Leena Huss & Sari Pesonen
”Revitalisering i praktiken – samlad kunskap för den som vill återta sitt språk”
Språkgemenskapernas och individernas eget engagemang är avgörande för lyckad revitalisering. Arbetet inom språkgemenskaperna stärker enskildas förutsättningar att bruka och återta språken samtidigt som det uppmuntrar och inspirerar allt fler att engagera sig. Men det finns ett uppenbart behov av samlad kunskap om revitalisering, olika metoder att revitalisera ett språk och ”best practices” för att stödja engagemanget och det språkrevitaliserande arbetet inom språkgemenskaperna. I detta föredrag presenteras en ny publikation som diskuterar språkrevitalisering och dess olika former men också insatser som kan göras för att vända på språkbytesprocessen. Publikationen baserar sig dels på allmän kunskap, forskning och beprövad erfarenhet, dels på olika typer av revitaliseringsinsatser som genomförts och olika typer av metoder som använts i revitaliseringsarbete i Sverige och utomlands.
Carola Kleemann & Kristin Nicolaysen
“Kven Language Between Generations”
Within families of Kven descent, efforts are made to pass on the Kven language and other cultural heritage, along with connections to places and practices that represent a Kven past, present, and future for them. Language transmission between generations is often overshadowed by institutional language practices and strict ideals of strong language models. Within the framework of everyday life, where the majority language is very dominant, a more sustainable practice may be to consider the multilingual reality of the generations.
We have based this presentation on two short films from the video material "Isä and Aftenstjernen," which shows how isä, the grandfather Egil Sundelin, in various situations works to pass on his Kven mother tongue to his grandson, Iver Isak, or Iiveripoika. The film and language vitalisation project started when Iver Isak was four years old, and his grandfather was 72. Today, they are 11 and 79, respectively, and they are still in the midst of their story about the transmission of cultural heritage.
Filmmaker, and mother to Iver Isak, Kristin Nicolaysen, films and facilitates the meetings/episodes, where the relationship between the generations, the use of Kven words and concepts, and the different material conditions of the places become visible. The meetings between isä and his grandson provide insights into a type of encounters that are both sociocultural and sociomaterial. Based on analyses of the film recordings, language researcher Carola Kleemann examined how the Kven words and concepts are transmitted as a sustainable translingual pedagogy, anchored in Kven places and the practices of these places.
As the borders between researchers and participants are blurred, dialogues between the participants about the language project and the film recordings are a central part of the method and material. Our presentation is a narrative about language learning and cultural learning where the relationship between the generations and the place are central.
Dieter W. Halwachs
“Plurality, (Re)Vitalisation, and AI”
Out of the approximately 8,200 languages documented in Glottolog based on linguistic criteria, around 7,000 are currently in use. While less than 1% of these languages dominate, over 99% are endangered. 53% are potentially endangered because another dominant official language expands into everyday and private domains. Due to declining language transmission, 34% are definitely endangered, 7% are severely endangered, and 5% are critically endangered. These 12% of severely and critically endangered languages require revitalisation measures to ensure their use.
Revitalisation concerns strengthening or reactivating a language in private and everyday domains and attempts to emancipate it in public life. However, the latter is rarely revitalisation but often vitalisation, which focuses on a language's symbolic rather than communicative functions; most endangered languages have never been used formally. In individual cases, this can go so far that new public-symbolic functions are established, and, in contrast, everyday and private life communicative functions continue to decline or are increasingly taken over by another dominant language.
As ChatGPT states that artificial Intelligence holds significant potential for language revitalisation, the second part of the presentation tries to evaluate and discuss this claim based on facts and examples presented in the first part.
Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi
“Linguistic variation and language revitalization”
The purpose of this talk is to explore linguistic variation in the context of language revitalisation. Many endangered and minoritised languages are characterized by regional, intergenerational, situational, and free grammatical variation. They are often not fully standardised and may contain loanwords from a majority language or be subject to code-switching (e.g., Lainio & Wande, 2015; Paunonen, 2018). Furthermore, new speakers (for example, young people reclaiming and learning the language of their ancestors) use language differently from older generations (cf. Sallabank, 2018). Variation poses a challenge to language revitalisation: How do we approach variation when producing materials for language learning and revitalisation? What kind of language should grammars and textbooks contain? Should we perhaps allow or encourage variation in published documents and media? I will discuss these questions from a wider global and theoretical perspective, and illustrate different types of variation using Meänkieli, a minoritised Finno-Ugric language spoken in Sweden, as a case study.
