The Changing Voices of Europe

Social and political change and their linguistic repercussions, past, present and future

Edited by Winifred V. Davies, M. Mair Parry and Rosalind A. M. Temple

pp xvii355 1994 hardback
ISBN 0-7083-1259-4

‘The Changing Voices of Europe provides much food for thought and serves as a stimulating contribution to the field of language identity. It will appeal not only to linguists, but also to a variety of scholars working in European politics, the social sciences and multidisciplinary subjects such as European studies.’ THES

A timely collection of informative articles that examine sociolinguistic issues in many of the countries of Western Europe. Languages do not exist in a vacuum but are affected by the social and political changes that affect their speakers. Such changes can lead to modifications both in the structure of a given language and in how much or how little it is used by the community. The volume deals with the linguistic repercussions of social and political change in Western Europe in a series of articles by specialists in each area that range from general surveys to detailed studies of one linguistic variety in a particular historical context. Although the main focus is on the present and on the prospects for the future within a more closely-integrated Europe the volume also contains several contributions that illustrate the far-reaching effects of social and political developments on language use and structure in past centuries.

Readership: Aimed at sociolinguists, modern linguists, Celtic scholars, language historians, social historians, and readers interested in minority languages and cultures.

Contents

• Introduction: The changing voices of Europe – How many languages does Europe need?
  • Giulio Lepschy (Professor of Italian, University of Reading)
• Romania within a wider Europe: conflict or cohesion?
  • Rebecca Posner (Professor of the Romance Languages, Oxford)
• Was there ever a Parisian Cockney?
  • R. Anthony Lodgen (Professor of French, University of Newcastle upon Tyne)
• Elaboration and codification: standardization and attitudes towards the French language in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
  • Wendy Ayres-Bennett (University Lecturer in French and Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge)
• Protecting the French language
  • Malcolm Offord (Reader in French, Nottingham University)
• Language standardization and political rejection: the Romanian case
  • Maria M. Manoliu (Professor in the Department of French and Italian, University of California, Davis)
• Syntactic anglicisms: innovation or exploitation?
  • Christopher J. Pountain (University Lecturer in Romance Philology and Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge)
• Logographic script and assumptions of literacy in tenth-century Spain
  • Roger Wright (Senior Lecturer in Spanish, University of Liverpool)
• Nominal compounding in the Occitan dialects: influences from French (with an inventory of Occitan compound types)
  • Kathryn Klingebiel (Assistant Professor in the Department of French, University of Hawaii at Manoa)
• Language status and political aspirations: the case of Northern Spain
  • John N. Green (Professor of Romance Linguistics, University of Bradford)
• Ël piemontèis, lenga d'Euròpa
  • M. Mair Parry (Senior Lecturer in Italian, University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
• Great Expectations? A survey of hopes and fears about the implications of political developments in Western Europe for the future of France's minority languages
  • Rosalind A. M. Temple (Lecturer in French, University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
• Breton speakers in Brittany, France, and Europe: constraints on the search for an identity
  • J. Ian Press (Professor of Slavonic and Comparative Linguistics, Queen Mary and Westfield College)
• Attitudes to linguistic change in Gaelic Scotland
  • Derick S. Thomson (Emeritus Professor of Celtic, University of Glasgow)
• The poetry of speech in a lesser-used language
  • Bedwyr Lewis Jones (late Professor of Welsh, University College of North Wales, Bangor)
• A Tale of Two Dialects: standardization in modern spoken Welsh
  • Mari C. Jones (University Lecturer in French and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge)
• 'Tafodieithoedd Datguddiad Duw': the change in the voice of the Welsh Bible
  • David A. Thorne (Senior Lecturer in Welsh language and literature, St David's University College of Wales, Lampeter)
• The survival of Arabic in Malta?
  • Joseph Cremona (formerly University Lecturer in Romance Philology and Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge)
• Dialect and standard in speakers' perceptions: delayed reactions to linguistic reality in a German city
  • Winifred V. Davies (Lecturer in German, University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
• Language loss and language recovery: the case of the Rußlanddeutsche
  • Charlotte Hoffmann (Lecturer in German, University of Salford)
• Language and nationalism: Britain and Ireland, and the German-speaking area
  • Stephen Barbour (Reader in Modern Languages, Middlesex University)