new speakers of minority languages: the challenging opportunity – foreword

8/10/2019 New speakers of minority languages: the challenging opportunity Foreword

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Bernadette ORourke*, Joan Pujolar and Fernando Ramallo

New speakers of minority languages:the challenging opportunity Foreword

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Introduction

In this special issue we examine and reflect upon the emergence o new speak-ers in the context o some o Europes minority languages. The new speakerlabel is used here to describe individuals with little or no home or communityexposure to a minority language but who instead acquire it through immersion orbilingual educational programs, revitalization projects or as adult languagelearners. The emergence o this profile o speaker draws our attention to the waysin which minority linguistic communities are changing because o globalizationand the new profiles o speakers that this new social order is creating. The con-

cept also ocuses our attention on some o the undamental principles which hador a long time been taken or granted in much sociolinguistic research and inparticular, language planning associated with linguistic revitalization (ORourkeand Pujolar 2013). The authors o the eight articles included in this issue engagewith these issues through their analyses o new speaker communities across avariety o European contexts including the Basque Country, Brittany, Catalonia,Corsica, Galicia, Ireland, the Isle o Man and Occitania.

The new speaker as a category is not o course specific to minority lan-guage contexts per se. Millions o people throughout history have learned andused language varieties other than their mother tongue, native, first oramily language. In the field o linguistics and its related strands, the newspeaker category is one which has been examined under the perhaps moreamiliar, but now increasingly contested labels such as non-native, second-language, L2 speaker, learner etc. Similar to related notions such as emer-gent bilinguals (Garca and Kleigen 2010), multilingual subjects (Kramsch

*Corresponding author: Bernadette ORourke:Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.

E-mail: [email protected]

Joan Pujolar:Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona. E-mail: [email protected]

Fernando Ramallo:Universidade de Vigo, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]

2015 ORourke et al., published by de Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative

Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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Bernadette ORourke et al.

2012), metrolingualism (Pennycook 2010), translanguaging (Creese andBlackledge 2010) and translingual practice (Canagarajah 2013), the term newspeaker and new speakerness constitute an explicit attempt to move away

rom these older labels. They thereore build on the now growing emphasis inmultilingual research to understand the new communicative order o the modernera which is characterized by new types o speakers, new orms o language andnew modes o communication. In our view, the new speaker phenomenon con-tradicts the ways in which both majorities and minorities have historically usedlanguage to legitimize claims to nationhood and cultural authenticity. Our use othe new speaker label also reflects growing critiques in multilingual research othe undamental epistemologies on which our understanding o language hasbeen based. It prompts us to query how linguistics as a discipline has partici-

pated in the reproduction o linguistic ideologies, essentially through abstractnotions o nativeness, notions which as we will discuss below, have in act beenshown to have little or no empirical basis. In minority language research, studieson language revitalization have ollowed a similar trend, and have generallyocused on native and/or heritage communities, with significantly less attentionpaid to new speaker profiles and practices (ORourke and Pujolar 2013). Whilethere are exceptions to this, there have nonetheless been ew i any attempts toexplain the entire range o variation across new speaker profiles through com-

parative theory building and research. This is despite the act that in many minor-ity language contexts, new speakers have come to constitute an important socio-linguistic group, in some cases outnumbering or replacing traditional nativespeaker communities altogether.

In the current issue we ocus specifically on Europes minority language con-texts. We do o course recognize that the new speaker phenomenon extendsbeyond these specific cases and the issues we explore also resonate with indige-nous minority languages in many other parts o the world. There are, or example,clear parallels between new speakers and heritage speakers who have a longtrajectory in minority language contexts where English is hegemonic, especiallyamongst North-American or Australian first nations. The idea o being a newspeaker could thereore be used to describe members o those speech communi-ties who relearned the language afer language shif has taken place, taking theorm o adults learning the language through ormal training, rom their eldersand/or recalling it rom childhood (see, or example, McCarty 2013). Thereore,our European ocus in this special issue, is as much circumstantial as it is as-cribed and reflects the contexts in which the new speaker phenomenon has

become a more central ocus in our individual research agendas. In this intro-duction we will contextualize the broader debates which have prompted some othis research and the types o questions that it has raised. We will also address

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Foreword

issues around defining the notion o new speaker and in doing so build on cri-tiques o the native speaker concept. In this special issue we propose a rameor a scholarly conversation which has in act been going on or some time in

other domains but which has been given less explicit attention in the context ominority language research. Through this conversation we hope to contribute tothe wider theoretical and epistemological implications o the new speaker phe-nomenon or sociolinguistics and the study o multilingualism more broadly.

Historicizing new speakers

. New speakers as emic categories

A cursory review o the literature on studies about language revitalization pointsto the predominant ocus on native and/or heritage communities. Nonetheless,we do find studies which have paid some attention to so-called non-nativespeakers (see, or example, Trosset 1986; Woolard 1989; MacCalium 2007;McEwan-Fujita 2010; ORourke 2011). Such studies have tended to examineissues around legitimacy and linguistic authority and the subsequent struggles inwhich these individuals engage in pursuit o recognition as real or authenticspeakers. These are also issues, which as we will see, are given considerableattention by many o the contributors in the current issue.

Although its use in the English-language literature is more recent,withinindividual minority language contexts themselves, the idea o newness hadalready existed and has to varying degrees been used as both academic and olkconcepts to rame the general profile o speaker we are describing here. Since theearly 1980s, the term euskaldunberri, (literally, new Basque speaker) has or in-stance been widely used in the Basque Country to reer to speakers who learnBasque through ormal instruction, including adult education and immersion

schooling inIkastolas (see Ortega et al., this issue; Urla 1993, 2012). The differingsocial backgrounds and linguistic practices o new and old speakers oBasque made language a contested territory and brought issues o linguistic legit-imacy and ownership to the ore. The inclusion o euskaldunberrias a dictionaryentryconfirms the extent to which the term has in act become naturalized into

Robert (2009) uses the term New Speaker to describe second-language speakers o Welshwho are produced through Welsh-medium education. According to the Elhuyar Hiztegia, the Basque-Spanish bilingual dictionary, the expressioneuskaldunberriis taken to mean vascoparlante cuya lengua materna no es el euskera (que lo haaprendido siendo adulto)[Basquespeaker whose mother tongue is not Basque (who has learntit as adult)] (http://www.euskara.euskadi.net/r59-15172x/eu/hizt_el/index.asp).

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everyday language and used to describe this specific profile o speaker (see alsoGatti 2007). In the same vein, in the near-neighboring region o Galicia, the termneofalanteneo or new speaker has come to be used to describe a similar type o

speaker, that is, someone who was not brought up speaking the minority lan-guage but who adopted Galician language practices as adolescents or as youngadults (see ORourke and Ramallo, this issue, 2011, 2013). The neo prefix is alsoadopted as part o a label in other contexts including Breton. Neo-brtonnantisused or example to describe Breton speakers who acquire the language throughschooling or in adulthood (see Hornsby, this issue, 2008; Timm 2010). To varyingdegrees, across these three minority language contexts such overlapping labelshave come to be used as analytical categories. At the same time, they have alsobeen adopted as sel-defining categorizations by new speakers themselves and in

some cases as derogatory labels used by other social actors to contest the legiti-macy o new speakers as real speakers.

In other minority language contexts, however, including many o those ex-plored in this issue, there is an absence o such explicit labeling. Nevertheless,issues around legitimacy and authority are by no means less relevant and havebeen touched on, and in some cases even explored empirically. In the Catalancontext, or instance, although no such label exists, issues around new speaker-ness have to varying degrees figured in Catalan sociolinguistics (see or instance

Pujolar 2007; Woolard 1989, 2011; Woolard and Frekko 2013). Woolard (1989, 2011)in act even hints at the new speaker label, through the coining o the termNew Catalans to describe second-language speakers o Catalan who adoptbilingual practices. Interestingly, in the case o Irish, where new speaker pro-files have or a long time surpassed the number o traditional native speakers(McCloskey 2001), explicit labels are also noticeably absent. Nevertheless, wefind other kinds o labelling which is used as a means o distinguishing and, attimes denigrating new profiles o speakers as in some way less authentic. Theseemingly neutral term Gaeilgeoir(literally, Irish speaker) is or example rarelyi ever used to describe a native Irish speaker but can sometimes be used as aderogatory label or new speaker profiles (see Kabel 2000; ORourke 2011).

. The political economy of new speakers

The new speaker concept and interest in issues around new speakerness haveemerged in contexts in which there has been a tradition o cultural and political

intervention in maintaining and reviving so-called regional linguistic minori-ties. An understanding o the new speaker concept thereore requires a his-toricization o the socio-political and economic conditions within which such a

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group o speakers has emerged. While their current sociolinguistic contexts pointto several differences, the minority language contexts discussed in this issue ol-lowed largely similar historical trajectories. During the modern period, speakers

o these languages became subsumed under the apparatus o a linguistically uni-fied nation-state and, as such were relegated to the socioeconomic and socio-political margins. At best they came to be categorized as speakers o regionallanguages and at worst as users o sub-standard dialects o the newly acclaimednational language. As regional languages, they were excluded rom the modern-izing influences o capitalism and liberalism and, as such provided little incen-tive or newcomers to want to learn these languages or or existing speakers tomaintain them. Regional languages and their speakers became peripheral, sub-ordinated and ofen completely invisible in public spaces. At times this invisibil-

ity was the result o explicit laws or political repression. At other times, they wereunspoken and a no policy policy (Fishman 2001: 454) maintained a status quoin which these languages and their speakers remained subordinated. As access toeducation became more widespread, the explicit exclusion o these languagesrom national education systems institutionalized the stigmatization o theirspeakers. The use o these languages gradually retreated to a shrinking rural hin-terland which up to then had been sheltered rom modernizing influencesthrough their geographical and economic isolation. In time, these remaining

communities o speakers also began to dwindle through out-migration to the ex-panding industrial cities or through emigration abroad in search o a better lie.Learning the dominant language (and as such becoming new speakers o thatlanguage) was key to availing o these new opportunities and, in the process,speakers ofen decided to abandon their own language altogether.

The emergence o language revival moments over the course o the 19th cen-tury can be seen as a reaction to nation-state nationalisms and the processes olanguage shif which such nationalisms had initiated. Language revitalizationprojects, as Urla (2012) has aptly observed in the case o Basque, were generallycharacterized by the coming together o social movements and modern govern-mentalities (Foucault 1991). Language was thus posited as an object o study andsociolinguistic change began to be planned and managed by particular socialand/or political groups, institutions and governmental agencies. These languagerevival movements generally drew upon dominant European ideologies aboutlanguage and identity, based on the premise that communities o speakers wereconventionally constructed as the constitutive bases o distinct nationalities. Inthe latter part o the 20th century, set against a backdrop o civil rights move-

ments and a push or linguistic diversity at supra-state level through the institu-tions o the European Union, Western European nation states gradually began todevelop a more amiable approach to regional minority languages. In this new

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context, these languages have been given greater recognition and to varying de-grees provisions have been put in place to promote their use and acquisition,though institutional support in education and at other societal levels. In most

cases, new speakers are the outcome o these processes, having learned the lan-guage through adult or immersion education programs.

The native speaker in linguistics and

sociolinguistics

Having historicized the political and economic conditions under which new

speakers emerged, we are then aced with the rather thorny issue o how todefine the concept itsel. Predictably, debates about what such a definition shouldlook like have emerged at the various academic ora at which the new speakerconcept has been aired. On such occasions, instinctively, the tendency has beento try to construct categorical boundaries and to delimit who should and shouldnot be included in such a definition. These more positivist analytical leanings,unwittingly perhaps, positioned us as linguistic arbiters, a role which we our-selves had explicitly set out to question. So, rather than aiming at a neatly ormu-lated definition, there was a growing consensus that the new speaker conceptneeded to be ramed as a social category which would be subject to social negoti-ation and variation, and delineated largely by new speakers themselves.

. The native speaker in linguistics

Definitional issues are, as we are too well aware, not specific to the new speakerconceptper se. The native speaker concept is equally ethereal. Similar to other

linguistic concepts, including sentence, noun, meaning etc., defining whoor what a native speaker is has remained largely inconclusive. Paikedays (1985)examination o the native speaker concept, based on responses to questionnairesand interviews with prominent linguists, confirms the general lack o consensusin defining the term, or even in the perception that such a definition was actuallynecessary. This is despite the act that the term was used to underpin generativelinguistics as expressed by Chomsky:

One way to test the adequacy o a grammar proposed or L is to determine whether or not the

sequences that it generates are actually grammatical, i.e., acceptable to a native speaker,etc. [sic] (Chomsky 2002: 13)

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Despite the absence o any explicit definition o the concept, the nativespeaker has nonetheless been presented as a model o correct language use andthe user o well-ormed sentences. Up until the advent o linguistic corpora,

native speaker practices were rarely subject to empirical analysis and so or a longtime, the authority o the native speaker had remained unquestioned. For struc-tural and generative linguistics in particular, the native speaker concept has thusserved as an abstract elicitor o the appropriate linguistic expressions that werein truth produced through linguists intuitions (Paikeday 1985). Thus, the con-cept o the native speaker has been as uzzy and undefined as other undamen-tal concepts in linguistics and, as we shall see below, quite consequential in manyareas o language planning, teaching and learning.

We would argue that the consequential uzziness o the native speaker con-

cept reveals the multiple ways in which linguistics as a discipline has drawn,albeit implicitly, on the ideals o 19th century linguistic ethnonationalism. Thehistory o the native speaker can be traced to anthropologically romantic notionswhich link nativeness to a particular community, within a particular territory,associated with an historic and an authentic past. The idea o authenticity there-ore gains its orce rom essentialism, which is based on the assumption thatsomeone can only be considered a real speaker by virtue o biology and/or cul-ture (Bucholtz 2003). The concept and ideal o the native speaker is thereore one

which the field has inherited and is deeply engrained in the way we have come tothink about language more generally (Bonfiglio 2010). Modern discourses aboutlanguage, culture and nation draw on Herder and later Humboldts ideas aboutthe origin o language (Herder 1772; Humboldt 1836). While there was the basicnotion that a specific worldview was constructed through a particular language,the work o Herder and Humboldt provided a more succinct response to Lockeanskepticism. The Herderian/Humboldtian system produced a synthesis o moder-nity and antiquarianism that legitimized newly emerging nation-states and na-tionalist movements. It also provided the basis or linguistics as a discipline,something which was epitomized by the works o Jakob Grimm (Bauman andBriggs 2003). Language came to define national collectivities, implying thetrans-historical unity o such collectivities. As such, language provided the meansthrough which their cultural potential could be reproduced. This process o cul-tural reproduction was allegedly perormed through the intergenerational trans-mission o the language rom parents to children, thus through the unbrokenlineage o amily ties, ensuring a continuity with a primordial past through thebiological transmission o the language. Thereore language came to contain and

to epitomize the essence o the nation through its native speakers. Dialectologyprovides a clear example o how linguistic authenticity was connected to a spe-cific conception o the native speaker as territorially based, as rural and tradi-

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tional (old), male and (again) through amily transmission. Thus, the nativespeaker was as much an abstraction as the nation, the people or the lan-guage, concepts that were mobilized to produce national imaginaries rather

than to describe social realities.To understand how and why linguistics could adopt such a blatantly politi-cized concept at the same time as it was staking claims to constituting an objec-tive science is beyond the scope o our present discussion. Suffice it is to say thatmodern sociolinguistics, language planning and applied linguistics inheritedmany o these basic tenets o linguistic thought. It is also worth highlighting thatthe notion o the native speaker itsel has only recently come under scrutiny, scru-tiny which only emerged because o the problems it was seen to create or re-searchers as they tried to operationalize it in empirical research and teaching

practice. Applied linguistics has, or example, a long-standing history o debatesaround issues o nativeness, particularly in relation to the teaching o English asa second or oreign language (Ammon 2000; Davies 2003). In applied linguisticsand language teaching, it is ofen placed at the centre o language curricula asdefining the target competence. It is also used to construct milestones in thelearning processes with their corresponding stages o evaluation at all levels,rom classroom-activity eedback to mass-standardized certificates. However,Davies (2003) systematic assessment o the concept suggests that native speak-

ers can only be defined through largely extralinguistic means, that is (again) associally constructed categories (see also Coulmas 1981). Nativeness has alsocome under scrutiny in debates surrounding new Englishes (Kachru 1990;Bolton and Kachru 2006; Jenkins 2006), debates which have highlighted thehistorical underpinnings o the hegemonic model o proper English, a modelwhich essentially reproduced a race-based conception o linguistic legitimacy.Phillipson (1992) highlights the political and economic connections between thisideology and the language teaching industry in his critique o the tenet o thenative speaker as a linguistic model and as the model or the ideal teacher.

. The native speaker in sociolinguistics

Interestingly, even in the more anthropological strand o sociolinguistics, thenotion o nativeness has not been explicitly problematized. This is despite theact that issues around nativeness have been the subject o ongoing debate inAnthropology or many years (Dozier 1955). However, within the Ethnography o

Communication and Interactional Sociolinguistics, certain issues have beenbrought to the ore which touch on related concepts. The notion o speech com-munity is one such concept and has been amply discussed by Gumperz (1971)

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and Hymes (1961, 1974), and is o direct consequence to issues o language-basedgroup categorization and membership. Their attempts to define the notion interms o the language or variety used, and the norms or rules o linguistic con-

duct, were always inconclusive (Wardhaugh 2011), as they were unable to recon-cile pre-defined criteria with the locally relevant processes o inclusion and exclu-sion. As Hymes (1961) puts it:

To participate in a speech community is not quite the same as to be a member o it. Here weencounter the limitation o any conception o speech community in terms o knowledgealone, even knowledge o patterns o speaking as well as o grammar, and o course, o anydefinition in terms o interaction alone. Just the matter o accent may erect a barrier betweenparticipation and membership in one case, although being ignored in another. (Hymes 1961:5051)

In an attempt to address some o these limitations, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992) adapted Lave and Wengers (1991) notion o community o practiceto provide space or more emic, locally-based and ethnographically circum-scribed language communities. Neither option is, however, relevant to all o thecases we address in this issue and it is not our intention here to argue that newspeakers orm distinct communities, be it at a local or translocal level. The ques-tion we seek to ask, however, is how and to what extent new speakers may see

themselves and/or be seen by others as legitimate participants in the speech com-munities that have been historically constituted and imagined in contexts o lan-guage revitalization. Doerrs (2009) recent collection o essays devoted to thecritical ethnographic study o native speaker effects begins to provide someanswers to this question. In her (2009) issue she explored the maniold ways inwhich the term native speaker is mobilized as a olk concept and exploredthe consequences o such mobilization across different contexts, including lan-guage education as well as minority communities such as Catalonia (Frekko2009), Ikageng in South Arica (Baker 2009), Yukatek Maya speakers (Whiteside2009) and Easter Island (Makihara 2009).

. New speakers in sociolinguistics

This then provides the general socio-political, economic and indeed ideologicalcontext in which new speakers o Europes minority languages have recentlyemerged. This is also the context in which sociolinguistics as a discipline has

participated in the design o language planning paradigms, including its modes oassessment and measurement o language practices and categories o speakers. Itis perhaps no coincidence that the counting o languages and sociolinguistic

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1992) together with hegemonic notions o languages as separate codes and asdefining group belonging. In contexts as divergent as Catalonia and the Isle oMan, historically, sociolinguists for language revivalhave been involved in assess-

ing and promoting language planning efforts devoted to the protection and ex-pansion o communities o minority language speakers. Native speakers havegenerally been at the core o such efforts. Fishman (1991) defines his blueprint orlinguistic revival basically as a process o reconstruction o the community onative speakers.

We would thereore argue that the emergence o new speakers as a salientsocial and demographic reality prompts us to query the undamental assump-tions on which much research and planning on European linguistic minoritieshas been based. The predominantly unctionalist perspective inherent in this and

other approaches used to explain the process o language shif, have, as Williams(1992) suggests, ignored power relations and conflict in language contact situa-tions. These models have been unable to adequately explain the apparent devia-tions rom the sociolinguistic status quo displayed by the emergence o newspeakers (see ORourke and Ramallo, this issue). Neither could such approachesaccount or the uzzier in-between spaces o linguistic practice characterized bythe more hybridized and ofen multiple identities (see Martin-Jones et al. 2012;Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 1994, 2007) which as this issue will show, are encap-

sulated in new speaker profiles. The native speaker community has been ideal-ized as speakers o the most authentic orm o language leading to a preserva-tionist rhetoric (Pennycook 2010: 105) with an exoticizing and romanticizing viewo local people locked in time (Cameron 2007). Sociolinguists or language revivalin effect draw on salvage linguistics, which like salvage anthropology havesought to preserve indigenous cultures and languages and especially to recon-struct an earlier moment in history (Bucholz 2003: 400). However, in doing sorevival sociolinguistics suffers rom a number o contradictions:

a) On the one hand, it positions native speakers as legitimate representatives o a givencommunity. On the other hand, there is a realization that non-native speakers are also re-quired to learn and use the language to effectively reverse the processes o language shif.b) Sociolinguistics endeavors to keep the language pure and intact while at the same timesupports modernization and standardization strategies which ofen stigmatize the tradi-tional orms o language (and their speakers) on which they based their models o purity inthe first place.c) At the same time, the ideals o linguistic purity and uniormity also run contrary to newspeaker communities which are characterized by diversity and multilingual practices.

Sociolinguistics are thus aced with the widely-recognized epistemologicalquandary o how to assert the value o mixed or plural identities in minority

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societies in which the attempt to escape relations o dominance places a highpremium on declarations o absolute difference and clear-cut boundaries (Jaffe1993: 101) and ollowing a somewhat similar line o thought, as Bucholtz (2003)

points out:

The committment to study those who have been relegated to the margins o modern struc-tures o power stands as one o the most potent ethical principles o sociolinguistics. But thepositing o authenticy as the prerequesite or serious scholarly attention ofen works to un-dermine the principle by designating some language users but not others as legitimate rep-resentatives o a given community. In addition, a sociolinguistics ounded on authenticitymust ace the problem o essentialism. (Bucholtz 2003: 400)

The contradictions presented to us as researchers in the field are as we will

show, also experienced by social actors at different levels. In Ireland, Brittany andOccitania, or instance, an old generation o native speakers ofen challengethe legitimacy o new speakers as members o the community. In Galicia, newspeakers themselves eel uncertain about their status and the adequacy o theGalician they speak, despite the act that old speakers usually regard them aslinguistic models o correctness (ORourke and Ramallo 2013). In all o these con-texts, the division between old and new speakers are not just characterized bytheir language learning trajectories, but by their social profiles, the old being

generally peasants located in declining rural areas and the new being middle-class urban dwellers whose amilies recently adopted the dominant language.Thus the contradictions are not just linguistic, but instead affect the ways inwhich linguistics was thus ar mobilized to characterize legitimate linguisticpractices and speaker status, which in turn affect the ways in which sociolinguis-tics re-affirm the objectives o revitalization agendas and the methods o languageplanning set out in such agendas.

New speakers of minority languages:the individual case studies

The authors o the eight articles included in this issue engage with these ques-tions through their analyses o new speaker communities across a variety o mi-nority language contexts including Corsican (Jaffe), Manx ( hIearnin), Basque(Ortega et. al.), Breton and Yiddish (Hornsby), Galician (ORourke and Ramallo),Irish (ORourke and Walsh), Occitan (Costa) and Catalan (Pujolar and Puigde-vall). However, as will become apparent rom a reading o individual articles, theanswers to these questions are not always the same. What are classified as old

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or native speakers in one context sometimes show marked differences in othercontexts, and the same can be said o new speakers. In some o the minoritylanguage contexts presented in this issue the new speaker label has come to

be used as an analytical category. In others, it has even been adopted as a sel-defining category by new speakers themselves. Sometimes the term serves as aderogatory label to contest the legitimacy o new speakers as real speakers. Inother minority language contexts, while no explicit label exists, issues aroundlegitimacy and authority are no less relevant. Speakers within individual mi-nority language contexts ofen draw on different sources o legitimacy, which inturn produce contrasting effects on native and new speaker relations. On theone hand, such relations are affected by the socieconomic status o each group ospeakers and on the other, by the orms o linguistic capital they possess (e.g.

how different generations gained access to literacy in each language).In the first article in this issue, Jaffe explores the diverse trajectories o

Cosican language learners. Her discussion points to the complex issues aroundidentity construction amongst such learners as new speakers o Corsican. Sheexamines emerging issues around legitimacy, authority and authenticity in asociolinguistic context in which both ormal/institutional and inormal/socialuse o Corsican is restricted. New speakers o Corsican, as Jaffe shows, are othemselves a very diverse group. This diversity is apparent in their motivations or

learning the language, their social backgrounds and political alignments, andtheir commitment to the process o revitalization more generally. Thereore,learners can only become new speakers by producing their own set o new con-texts o language use and their own standards o perormance. However, as Jaffealso shows, Corsican language teachers become important agents in the creationo these new contexts and the production o a new type o Corsicanness whichsteers clearly away rom the ideals o localism, tradition, nationalism and linguis-tic purity.

hIearnins examination o the Manx context provides us with an exampleo where a native speaker community no longer exists. He traces the way in whichin the absence o native speaker models, the more active members o the Manxrevitalization movement become the new linguistic role models. These newspeakers are awarded authority on the basis o their perceived linguistic expertiseand their participatory role in the events and networks that construct a sense ocommunity. Such a community may even include people who display little orno actual use o the language as a conventional means o communication. Caseso extreme language shif such as the case o Manx, provide evidence that lin-

guistic legitimacy and authenticity do not stem rom the seeminlgy intrinsic prop-erties inherent to the languages or its native speakers, but are instead derivedrom groups which have the ability to construct and claim legitimacy.

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The situation becomes more complex when conventional native speakersand new speakers constitute, and are perceived as, relatively distinct groups.Where this occurs, tensions ofen emerge between the two. New speakers can

come to endow native speakers with a higher claim to linguistic authenticityand ownership by virtue o having acquired the language through amily trans-mission. The articles on Galician (ORourke and Ramallo), Basque (Ortega et al.),and Irish (ORourke and Walsh) all illustrate this general trend. In the cases oBreton (Hornsby) and Occitan (Costa) these tensions are elevated to antagonisticlevels between the two groups.

Ortega et al.s interviews with new speakers o Basque reveal that suchspeakers generally accord greater legitimacy and authenticity to native speakers.However, this becomes diluted amongst those new speakers who report more re-

quent use o Basque, a trend which ORourke and Walsh also idenfity in the Irishcontext. Costa documents developments in the long-standing eud amongst pro-ponents o Occitan where traditionalist activists have contested the authority oestablished academic Occitanists and their proposed standard. The largely rural-based traditionalist activists consisting o traditional native speakers, tend to usedialectal orms o Occitan and perceive standard Occitan as artificial. Con-versely, urban new speakers o Occitan increasingly adhere to what Costa calls apost-vernacular culture that reinterprets tradition as a component o contem-

porary global liestyles. In the case o Breton, Hornsby shows that the conflictrevolves around linguistic purity, with new speakers allegedly presenting evi-dence o intererences rom French that are perceived by native speakers as de-eating the purpose o linguistic preservation.

In Galicia, as ORourke and Ramallo have shown elsewhere (see ORourkeand Ramallo 2013), native speakers (mostly rural, Spanish-literate) have a highregard or new speakers (mostly urban, middle-class) who acquired literacyin standard Galician, something that they had not done. In this context, newspeakers are positioned and indeed position themselves as political vanguardsor language revitalization efforts, and as a group purposely and consciouslyact as agents o social change. In their contribution to this issue, ORourke andRamallo look specifically at how new speakers o Galician construct themselvesas agents o social change. In the Galician and other minority language contexts,new speakers ofen take on an activist role, showing a strong sense o responsibil-ity towards ensuring the uture survival o the language, as well as a clear com-mitment to what they perceive as a situation o social and political injustice.ORourke and Ramallo show that through their commitment to the language

cause, new speakers o Galician may reflect similar stances to other types o activeminorities including environmentalists and eminist movements.

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In the final article in this issue, Pujolar and Puigdevall look at the case oCatalan. This is a context which is characterized by relatively fluid boundariesbetween old and new speakers. This fluidity is probably made possible by the act

that in Catalonia, there is an almost simultaneous acquistion o Catalan andSpanish and, as Pujolar and Puigdevall observe, in everyday interaction the dis-tinction is o little relevance as large numbers o people routinely use the twolanguages to different degrees. They ocus their analysis on the process wherebypeople develop the ability to speak Catalan in contexts outside the classroom.They put orward the notion o mudato describe the specific biographical junc-tures that mark repertoire changes over the lie o an individal speaker. This mudausually occurs through the adoption o the other language in specific socialmilieus and with particular people. The authors also point to the varied strategies

Spanish speakers develop to be accepted as speakers o Catalan in everyday lie.

Concluding remarks

In this issue, our aim has been to raise awareness about the contradictionsbrought about by the emergence o new profiles o minority language speakers.We would argue that these contradictions are markedly different rom the tradi-

tional division which tended to be ormed along ethnolinguistic lines, particu-larly between majority and minority language speakers. New speakers thus createa division within the minority language group itsel, a division which unsettlesestablished ideologies around language and identity. Philology, dialectology andsociolinguistics have been intimately involved in the production o a legitimateminority linguistic space and, as such are also caught up in such contradictions.On the one hand, these disciplines have enhanced the prestige o minority lan-guages through support or standardization and normalization, processes romwhich new speakers are in many ways the outcome. On the other hand, through apredominat ocus on native speaker communities, analyses o issues around newspeakerness have been at best patchy and at worst absent altogether. Sociolin-guists or language revival have sought to preserve indigenous cultures and lan-guages. However, in trying to reconstruct these languages on the past they posi-tioned native speakers as the legitimate representatives o a given speechcommunity. In doing so, new speakers have been largely ignored (intentionally orotherwise) as a linguistic group, despite the act that such speakers are a neces-sary part o reversing language shif.

Our linguistic economies are undergoing a process o proound transorma-tion, in which the sources o linguitic authority are being displaced as we movetowads a new post-national sociolinguistic order (Pujolar 2007). In this new

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sociolinguitic order, new speaker profiles and their corresponding practices canno longer be ignored. It is likely that across different linguistic communitieswhere new speaker practices are emerging, space will need to be explcitly demar-

cated or them within linguistic revitalization projects. Linguistics and its relatedstrands have played an important role in shaping the processes o language inter-vention. Our ocus on the new speaker phenomenon is thereore a way oacknowledging this interventionist role and in our analytical endeavors, to ex-plicitly engage in an exercise o reflexivity.

Acknowledgements: Research leading to many o the articles included in thisissue was made possible thanks to various unding sources:a) A grant provided by the SpanishMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovacinwithin the

Plan Nacional de I+D+i20082011 to the project Nuevos hablantes, nuevasidentidades (acr. NEOPHON). Re. FFI2011-24781.

b) A research Fellowship awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council(AHRC) in the United Kingdom or the project New Speakers o MinorityLanguages and their Role in Linguistic Revitalization (Grant number AH/J00345X/1).

c) A Research Workshop in the Arts and Humanities grant awarded by the RoyalSociety o Edinburgh to support the hosting o a workshop and symposium,

at which earlier versions o the articles included in this issue were first aired.d) Many o the articles have also benefitted rom ongoing discussion on the

new speaker theme as part o the EU COST Action IS1306 network entitledNew Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges.

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new speakers of minority languages: the challenging opportunity – foreword

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