Marián Sloboda

Language Management and Language Problems in Belarus: Education and Beyond

Abstract This article provides an overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Belarus, the most russified of the post-Soviet countries. It summarizes language policy and legislation, and deals in more detail with language management and selected language problems in Belarusian education. It also contributes to the work on language planning by applying Jernudds and Neustupnýs Language Management Theory, particularly the concept of the language management cycle, to analysis of sociolinguistic issues in Belarus.

Carrying out a language policy change: advocacy coalitions and the management of linguistic landscape

This paper focuses on agency in language policy change. The object of the analysis is the processes of bilingualization of signage in three European towns. Located in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Wales, the towns differ in various respects, including the extent to which signage language policies have faced opposition and threatened social cohesion. Two theoretical frameworks are combined to analyse what facilitated or hindered language policy changes at the three sites. Language management framework provides a model of behaviour through which language and communication evolve in response to deviations from communicative expectations. Advocacy coalition framework, developed in political science, is used to gain an understanding of how such behaviour by coordinated social actors influences macro-level processes such as policy change.

Receptive multilingualism in ‘monolingual’ media: managing the presence of Slovak on Czech websites

This paper investigates how the presence of a minority language closely related to the majority language is received and treated on the World Wide Web. Specifically, it deals with the acceptability and treatment of texts written in Slovak in the .cz domain, which belongs to the Czech Republic, more than a decade after the split of Czechoslovakia. Employing Language Management Theory and focusing on membership categorisation, the investigation first examines user comments which refer to the use of Slovak on .cz websites as inadequate or problematic. The analysis then proceeds in two directions: first, it deals with users’ expectations regarding the use of Slovak on specific websites. Second, it focuses on how users and the website editors subsequently managed the problematic deviations from these expectations. As a result, the study centres around three phenomena which were shown to be relevant for the online participants: Internet nationalism, the intelligibility of Slovak to Czechs and the searchability of webpages in a closely related language.

Historicity and citizenship as conditions for national minority rights in Central Europe: old principles in a new migration context

ABSTRACT Having a historical presence in a country and citizenship of that country are two basic conditions under which national minority rights are granted in many countries, but increasing international migration has started to pose a challenge to this conception. Like other countries of Central Europe, the Czech Republic has adopted the two conditions for granting rights to traditional ‘national minorities’ and has developed a separate policy for the ‘integration of foreigners’; however, the emergence of the second generation of Vietnamese has presented a special challenge to this two-tier policy system. Recent renegotiation of the historicity of this immigrant group has resulted in its ‘official recognition’ as a national minority. This paper discusses this case in its wider Central European context, and addresses the question of whether we are observing an erosion of the two-tier policy system or a reconsideration of the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ minorities. Finally, the paper touches upon the question of the role and usability of ‘old’ minority language rights, considering the lack of interest among the traditional minorities vs. the linguistic situation of the migrants’ second generation.

Discourse coalitions for and against minority languages on signs: linguistic landscape as a social issue.

Everyday passers-by, regular residents, as well as municipal officers may have a mental image and a set of discourses about the multilingualism of a linguistic landscape (LL) of their city which can be quite different from what scholars working with LL would ‘see’ and think. That is why we undertook our investigations about the perception of the linguistic landscape and wanted to shed light on how discourses on this perception can be instructive about social issues in the lives of urban residents. We hypothesized that the presence of a minority community in a town will engender discussion about the identification of this community (both from the inside and the outside) and about the perceived value of this community, its language, its customs or its culture. In order to trigger discussion and discourse data to analyse, we used people’s perception about LL as our departure point. Hence, elicited and naturally occurring oral and written data were collected on people’s opinions about local LL in four multilingual European locations with important minority communities. The analysis which follows documents our attempt at providing another snapshot of how LL and minority languages (and their speakers) shape each other.

Language Planning in Slovakia: Nation-Building in the Context of European Integration

This chapter describes and discusses language planning in the territory of today’s Slovakia in its historical development. The discussion focuses especially on language-planning developments in Slovakia since the disintegration of the Czech-Slovak federation in 1992/1993—such as debates in the country about the influence of Czech, the social-linguistic ramifications of the new policies on minority-language rights and their relationship to international legal standards.