.] Im Folgenden soll die Bedeutung der historischen sozio-ökonomischen Entwicklung für die LL ausführlicher beschrieben werden, um so zu zeigen, dass ohne die entsprechenden sozio-ökonomischen Prozesse eine LL im modernen Sinne nicht existieren würde, womit gleichzeitig auf die Kritik an den üblicherweise urbanen Erhebungsorten eingegangen wird. Im Anschluss daran soll eine kurze Darstellung der historischen Konfliktlagen der häufigsten Zielregionen von LL-Studien aufzeigen, in welcher Weise diese die LL-Perspektive möglicherweise einseitig geprägt haben. Die Präsenz vergleichbarer Strukturen in fast allen Forschungsregionen von LL-Studien wird ebenfalls aufgezeigt und die sich daraus ableitende Problematik für die Auswahl neuer Forschungsorte und -themen beschrieben. ; This paper introduces Linguistic Landscape research as a field of sociolinguistic. Its foundations going back to the late 1990s, Linguistic Landscape studies focuses on the presence of written language in public space and its political, economic and societal meaning – often touching on the relationship of minority and majority languages. I will present the historical foundations of Linguistic Landscapes and present applications of Linguistic Landscape research. Within this context I will also address methodological and theoretical issues and problems such as the implications deriving from the definition of the basic unit of analysis (sign) or the missing differentiation of the term "minority" (allochtonous vs. autochtoneous).

The term "minority" mainly refers to ethnicity and group size without taking into account that the groups referred to as minoritarian may show structural similarities and differences that allow their grouping along specific parameters. In this paper I will show that historical and present political and socio-cultural influences have an impact on the shape of the minorities of Armenia. The relevant parameters identified in this paper allow both to group minorities along similarities and, at the same time, account for their special structure and their future prospects.

AbstractThe Republic of Armenia is for the most part an ethnically homogenous country. According to the 2011 census, the share of ethnic minorities is about 1.9 percent of the population, comprising eleven registered minorities and at least two additional groups, namely the Udi and Tat refugee minorities. This article examines the different values that ethnic minorities of Armenia assign to language in the process of identity construction. Despite their cultural and religious diversity, the ethnic minorities of Armenia have a feature in common: none of the groups originates from the territory of the present-day Republic of Armenia, and in each instance immigration occurred under Tsarist or Soviet rule. Various social and historical factors related to migration condition the relevance of language for individual ethnic minorities. In some cases, these factors also influence collective self-perception in a way that is inconsistent with actual language practices and actual linguistic competence. The present article is descriptive in nature and aims at characterizing the role that language plays in identity construction by minority groups within a predominantly mono-ethnic country.

Sociolinguistic questionnaires often concentrate on the documentation of linguistic practices without considering in details the cultural context into which these linguistic practices are embedded. A cultural linguistics approach to the documentation of language takes a wider perspective including the socio-cultural and the socio-economic aspects of a group in order to design an explanatory background for sociolinguistic data and in order to parameterize corresponding questionnaires. This article discusses some crucial aspects of this approach that are also relevant to a more comprehensive documentation of the linguistic practices of a language community. I will use data stemming from the project Minorities of Armenia–a Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Survey to illustrate this approach allowing a comparative description of minorities within the frame of a more or less homogeneous majority society.

The article addresses both theoretical and methodological issues related to the documentation of ethnic minorities in present-day Armenia. Normally, Armenia is regarded as a prototypical example for a statehood that is marked for a homogenous ethnic composition. In fact, social groups typically referred to as 'minorities' constitute only some 2% of the total population. The minority map of Armenia includes fourteen groups two of which (Tats and Udis) represent migrants and refugees from Azerbaijan having arrived in Armenia as late as 1990. The documentation of the minorities in Armenia calls for a reconsideration of parameters of ethnicity and for the corresponding adjustment of methodology and descriptive patterns reflecting the peculiarities of ethnicity in Armenia. Most importantly, we cannot apply a unified, mono-dimensional perspective starting, e.g., from a parameter, such as 'language'. Rather, we have to set up a weighted network of parameters that include both sociocultural and sociolinguistic features. The paper briefly illustrates this point with the help of preliminary data stemming from fieldwork related to the project "Minorities of Armenia: A Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Survey". It will be argued that the social construction of collective identity and ethnicity is controlled by both tendencies of growing self-awareness and likewise trends toward transcultural processes present especially in the diatopic and diastratic periphery of the given minorities.