What do minority languages mean? European perspectives

Abstract

Minority language" as a notion emerged in scientific and legal discourse in the last decades of the twentieth century.Its definition has never been clear and looking at how it is used in discourse, it becomes obvious that its meaning is context-dependent.This Multilingua issue is dedicated to the investigation of what it means to designate a language as a minority language in the twenty-first century in Europe. ContextInvestigating the use of "minority language" in scientific and legal texts in European contextswhether focusing on language use, transmission, policies, education or any other specific aspectreveals an important web of other expressions used to refer to the languages in question.For instance, next to "minority language", we may find "lesser used language", "community language", "regional language", "local language" or "heritage language".Depending on the context they are used in, these items share various semantic relations: synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy.Overall, it seems the meaning of each of these notions is always determined in discourse by the actual "name giver" (Tabouret-Keller 1997) 1 : with each speech act, a name may carry a new meaning.The speaker may use in discourse "minority language" or any other notion of the paradigm the way he or she

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.