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The present paper deals with the present-day relationship between the two official languages of Norway, Bokmål and Nynorsk (actually two variants of the same language, Norwegian), examining how their equal status functions in reality in the Norwegian society, in the administration, in the educational system, in the everyday life, in the digital world, etc.
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The study starts with the definition of local, translocal, and global linguistic context in the digital space. Facebook as a social media platform provides opportunities for everyday digital literacy practices such as code play. Code play allows mixing codes and repertoires usually with a humorous reference. We argue that creative interaction among languages creates the methodological need for a translingual approach besides the traditional code-switching theory to explain online linguistic phenomena. Adopting a netnographic approach, this paper presents two participants’ linguistic history, online linguistic practices, and perceptions of their own digital literacy, exploring their portrayal of (multi)linguistic identity which has local, translocal, and global resonance. The paper exploits possibilities of code play to accomplish communicative goals through code-switching and translingualism with a linguistically diverse audience.
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In this paper, I put forward a comparative/contrastive analysis of ethnic identity on the basis of humorous texts about Romanians and Hungarians living in Romania within the framework of the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH). The corpus contains fifty jokes taken from websites and social media, books and recordings in which the Romanians are at the centre and the Hungarians are the butt and vice versa. The overall purpose of the study is to illustrate the main topics and stereotypes used in ethnic jokes. In this research, I will show that Romanians and Hungarians joke about similar topics, the most common ones being the “ownership” of Transylvania, rejection of the other, and language distortion but also friendship among Hungarians and Romanians. I also conclude that stereotypes can be attributed to one ethnic group, but there are also shared stereotypes, and some of them can switch from one group to the other depending on the perspective.
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This paper undertakes the introduction to virolinguistics, a new linguistic discipline that investigates the virus language (virolect) based on the Hungarian linguistic material drawn from the scientific literature and our own collection. The goal of this work is to evaluate the effect of the pandemic on certain aspects of the Hungarian language: genres, vocabulary, communication, the linguistic landscape, and social media. The linguistic materials of these various areas play an important role in our society: they have a warning, entertaining, or stress-relieving function. Due to the restrictions, most studies have moved to the Internet. The methodological paradox of virolinguistics can be identified in the fact that it disregards certain scientific standards in order to assist linguists in collecting their valuable linguistic and visual materials.
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This paper focuses on the online presence of languages and linguistic patterns of local small businesses in a bilingual, Hungarian-Romanian ethnic community in Romania. By capturing linguistic diversity and creativity via netnographic research, patterns of linguistic landscape elements in the social media, such as marketing strategy of local small businesses, can be analysed. The findings suggest that despite the need to advertise by using the state language, Romanian, in order to maximize the target audience, the concentration of Hungarian landscape elements is the highest. Businesses construct their linguistic identity by their language choices and practices, aligned with the collective linguistic identity of a bilingual community and the need for a global representation, in order to secure a place in the local market.
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The paper analyses six professional narratives in a workplace meeting. The first part presents the theoretical framework, namely definition, types of and approaches to identity and the main features of narratives, namely the structure, function, and narrator’s roles. The underlying assumption is that speakers display particular facets of their identity considering the environment and the type of interaction in which they are engaged and that narratives change depending on their purpose and context. The theoretical framework relies on Tajfel’s social constructionist approach to identity and on the Membership Categorization Analysis. The second part is the data analysis of the narratives presented by several employees of a multinational company during a phone conference meeting, with a focus on the professional identity in terms of narrative structure and values upheld by the narrators. The analysis presents the structure of the professional narratives, the values upheld, and the narrators’ roles and concludes with a possible professional master narrative.
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The diversity of the contemporary Silesian dialects corresponds to the division adopted by K. Nitsch (1960), apart from the non-existence of the Lach dialects that are extinct in this area. However, the dialects present in Silesia have become richer by the Southern Borderlands dialect, which is used mainly by repatriates living in villages (and small towns) in the area stretching from the Katowice to the Wrocław regions. The linguistic analysis of a given dialect is still determined based on the inhabitants’ speech, that is relying on the usage and function criterion. This opens the prospect of studying language by means of the paradigms applying the usage-based models of language, such as cognitivism, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. The most commonly used variation of Polish is mixed, where the dialect intertwines with the general language and which is characterised by stylistic diversity (e.g. the colloquial and scientific styles); hence, the application of language usage-based paradigms, which enable the presentation of language in sociocultural processes (e.g. dromology, mediamorphosis, and glocalisation, i.e. globalisation and localisation combined) is important in the research of this kind. When determining dialectal characteristics, E. Rosch’s prototype theory is also useful, as it permits the detection of canonical (prototypical) features of a given dialect, usually phonetic ones, which allow its distinction from another dialect by criteria. This is because the traditional division of Silesian dialects has undergone certain transformations concerned with a shi of Silesian dialects’ influences with respect to Lesser and Greater Polish ones, expansion of the mixed area at the borderline between dialects, establishment of mixed Polish, and reduction of the number of people speaking a dialect only. The diversity of dialects as a prestigious variation of Polish in Silesia attests to the abundance of regional experiences of the lands and requires a further holistic research of the language transformations occurring in Silesia.
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This article presents more than 300 semantic units being names of women used in the area of Warmia and Masuria in the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century in traditional rural communities. It discusses the semantic diversity of particular groups of lexemes, presents their number, and indicates the extralinguistic reasons which caused the growth of the number of feminine names within certain semantic fields. It also confronts certain specialised sets of lexemes, e.g. the names of unmarried women, with their male counterparts.
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This article contains an analysis of 17th-century proto-names from the area of the Daleszyce parish (Świętokrzyskie voivodship, Kielce poviat) for the presence of phonetic dialectal characteristics. The research material was excerpted from the manuscripts of four parish registers (records of birth) wrien in Latin. The analysis showed that the examined anthroponymic material was a storage of various phonetic characteristics throughout the 17th c. The Daleszyce historical anthroponyms recorded typically Lesser Polish features (the shi from -ch to -k in the final position), Masovian features (fluctuations in the ge : g’e, ke : k’e groups; hardening of l’), Masovian and Greater Polish features (fluctuations in the -ew-/-ow- groups), and general dialectal features (Masurian influences and the presence of prosthetic consonants). The analysed material contained also various manifestations of hypercorrection with respect to dialectal forms, such as e.g. the so-called szadzenie, removal of h- and j- in the initial position heard as forms with prothesis, secondary nasalisation of e in positions other than ones arising from the phonetic assimilation to the neighbouring nasal consonants. This article might fill, to an extent, the gap in the anthroponymic research on the Kielce region in the 17th c.
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The modern working world is characterized by increasingly complex external and internal pluri- and multilingualism,which poses growing challenges for professional communication. In order to be able to systematically capture this increasing complexity, a separate model is required. In this model, on the one hand, the individual languages and their linguistic varieties of external and internal multilingualism and, on the other hand, the first-, second- andforeign-language competencies of individual persons are entered in a matrix. In this way, multilingual settings of professions or workplaces as well as multilingual profiles of individual persons can be described in a differentiated manner and corresponding political and didactic measures can be taken.
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Wars, catastrophes, pandemics, epidemics have always meant that man, instead of inventing problems for himself and complicating life, turned in his actions to the basic values of his earthly existence. These dramatic events and phenomena, which are inseparable from human history, seemed to “cleanse” the mind and bring thinking back on track with basic needs and fundamental, mostly positive feelings. The covid pandemic is such a turning point. However, the old concerns remain – including the question of political correctness in the use of language in German society. In this context, the article examines and analyses the guidelines for “Employees of the Berlin Administration on Diversity-Sensitive Language Use” published by the Berlin Senate in September 2020. The linguistically correct reorientation anchored in this document is intended to help the Berlin administration on its way to treating all citizens fairly. However, the German language seems to be a garden of traps in its grammatical structure. Critical voices are rising in society against the new regulations – not against the struggle for gender equality itself, but against the political proposals in language use, which seem to be getting closer and closer to the border of the absurd. In this context, this article attempts to present which difficulties and linguistic doubts arise from the new regulations on language use in Berlin’s authorities and offices. Old and new expressions are compared and the resulting problems of interpretation are discussed. Furthermore, various linguistic means of the form of expression to be corrected are discussed and examples are given. It will probably never be possible to find the final word that no longer hurts anyone and makes everyone in society equal. However, the struggle for social and societal equality must not be abandoned in these troubled times.
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This article aims to describe the image of the representatives of the conceptual categories woman and married woman recreated based upon Chinese word associations. The paper starts with the presentation of the stereotype and gender stereotype definitions. Furthermore, the author provided the results of her research conducted in Taiwan between 2019 and 2020.
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Japanese given names reflect through their kanji selection particular perceived or anticipated aspects concerning their bearers, providing an insight into the changing values of Japanese society. In the past, numbers were used in names mainly to refer to the order of birth, the time of birth, or, in the case of large numbers, to express a wish for longevity. Within the larger historical context, this paper focuses on the use of kanji representing numbers in the names of children born in the last ten years (2008–2017), exploring the recent reasons for their choice and what values and priorities of recent Japanese parents they reflect.
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This article considers how the long-standing American cultural tradition of sentimentality and its affective power can be discursively utilized by contemporary Black women in the public contexts. Using the concept of sentimental political storytelling as discussed by Rebecca Wanzo, I analyze three award speeches given by Viola Davis – a popular and acclaimed African American actress whose speeches generate significant public and media attention. Framing Davis’s speeches within the Black feminist epistemology, I draw on the conventions of sentimental storytelling proposed by Wanzo to argue that Davis is an example of a Black woman skilfully using sentimentality to gain affective agency and mobilize sympathy from mainstream public while at the same time narrativizing African Americans’ lived experiences to have their humanity and their struggle recognized today. Given the continued prioritization of White female suffering in the American media over stories of Black women’s struggle, the ways in which Black women can discursively utilize sentimentality to gain affective agency and negotiate self-definition in interactional public contexts is of significant sociolinguistic interest.
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Caring for a family member with dementia involves multifaceted relational issues linked to the construction of caregiving as an emotional, symbolic and morally sanctionable practice inscribed in kin relations and dominant femininity (Paoletti 2007). As the disease disrupts taken-for-granted expectations for a person with dementia and the entire family, this qualitatively new situation necessitates the (re)negotiation of kin roles and responsibilities (Peel 2017; Purves 2011). By applying conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to an audio-taped open-ended interview with an American female caregiver, this paper investigates in-depth how she discursively navigates complex familial role-relational trajectories while assisting her mother with dementia. The study examines the situatedness of role vis-á-vis self-other relations with assumptions about categories within the membership categorization devices ‘family’ and ‘gender’ being critical to this process. It documents how the participant contextualizes care experience not only in the standardized relational pair ‘daughter-mother’ but brings into focus a broader constellation of historical, contemporaneous or hypothetical aspects of kinship ties (e.g., with her parents, siblings or children), each of which invokes distinct expectations, responsibilities and loyalties which sometimes competing with other relations. The study thus exposes certain commonsense propositions concerning normative family role-relationships which function as powerful benchmarks for making life choices, interpreting one’s experiences, and morally evaluating oneself and others while providing care to kin with dementia.
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The aim of the article is to survey the usage of metaphors in President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speeches on the Russian aggression against Ukraine. To be precise, the objective of the paper is to study and present the conceptual metaphors of war present in the speeches of the leader of Ukraine from the 24th of February 2022, the day Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, up to the 24th of March, i.e. the first month of the war. The speeches available on the President of Ukraine Official Website https://www.president.gov.ua/en are analysed using the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor, as introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and developed by Kövecses (2002), with reference to the role of conceptual metaphor in political discourse (Fabiszak 2007, Neshkovska and Trajkova 2020, Wen Lin Cheng 2011).
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The aim of the research is to recognize the role of mental spaces in meaning construction of the nickname flądra in Polish [English: slut; literally: a flounder], received on the ground of the real discourse extracts retrieved from the Polish Corpus. The meaning of the nickname is obtained by examining the metaphors underlying it, which are motivated by various contextual factors, e.g. the speaker’s gender and discourse registers. The results obtained in the study reveal that the meaning of the flądra nickname is based on five metaphorical dynamic structures organised hierarchically, from which the mental-spaces level provides for the novel meaning of flądra.
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The article examines the issue of transliteration of Kazakh personal names into Rus¬sian in the Soviet era. At that time, personal names were recorded in the documents exclusively in Russian. There were no scientifically based methods of transliteration from Kazakh into Russian. The Russian transliterations of Kazakh anthroponyms at that time were distinguished by multivariance, inconsistency with the original pho¬netic image. In the course of the analysis of the academic dictionary reference book of Kazakh names and their spellings in Russian by Dzhanuzakov, Yesbayeva in 1988, the most common methods of transliteration were identified as graphic-phonetic (75.99%), and graphic (5.72%). 18.12% of Kazakh names have a one-to-one corre¬lation with transliteration in Russian. The multivariance and distortions in the Rus¬sian transliteration of Kazakh names are partly a consequence of the difference in the phonetic and graphic systems of both languages and partly the general policy of russification and ignoring the linguistic and cultural needs of the peoples of the USSR. Nowadays, these problems are being gradually eliminated, and instructions for uni¬form transliteration into Russian are being developed.
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