基本説明
Calvet argues that what linguists call "languages" are in fact invented abstractions and instead offers a method of analysing human communication based on the contention that it is a social practice and that languages exist only insofar as they are used by the people who speak them.
Full Description
There are around 5,000 languages spoken across the world today, but the languages that coexist in our multilingual world have varied functions and fulfil various roles. Some are spoken by small groups, a village or a tribe; others, much less numerous, are spoken by hundreds of millions of speakers. Certain languages, like English, French and Chinese, are highly valued, while others are largely ignored. Even if all languages are equal in the eyes of the linguist, the world's languages are in fact fundamentally unequal. All languages do not have the same value, and their inequality is at the heart of the way they are organized across the world. In this major book Louis-Jean Calvet, one of the foremost sociolinguists working today, develops an ecological approach to language in order to analyse the changing structure of the world language system. The ecological approach to language begins from actual linguistic practices and studies the relations between these practices and their social, political and economic environment. The practices which constitute languages, on the one hand, and their environment, on the other, form a linguistic ecosystem in which languages coexist, multiply and influence one another. Using a rich panoply of examples from across the world, Calvet elaborates the ecological approach and shows how it can shed light on the changing forms of language use in the world today.
This path-breaking book will be of great value to students and scholars in linguistics and sociolinguistics and to anyone concerned with the fate of languages in our increasingly globalized world.
Contents
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION: practices and representations
1. The ecology of languages
The need for identity and its linguistic
manifestations: endogenous and exogenous
relexifications
The graphic environment
Dramatic change in a specific linguistic ecology: the example of Australia
The political frontier and the ecolinguistic system
The influence of the horse on European languages 98
A false conception of linguistic ecology: Bickerton's
simulation project
Conclusions
2. The galaxy of languages
Constellations of languages
The galactic model and linguistic policy:
the example of the European Community
The Hindi constellation
The Bambara constellation
The galaxy of writing systems
Conclusions
3. Regulation and change: the homeostatic model
An example of internal regulation: vernacular variants of French
Of ships and languages: from Christopher Columbus to lingua franca
Vernacularization as ecological acclimatization:varieties of French in Africa
African argots and the ecolinguistic niche; the example of Bukavu
Conclusions: acclimatization and acclimatation
4. Linguistic representations and change
Linguistic insecurity and representations: a historical approach
Some theoretical problems: a first approach
Some problems of description
Conclusions
5. Transmission and change
The transmission of first languages and the myth of the mother tongue
The case of creoles: upheaval in the ecolinguistic niche and linguistic change
The transmission of gravitational systems
Conclusion: evolution and revolution
6. Five case studies
One name for several languages: Arabic schizoglossia Several names for one language: the example
of Kituba
One, two or three languages? The example of Serbo-Croat
Kraemer: the invention of French in the socioprofessional context
An ecological niche: the Island of St-Barthélemy
CONCLUSION: Inventing language, giving it a name
Notes
Bibliography
Index
