Leena Huss & Sari Pesonen
”Revitalisering i praktiken – samlad kunskap för den som vill återta sitt språk”
Språkgemenskapernas och individernas eget engagemang är avgörande för lyckad revitalisering. Arbetet inom språkgemenskaperna stärker enskildas förutsättningar att bruka och återta språken samtidigt som det uppmuntrar och inspirerar allt fler att engagera sig. Men det finns ett uppenbart behov av samlad kunskap om revitalisering, olika metoder att revitalisera ett språk och ”best practices” för att stödja engagemanget och det språkrevitaliserande arbetet inom språkgemenskaperna. I detta föredrag presenteras en ny publikation som diskuterar språkrevitalisering och dess olika former men också insatser som kan göras för att vända på språkbytesprocessen. Publikationen baserar sig dels på allmän kunskap, forskning och beprövad erfarenhet, dels på olika typer av revitaliseringsinsatser som genomförts och olika typer av metoder som använts i revitaliseringsarbete i Sverige och utomlands.
Carola Kleemann & Kristin Nicolaysen
“Kven Language Between Generations”
Within families of Kven descent, efforts are made to pass on the Kven language and other cultural heritage, along with connections to places and practices that represent a Kven past, present, and future for them. Language transmission between generations is often overshadowed by institutional language practices and strict ideals of strong language models. Within the framework of everyday life, where the majority language is very dominant, a more sustainable practice may be to consider the multilingual reality of the generations.
We have based this presentation on two short films from the video material "Isä and Aftenstjernen," which shows how isä, the grandfather Egil Sundelin, in various situations works to pass on his Kven mother tongue to his grandson, Iver Isak, or Iiveripoika. The film and language vitalisation project started when Iver Isak was four years old, and his grandfather was 72. Today, they are 11 and 79, respectively, and they are still in the midst of their story about the transmission of cultural heritage.
Filmmaker, and mother to Iver Isak, Kristin Nicolaysen, films and facilitates the meetings/episodes, where the relationship between the generations, the use of Kven words and concepts, and the different material conditions of the places become visible. The meetings between isä and his grandson provide insights into a type of encounters that are both sociocultural and sociomaterial. Based on analyses of the film recordings, language researcher Carola Kleemann examined how the Kven words and concepts are transmitted as a sustainable translingual pedagogy, anchored in Kven places and the practices of these places.
As the borders between researchers and participants are blurred, dialogues between the participants about the language project and the film recordings are a central part of the method and material. Our presentation is a narrative about language learning and cultural learning where the relationship between the generations and the place are central.
Gerd Carling
“Grammatical gender in Romani chib as part of a revitalization process”
Romani varieties have a system of two genders, masculine and feminine (Matras 2002). This is different from the system found in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan, which has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter (Masica 1991). The two-gender system (masculine – feminine) is something that Romani shares with some New Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, whereas other New Indo-Aryan languages, such as Gujerati, Konkani, and Marathi, have preserved the three-gender system of Old Indo-Aryan (masculine – feminine – neuter) (Carling 2019). However, an interesting aspect of Romani is that some varieties are mixed with their matrix varieties, forming so-called mixed or intertwined languages (Matras 2003). An example of a variety like this is Scandoromani, the indigenous Romani dialect spoken in Sweden and Norway (Carling, Lindell, and Ambrazaitis 2014). In this variety, the Romani two-gender system of masculine and feminine has adapted to the Swedish and Norwegian system of common and neuter, but in which dialects have preserved a three-gender system of masculine, feminine, and neuter. The lecture will start by looking at the evolution of gender, from Old and Middle Aryan via New Indo-Aryan and Romani to mixed varieties, with a specific focus on the vocabulary, demonstrating how words change and adapt their gender due to various causes. Focus of the lecture will be on aspects of how the gender system, involving the entire vocabulary, is of relevant to the revitalization process of Romani varieties. By changing the gender system, Romani varieties adapt to their matrix languages, a process that may play a role in the revitalization.
Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi
“Linguistic variation and language revitalization”
The purpose of this talk is to explore linguistic variation in the context of language revitalisation. Many endangered and minoritised languages are characterized by regional, intergenerational, situational, and free grammatical variation. They are often not fully standardised and may contain loanwords from a majority language or be subject to code-switching (e.g., Lainio & Wande, 2015; Paunonen, 2018). Furthermore, new speakers (for example, young people reclaiming and learning the language of their ancestors) use language differently from older generations (cf. Sallabank, 2018). Variation poses a challenge to language revitalisation: How do we approach variation when producing materials for language learning and revitalisation? What kind of language should grammars and textbooks contain? Should we perhaps allow or encourage variation in published documents and media? I will discuss these questions from a wider global and theoretical perspective, and illustrate different types of variation using Meänkieli, a minoritised Finno-Ugric language spoken in Sweden, as a case study.
External link.
