What is in a language
Essentialism in macro-sociolinguistic research on Afrikaans
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4179645 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Johanita Kirsten (0000-0002-0541-5964, North-West University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 2017 |
| Issue | 248 |
| Publication date | 2017-09-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of the Sociology of Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0165-2516 • E-ISSN: 1613-3668 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ijsl-2017-0035 |
| OpenAlex | W2748038566 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 27 |
Essentialist conceptions about language, and the relationship between language and other things, are still fairly common in society, and to some extent in linguistics. It is of particular relevance when working with specific (named or unnamed) languages in multilingual environments, or with one specific (named or unnamed) variety of a language among many. This article investigates how essentialism manifests in a collection of macro-sociolinguistic research articles on Afrikaans in contemporary, multilingual South Africa through critical discourse analysis. The findings indicate that subtle and covert indications of an extent of essentialism are quite common in the data, and even explicitly essentialist statements and claims are not completely absent. Some counter-examples of and challenges to essentialism in the data are also explored, although they are found to be less common than covert instances of essentialism. Suggestions regarding a few essentialism-related problems that arise from the data are discussed briefly
Covert · Epistemology · Essentialism · Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy
How to do Discourse Analysis
Bilingualism as Ideology and Practice
Mediating Unity and Diversity
The Role of Language in European Nationalist Ideologies
Introduction Language Ideology as a field of inquiry
Getting Linguistic Human Rights Right
Discourses of language activism
Getting language rights right
Colonialism and re-imaging minority language management
Multilingualism in Urban Africa
Commentary
Tracking the demographics of (urban) language shift – an analysis of South African census data
Monolingual Bias in SLA Research
Politics, Philosophy, Culture
Rehabilitating a whiteness disgraced
The right to language
A rebuttal of essentialist sociolinguistics
Metaphors of possession in the conceptualisation of language
Re-thinking language conflict
Languages, inequality and marginalization
Flourishing functional multilingualism
The Asmara Declaration as a sociolinguistic problem
Language and the nation-state
Language essentialism and social hierarchies among Giriama and Swahili
Multilingualism and social cohesion
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2023 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |