Unit 2-5. Languages beyond boundaries

 

Guidelines for extensive reading of ESP texts

The students' main task is reading, but writing summaries is valuable not only to provide a means for teachers to check comprehension, but because the writing of summaries improves comprehension. In addition, this practice helps students improve their writing ability. Another task that can be adapted for extensive reading is the "standard exercise," a set of open-ended questions that can be designed to suit most texts available to students in a course. Students also have some responsibility for determining the appropriateness and comprehensibility of the texts they are reading. One means of doing this is checking dictionary use: too much necessary use shows that the text is too difficult. Too much unnecessary use shows that the student's approach is not appropriate for extensive reading. In any case, a poor or inappropriate text is not the disaster it can help in a translation or skills-building course because in the extensive reading procedure reading is individualized: if a text proves to ' be uninteresting or too difficult, the student simply abandons it for another. In other words, readability or comprehensibility is an element of the course rather than a precondition, and is determined by the techniques of this procedure.

 

Text 2-5. LANGUAGES BEYOND BOUNDARIES

(Based on Virginie Mamadouh’s article in the Toolkit for Transnational Communication in Europe . Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism. University of Copenhagen, 2011)

Borders - Borderlands – Boundaries (after Virginie Mamadouh)

Linguistic similarities and differences produce social boundaries. Some boundaries are more important than others. State borders, which are primarily politically constructed territorial boundaries, are particularly important because the modern state has developed into the hegemonic political institution exercising its internal and external sovereignty. Territorial modern states have also regulated linguistic practices in their bounded territory, and linguistic characteristics have often been used as key markers to mobilize people as a nation within an existing state or alternatively to secede from an existing state and establish a separate state. As a result, state borders often coincide with linguistic boundaries and they reinforce each other. In multilingual states, language arrangements are often territorial, delimitating juxtaposed monolingual regions. In those cases administrative borders might reinforce linguistic boundaries.

Geographers traditionally distinguish between subsequent, antecedent, and superimposed boundaries. In the first case, the boundary has been drawn after a population established itself. It follows an existing cultural (linguistic) divide. In the second case the state boundary has been drawn first and different groups (i.e. people sharing similar cultural features like a language) settled later at the different sides of the boundary. In the third case, the state boundary has been established later and crossed existing patterns.

In Europe we find extremely old state boundaries (Portugal/Spain, Spain/France) and extremely recent ones (Kosovo/Serbia). Some states have been established as a response to national territorial claims based on national and linguistic identities: for example Slovenia, Slovakia or Kosovo. In other cases, linguistic boundaries followed old political boundaries: the limes of the Roman Empire as boundaries between Germanic and Romance languages. Yet in more numerous cases, state boundaries have been drawn across existing linguistic communities, and subsequent processes of state formation and nation building have either homogenized linguistically and culturally the population of the state or created ethnic minorities. European borderlands vary greatly linguistically.

Some state boundaries are clear cut linguistic boundaries (Spain/Portugal, although this is not true if Galician is conceived as a variant of Portuguese); others typically separate linguistic minorities from the main state where the language is spoken (for example Slovenian speakers in Italy and Austria, Hungarian speakers in Transylvania, German speakers in Poland and the Czech Republic), Finnish Speakers in Northern Sweden, Swedish speakers on the Åland islands and in Southern Finland, or linguistic minorities in both states (Basque speakers in Spain and France, Catalan speakers in the same two countries).

Finally some state boundaries separate states sharing the same language (like Austria and Germany, Belgium and France, Belgium and the Netherlands), while strongly institutionalized territorial linguistic boundaries (like the one between Flanders and Wallonia or the one between Southern and Northern Cyprus) are no established (official) state boundaries.

Both Europeanization and globalization have dramatically transformed the role of state borders. The European integration project aims at removing barriers to communication and mobility at the borders between Member States. By definition, globalization process implies the intensification of (long distance) cross-border relations. In this context, linguistic similarities between groups on both sides of an existing state border can be instrumental in fostering cross- border encounters and initiatives.

Nevertheless, different institutional experiences may have created or expanded differences in vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics, between linguistic groups at both sides of the border and have generated asymmetrical power relations (for an extreme example see Stevenson 2002 for the impact of the division and the reunification of Germany on the German language). In other cases new states magnify small differences between language varieties to establish their national language (for example Norwegian standards versus Danish, and more recently efforts to accentuate and systematise the differences between Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin).

Geographers generally distinguish between borderlands according to the degree to which each borderland is integrated in its state territory and the degree to which both sides of the border are integrated with each others. The ideal embodied by the European integration project and more specifically the European Union is that of fully integrated borderlands. The Interreg programme of the European Commission does support this specific kind of cross-border integration and also impact on borderlands linked by a common language.

Finally both Europeanization and globalization have also stimulated international migration making linguistic superdiversity a key characteristic of contemporary urban regions and creating linguistic boundaries inside cities (sometimes linked to micro-territories dominated by a specific linguistic group) and transforming them in linguistic borderlands where similar communication strategies might be deployed as in communication crossing state borders.

2. Languages of Regional Communication or ReLan (after the article by Rudi Janssens, Virginie Mamadouh, László Marácz in the Toolkit for Transnational Communication in Europe. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism. University of Copenhagen, 2011)

Languages can be classified according to the scope of the communication they enable. It is customary to talk of languages of local or of global communication. In the realm in between we distinguish Languages of Regional Communication (ReLan). We define "regional" here as communication beyond the realm of the local community.

A specific category of ReLan consists of Standard Languages institutionalized by political authorities as the official languages on their territories (the so-called official or national languages). Nevertheless we are particularly interested in ReLan amidst linguistic diversity, either in multilingual regions when different language groups coexist or in transnational communication. The region might be a borderland divided by state or administrative borders (such as Tyrol) or a macro-region composed of multiple states (like Scandinavia or Central Europe). These transnational ReLan are especially relevant when state borders become porous, making transnational encounters more frequent due to globalization and Europeanization processes.

In addition we propose a typology of ReLan on the basis of the prevalence of non-native speakers involved in the communicational situation. Firstly, when the speakers involved are almost exclusively L1-speakers of the regional language, we speak of a Regional Vernacular Language (ReVer). When L2 speakers are predominant in the regional communicational encounters and have the ownership of the language (and not L1 speakers or institutions represented them), we speak of Regional Lingua Franca (ReLF). In the more balanced cases, we speak of a regional vehicular language, for which we use the acronym ReLoC (Regional Language of Communication as opposed to Regional Languages of Identification).

This typology can be illustrated with the example of German, which is also a national language (NL) of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium and a native language of many of the majority of the inhabitants of the first three states in the list. German is also a ReVer, a Regional Vernacular in a much wider region, including L1-speakers in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, borderlands in France (Alsace), Denmark, Belgium, Italy (South Tyrol), Poland (Silesia) and the Czech Republic and in Transylvania.

In addition German is a Regional Vehicular (ReLoC) when it is used as a language of communication in Central Europe when an L1 speaker from the German lands meets a Central European, i.e. Czech, Slovak, Pole or Hungarian speaking German as an L2. Finally, German can become a ReLF when it is the language of communication of a Dutch, Czech, Pole or Hungarian or other L2-speakers of German in the Central European macro region.

There are many ReLan in Europe, especially in regions crossing political borders (state borders or linguistic relevant administrative borders). Some are mainly ReVer (like Catalan along the French Spanish border or Hungarian in the Carpathian Basin), other mainly Regional Vehicular or ReLoC (Czech in former Czechoslovakia or Serbian in former Yugoslavia) and other ReLF (like French in Southeastern Europe, Russian in former Eastern Europe, and English increasingly everywhere in Europe). ReLF could also adequately describe a situation of mutual intelligibility between languages in a region, like between Danish, Norwegian (Bokmål) and Swedish in the Nordic countries ("Scandinavian" as ReLF).

In addition, one could argue that in most European states where the rights of linguistic minorities are guaranteed the state National Languages have become Regional Vehiculars (ReLoC) rather than ReVer, while they have become even ReLF negotiated by speakers of different L1 in those metropolitan regions where a condition of superdiversity prevails. To give a German example again, German is a ReLF in Hamburg or Berlin among teenagers of various ethnic and linguistic background. Similarly Catalan is becoming with the "normalization" policies of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia a ReLoC rather than a ReVer, and combined with the increasing international migration to Barcelona, even a ReLF.