Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T18:08:23.930Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘People here speak five languages!’: The reindexicalization of minority language practice among Carinthian Slovenes in Vienna, Austria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2014

Anna Weichselbraun
Anna Weichselbraun*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article investigates the transformation of minority language practice in the light of changing European language ideologies. Following a group of young Carinthian Slovenes from their rural hometowns to the capital of Vienna, this article analyzes their metadiscursive commentary about place and language in order to show how local language ideologies structure the indexical orders under which these individuals learn to assign meaning to linguistic practice. The data I present illustrates that these young members of a rurally stigmatized linguistic minority experience a transformation of their language-associated personhood in Vienna. There, their bilingualism allows them to be cosmopolitan participants in a European vision of mobile multilingual citizenship, while simultaneously troubling the language hierarchies erased by European language ideologies. (Linguistic minority, language ideology, indexical order, chronotopes, multilingualism, Carinthian Slovenes, Austria, Europe)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , September 2014 , pp. 421 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agha, Asif (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23(3):231–73.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif (2007). Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. Language & Communication 27(3):320–35.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict R. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
APA (2011). Staatssekretär Josef Ostermayer: ‘Die beste Lösung für alle Menschen in Kärnten und Österreich’. Austria Presse Agentur-OTS.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1998). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Barker, Thomas Mack, & Moritsch, Andreas (1984). The Slovene minority of Carinthia. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Beck, Ulrich, & Grande, Edgar (2007). Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan; Collins;, James & Slembrouck, Stef (2005). Spaces of multilingualism. Language & Communication 25(3):197–216.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). The forms of capital. In Richardson, John G. (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, 241–58. New York: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Cavanaugh, Jillian R. (2009). Living memory: The social aesthetics of language in a northern Italian town. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Davidson, Deanna (2007). East spaces in West times: Deictic reference and political self-positioning in a post-socialist East German chronotope. Language & Communication 27(3):212–26.Google Scholar
Dick, Hilary Parsons (2011). Language and migration to the United States. Annual Review of Anthropology 40(1):227–40.Google Scholar
Eisenlohr, Patrick (2004). Temporalities of community: Ancestral language, pilgrimage, and diasporic belonging in Mauritius. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(1):81–98.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan (2005). Language ideologies compared. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):23–37.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan (2006a). Contradictions of standard language in Europe: Implications for the study of practices and publics. Social Anthropology 14(2):163–81.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan (2006b). Migration, minorities and multilingualism: Language ideologies in Europe. In Mar-Molinero, Clare & Stevenson, Patrick (eds.), Language ideologies, policies, and practices: Language and the future of Europe, 13–27. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan (2011). Polyglot nationalism: Alternative perspectives on language in 19th century Hungary. Langage et Société 136:31–54.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan (2012). Sociolinguistic regimes and the management of ‘diversity’. In Duchêne, Alexandre & Heller, Monica (eds.), Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit, 22–42. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, & Irvine, Judith T. (1995). The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research 62(4):967–1001.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, & Ann Woolard, Kathryn (2001). Languages and publics: The making of authority. Manchester: St. Jerome.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Robert D. (2004). Language and identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haas, Hanns, & Stuhlpfarrer, Karl (1977). Österreich und seine Slowenen. Vienna: Löcker & Wögenstein.Google Scholar
Inoue, Miyako (2002). Gender, language, and modernity: Toward an effective history of Japanese women's language. American Ethnologist 29(2):392–422.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T., & Gal, Susan (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Kroskrity, Paul V. (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, 35–83. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Karner, Stefan (2006). Die Bemühungen zur Lösung des Kärntner Minderheitenproblems 2005. Die Ortstafelfrage aus Expertensicht. Eine kritische Beleuchtung, 81–110. Klagenfurt: Land Kärnten.Google Scholar
Klemenčič, Matjaž, & Klemenčič, Vladimir (2010). Die Kärntner Slowenen und die Zweite Republik: Zwischen Assimilierungsdruck und dem Einsatz für die Umsetzung der Minderheitenrechte. Klagenfurt: Hermagoras Verein.Google Scholar
Knight, Robert (2005). The Carinthian Slovenes. In Breuning, Eleonore C. M., Dr. Lewis, Jill, & Pritchard, Gareth (eds.), Power and the people: A social history of Central European politics, 1945–56, 110–29. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Koven, Michele (2013). Antiracist, modern selves and racist, unmodern others: Chronotopes of modernity in Luso-descendants' race talk. Language & Communication. Online: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0271530913000281.Google Scholar
LINEE (2010). Challenges of multilingualism in Europe: Core findings of the LINEE network of excellence—Final Report. Bern: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern.Google Scholar
Malle, Augustin (2011). Der Widerstand der Kärntner Slowenen im historischen Gedächtnis. In Entner, Brigitte, Malle, Augustin, & Sima, Valentin (eds.), Widerstand gegen Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus im Alpen-Adria-Raum: internationale Tagung; Klagenfurt/Celovec 24.-25.2.2011: Odpor proti fašizmu in nacizmu v alpsko-jadranskem prostoru, 65–83. Klagenfurt: Drava.Google Scholar
Moore, Robert (2011). Standardization, diversity and enlightenment in the contemporary crisis of EU language policy. King's College London Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 74. Online: https://scholar.gse.upenn.edu/moore/files/moore_2011d_eu_language_policy_kcl_wp.pdf.Google Scholar
Moritsch, Andreas, & Domej, Teodor (1996). Austria Slovenica: Die Kärntner Slovenen Und Die Nation Österreich. Klagenfurt: Hermagoras.Google Scholar
ORF (2006). Haider verrückte Ortstafeln in Bleiburg. ORF. Online: http://ktnv1.orf.at/stories/88204; accessed 11 September 2013.Google Scholar
Reiterer, Albert F. (1996). Kärntner Slowenen, Minderheit oder Elite? Neuere Tendenzen der ethnischen Arbeitsteilung. Klagenfurt: Drava.Google Scholar
Reiterer, Albert F. (2004). The Slovene language in Carinthia – Symbolic bilingualism. Razprave in Gradivo 43:186–201.Google Scholar
Rindler Schjerve, Rosita, & Vetter, Eva (2012). European multilingualism: Current perspectives and challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2003a). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3–4):193–229.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2003b). The whens and wheres—as well as hows—of ethnolinguistic recognition. Public Culture 15(3):531–57.Google Scholar
Austria, Statistik (2003). Volkszählung 2001, Hauptergebnisse I – Kärnten. Vienna: Statistik Austria.Google Scholar
Austria, Statistik (2013a). Bevölkerung zu Jahresbeginn seit 2002 nach zusammengefasster Staatsangehörigkeit – Kärnten. Vienna: Statistik Austria.Google Scholar
Austria, Statistik (2013b). Bevölkerung zu Jahresbeginn seit 2002 nach zusammengefasster Staatsangehörigkeit – Wien. Vienna: Statistik Austria.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Patrick (2006). ‘National’ languages in transnational contexts: Language, migration and citizenship in Europe. In Mar-Molinero, Clare & Stevenson, Patrick (eds.), Language ideologies, policies, and practices: Language and the future of Europe, 147–61. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
van Avermaet, Piet (2009). Fortress Europe? Language policy regimes for immigration and citizenship. In Hogan-Brun, Gabrielle, Mar-Molinero, Clare, & Stevenson, Patrick (eds.), Discourses on language and integration: Critical perspectives on language testing regimes in Europe, 15–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn (2008). Language and identity choice in Catalonia: The interplay of contrasting ideologies of linguistic authority. In Süselbeck, Kirsten, Mühlschlegel, Ulrike, & Masson, Peter (eds.), Lengua, nación e identidad: La regulación del plurilingüismo en Espana y América Latina. Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut P.K.Google Scholar
WZ Online & Austria Presse Agentur (2006). Haider: ‘Kärnten wird einsprachig’ – Inseratenkampagne in der Rabiatphase des Wahlkampfs. Wiener Zeitung. Online: http://www.wienerzeitung.at/dossiers/wahlen/oesterreich/282578_Haider-Kaernten-wird-einsprachig.html.Google Scholar
Zupančič, J. (1993). Socialgeographic transformation and national identity: The case of the Slovene minority in Carinthia (Austria). GeoJournal 30(3):231–34.Google Scholar