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Sociolinguists study the valorization of specific languages as a ‘language ideology’. Contemporary nation-states frequently identify with and promote specific languages. Such linguistic nationalism is a language ideology, but not the only one. This article examines earlier millennia to uncover the dynamics by which imperial systems managed linguistic diversity and how and why they favored and disfavored particular languages and scripts. I analyze states and empires as coalitions of interest groups. I invoke the scribal masters of imperial chanceries and archives as one such group. I develop a heuristic framework (or “model”) to understand the interactions of language and power that unfolded across West and South Asia. I begin with a great empire, the Persian, that did not employ its founders’ ethnic speech but instead refined an older state language in governance. That choice entrenched an interest group that endured through a thousand years till displaced by Arab conquest after 660 CE. But a simpler ‘New Persian’ revived in the eastern Iranian lands. Turkish and Mongol conquest elites emerging from Inner Asia carried this language and its scribes into their growing domains in the Indian subcontinent. I then explain why the non-Persian Mughals in the 1550s selected Persian as their state language and rejected the constant pressure to use Urdu creole. Mughal rule left behind a tenacious Persian-writing elite that the early British empire employed. Finally, I explain the state processes behind the colonial-era decline of Persianate administration and the emergence of a new linguistic politics in colonial India.

With the development of globalization cultural issues associated with TEFL are inevitably being transformed. In the modern world peoples were grouped within nations and communicated in speech communities largely within their own countries; communication outside the boundaries of the national speech communicty was not the norm for the majority of people. In the post-modern world the position of these vertical boundaries is changing to horizontal and an upper stratum of society (wherever it is located) is able, with computer technology, to communicate relatively freely across national borders. The lingua franca of this communication is English. It is not the English of any particular country and it is developing new cultural norms, especially in the electronic media. In one stratum professional functions dominate and electronic usage closely reflects familiar print genres. In other strata more interpersonal functions occur and at the same time the language is moving away from old standard forms; this is most apparent in email and chat room discourse. Teachers have to save from traditional notions of culture and situation and embrace the new electronic forms, finding ways to help their studens participate fully in the new intercultural situation.

This article considers how struggles over land shaped the process of \"anglicization\" in colonial Pennsylvania. It focuses on a property dispute in the 1720s that pitted a second-generation Swedish yeoman and his fellow \"Ancient Settlers\" against an aspiring English Quaker entrepreneur and his high-placed allies. Drawing on property records, official minutes, and contemporary correspondence to reconstruct the controversy, the article demonstrates that disputes over land not only mobilized the Swedish population in Pennsylvania as \"Swedes\" but also embedded them within the colony as property-owning and rights-bearing British subjects. Their eighteenth-century cultural transformation was ultimately a negotiated process of \"Britonization\" that fostered appeals to ethnic and national forms of distinction as well as to shared attachments to Englishness and Britishness.

Methodological nationalism in sociological theory is unfit for the current globalized era, and should be discarded. In light of this contention, the present article discusses Max Weber's view of language as a way to relativize the frame of the national society. While a \"linguistic turn\" in sociology since the 1960s has assumed that the sharing of language—linguistic community—stands as an intersubjective foundation for understanding of meaning, Weber saw linguistic community as constructed. From Weber's rationalist, subjectivist, individualist viewpoint, linguistic community was a result of social actions, not a prior entity as assumed by German metaphysical organicism (and historicist holism). Indeed, Central Europe in Weber's era was a battlefield of linguistic nationalism(s); in contrast to the national societies of the Cold War period, national borders were unstable and ultimately the multiethnic empires of the region were dismantled after World War I into ethnolinguistic nation-states. Experience of this contemporary reality brought Weber to the core of the relationship between language and politics: A language community is an imaginary one demarcated not by language itself but by conscious opposition against outsiders, with monolingual contexts within borders created artificially by homogenizing policies like linguistic standardization and national education—the first modernity of language. In this way, Weber felt, language can be a means to domination.

En France, l’anglicisation des publicités est de plus en plus marquée. Ce phénomène est interrogé ici. Ceci, dans une perspective qui relève des Critical Management Studies, dont sont retenues les visées épistémologiques et pragmatiques de dénaturalisation des pratiques. On montre que ce qui est communément tenu comme évident ne l’est absolument pas. La recherche entreprise délivre quatre apports : i) elle pointe l’existence d’une résistance largement inaperçue des praticiens du marketing – un problème d’acceptation socio-culturelle de l’anglicisation de la communication commerciale; ii) elle analyse les grammaires de la critique, les conventions morales diversement mobilisées dans la contestation; iii) elle élucide les émotions morales qui animent au plus profond cette contestation; iv) elle complète ces analyses par l’examen de l’imagination morale (des représentations métaphoriques) qui l’organise.

This article examines the editorial choices made in Edinburgh printer Andro Hart’s 1616 edition of John Barbour’s Brus. Comparison of the 1616 Hart edition with Thomas Speght’s 1602 Chaucer edition displays similar concerns with preserving accessibility to historical texts despite significant language changes in both Older Scots and English, noting shared employment of assistive paratextual apparati. Linguistic assessment comparing Hart and Speght’s editions to their parent texts demonstrates how both editors modernize language to improve reader accessibility while preserving archaic qualities and metricality. Contextualization of the declining prestige of Older Scots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further clarifies this assessment. Hart’s edition portrays both a genesis of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English, and a coda for Older Scots as a literary prestige tongue.

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Reloaded? Writing the Conceptual History of the Twentieth Century Guest editors: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Kathrin KollmeierIntroduction Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Kathrin KollmeierSome Thoughts on the History of Twentieth-Century German Basic Concepts Willibald SteinmetzIs a “History of Basic Concepts of the Twentieth Century“ Possible? A Polemic Philipp SarasinHistory of Concepts, New Edition: Suitable for a Better Understanding of Modern Times? Alf LüdtkeReply Christian Geulen

This article explores the anglicisation of the Scots language between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the variation between the orthographic clusters and found in relative and interrogative clause markers. Using modern statistical techniques, we provide the most comprehensive empirical analysis of this variation so far in the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (Meurman-Solin 1995). By combining the techniques of Variability-Based Neighbour Clustering (Gries & Hilpert 2008, 2010, 2012) with mixed-effects logistic regression modelling (Baayen et al.2008), we uncover a different trajectory of change than that which has previously been reported for this feature (Meurman-Solin 1993, 1997). We argue that by using modern methods of data reduction and statistical modelling, we can present a picture of language change in Scots that is more fine-grained than previous studies which use only descriptive statistics.

Naturally, a group’s urge to protect all aspects of its language against negative sociolinguistic influences is a task carried out with all dedication because a group’s language identifies them, tells their story and showcases their cultural heritage. Presently, Igbo toponyms are seriously threatened by anglicisation. The paper’s main objectives are to highlight the various forms of anglicisation observed in Igbo toponyms, their negative influences on the Igbo language, and how to overcome this negative sociolinguistic phenomenon. The paper adopts a qualitative analysis approach; and observes that Igbo toponyms are actually anglicised, following the trend left by the British by adding ‘r’, ‘h’, ‘aw’, etc., with negative effects such as wrong spelling and meanings of Igbo toponyms, loss of history and cultural heritage of the Igbo etc. If this negative sociolinguistic phenomenon is left unchecked, potential loss of some letters of the Igbo alphabet and the Igbo language endangerment, are imminent.