Revista Alteridades
Revista Alteridades
Fecha
-
La hispanofobia del movimiento "Inglés oficial" en los Estados Unidos por la oficialización del...hot!
-
Ana Celia Zentella. La hispanofobia del movimiento "Inglés oficial" en los Estados Unidos por la oficialización del inglés
The Hispanophobia of the Official English Movement in the US.The greatest efforts ever made to restrict language in the US since the post W.W.I period have been taking place since 1980. Language policy in three areas—the language of government, the language of employment and the language of the schools— affect the human rights of 32 million members of language minority families, but they are targeted most specifically at the group that represents the majority: Spanish speakers. In response, defense of Spanish has served to unite diverse groups of Latinos despite differences in migration history, socio-economic profiles, and political affiliations. Of particular interest is the relationship between the positions that a group takes on the issue of making English the official language of the US and on the issue of eliminating the services that might be affected by English-only legislation. This paper reports on the views of more than 300 Latinos in New York City, and compares them with those of Euro-American, African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and others.
- Hits: 262
-
Escrituralidad, preservación de la lengua y derechos humanos lingüÃsticos: tres casos ilustrativoshot!
-
Nancy H. Hornberger. Literacy, language maintenance, and linguistic human rights: some telling cases.
Drawing on multi-year ethnographic research in Quechua-speaking communities of highland Peru and in Cambodian and Puerto Rican communities in inner city Philadelphia, this paper explores the degree to which the development of literacy in minority languages does or does not contribute to minority linguistic human rights and to minority language maintenance. The cases of the cyclical immigrant / citizen Puerto Rican population in the US, of the newly arrived Southeast Asian refugee populations in the US, and of a long-oppressed indigenous population in Peru provide three unique and different contexts in which to explore these issues, so central to local and national identities in an increasingly mobile and ethnically jigsawed world. The cases confirm that the relationship between literacy and language and culture maintenance is a complicated one, in which empowerment plays a significant role. They also highlight questions about various counterpoised dimensions of linguistic human rights - tolerance and promotion, individual and communal freedoms, freedom from discrimination and freedom for use, claims-to and claims-against. The paper concludes by suggesting that the promotion of linguistic human rights will have to continually confront difficult ethical choices and that the guiding principles in those choices must be to balance the counterpoints of those dimensions for the mutual protection of all.
- Hits: 273
-
Conflictos entre lenguas y derechos lingüÃsticos: perspectivas de análisis sociolingüÃsticohot!
-
Rainer Enrique Hamel. Language conflict and linguistic human rights: a sociolinguistic framework.
Based on ongoing research in an indigenous area of Mexico, this article analyses how language conflict between Spanish and indigenous languages, and minority shift operate on the levels of cultural models, discourse, and language use. In such processes, ruptures between them, and between the social production of experience and its discursive appropriation. The analysis shows in which ways theses processes affect linguistic human rights in two key areas of social organization: in bilingual education and the administration of justice. This comprehensive sociolinguistic perspective allows the author to relate the Mexican experience to other cases, and to sketch some general principles for research on the topic. As a conclusion the article sustains that a sociolinguistic framework which broadens the concepts of language and communication underlying existing models for language planning will best be suited to describe language conflict situations, and to establish an adequate basis for the definition and implementation of linguistic human rights. Such a framework will have to take into account at least three levels of sociolinguistic analysis: linguistic structure, discourse structure, and cultural models.
- Hits: 310
-
Lengua de mayorÃa regional, planificación del lenguaje y derechos lingüÃsticoshot!
-
Jacques Maurais. Regional majority languages, language planning, and linguistic rights.
This paper analyses the legal protection of languages from the point of view of “regional majority languages”, i.e. languages of populations which, though a majority in their historic territory (where they may nevertheless be experiencing some form of assimilation), are minorities at the national level (French in Quebec, Catalan in Catalonia, and many languages in the pre-1991 Soviet Union). Only the protection of aboriginal linguistic minorities seems to have been considered so far at the international level. The paper proposes some sociolinguistic principles related to the legal protection of languages which can be gathered from the Canadian experience: the present situation of aboriginal languages and the Quebec’s experience of language planning. Some recent foreign experiences of legal language planning are also taken into account (mainly Spain and the countries of the former USSR). Comments are also made on a draft Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights that is currently circulating. The new linguistic situation arising from the suppression of barriers to free trade is briefly considered as in some cases language can be considered as a nontariff barrier to free trade: minority languages would be most vulnerable to such legal interpretations.
- Hits: 277