‘Mucho malo for fascisti’: Languages and Transnational Soldiers in the Spanish Civil War

This article explores the linguistic experiences of transnational soldiers, using the Spanish Civil War as a case study. It argues that communication difficulties provoked by linguistic diversity within the Republican war effort and particularly within the International Brigades, caused the high command to move from a utopian, internationalist policy to a more pragmatic approach. The article evaluates the role played by language intermediaries in this evolving policy and in the wider Republican war effort. Finally, it argues that soldiers grassroots experiences of language contact forged new linguistic forms which underlined a strong sense of shared purpose and identity.     

“Words fail us”: Beckett,Leacock, and Johnson

ABSTRACT

This article will look at political treatments of language in Samuel Beckett’s early novel Watt and place the novel’s linguistic scepticism in conversation with three authors, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the language theorist Felix Mauthner, and the English-born, Canadian parodist Stephen Leacock. The paper will argue that Beckett, like Leacock, engages in Mauthnerian critiques of language, destabilising Johnsonian formulae for language standardisation. But while Leacock fails to develop the political implications of his critique of language, Beckett’s understanding of language standardisation is implicitly political, informed by Johnson’s conception of speech as the predicate of national identity, a standard for inclusion which Watt gleefully antagonises. Challenging nationalist calls for controls on language, Watt interrogates the ways that campaigns for linguistic unity will engender exclusionary attitudes towards the nonconforming and bar access to that speech and identity which falls outside of normative frameworks.     

Cultural attraction, ‘soft power’ and proximity: the popularity of Japanese language in Hong Kong since the 1980s

This paper discusses the cultural attraction, ‘soft power’, and importance of cultural proximity to the popularity of the Japanese language in Hong Kong over the last three decades. Exploration of both primary and secondary sources constitutes the main research methodology employed. Email surveys and face-to-face interviews were undertaken to ascertain the nature and degree of the cultural attraction that stimulates local people's interest in learning Japanese language and culture. The paper concludes that Japan's ‘soft power’, i.e., popular culture and cultural products, are the most influential driving forces behind the popularity of Japanese language in Hong Kong. Also, the Japanese cultural proximity to the Chinese is another factor that excites local people's interest in learning Japanese as a foreign language. In the Hong Kong context, geopolitical and national identity factors do not seem to detract from the popularity of the Japanese language.     

Home stories: immigrant narratives of place and identity in contemporary Ireland

This paper discusses immigrant identity and place in contemporary Ireland. It draws from a longitudinal research project that involved recent immigrants to Ireland. Participants in the project came from 18 different countries, and ranged in age from 22 to 68. Their reasons for moving to Ireland were varied, and included work, adventure, and personal relationships. Combining insights from sociolinguistics and human geography, the paper first considers the different ways in which immigrants to Ireland narrate place and identity, paying particular attention to content and linguistic strategies. It then provides a more detailed discussion of the relationship between immigrant identity and place through a focus on the concept of “home,” highlighting the linguistic strategies and means that immigrants used to discursively construct notions of home and identity in their interviews. The paper concludes by arguing that detailed discourse level analysis of people's narratives of place offers new insights into the relationship between immigrant identity and place.     

Entitlement through numbers: nationality and language categories in the first post‐Soviet census of Kazakhstan*

Abstract. The post‐independence censuses in virtually all post‐Soviet states have become contested tools of nation‐building and ethnic entitlements. No state was politically more determined and psychologically more anxious to conduct its population census than Kazakhstan, in which the eponymous Kazakhs did not constitute a majority. The article points at political and identity pressures that made it inevitable that the first post‐Soviet census produce the ‘right’ numbers and officialise the anticipated majority status of Kazakhs in the multiethnic state. By analysing the census data on language, it shows how the state has constructed a politically desirable form of linguistic reality by altering the established category ‘native language’ in the census. This not only offers a compelling rationale for ethnic and linguistic entitlements, but also seeks to demonstrate the ‘success’ of the state's language policy.     

Globalisation and the decline of national identity? An exploration across sixty‐three countries

The relationship between globalisation and national identity is puzzling. While some observers have found that globalisation reduces people's identification with their nation, others have reached the opposite conclusion. This article explores this conundrum by examining the relationship between globalisation and people's feelings towards national identity. Using data from the International Social Survey Program National Identity II ( 2003 ) and the World Values Survey ( 2005 ), it analyses these relations across sixty‐three countries. Employing a multilevel approach, it investigates how a country's level of globalisation is related to its public perceptions towards different dimensions of national identity. The results suggest that a country's level of globalisation is not related to national identification or nationalism but it is related negatively to patriotism, the willingness to fight for the country and ethnic conceptions of membership in the nation. An examination of alternative explanations indicates that globalisation has a distinct impact on national identity.     

Language as a public good and national identity: Scotland's competing heritage languages

The preservation of one or several historically and culturally important languages may be a salient political issue in some polities. Although they may not be used as an active means of communication, these languages can also serve a symbolic identitary function. These ‘heritage’ languages can be seen as ‘public goods’ and that even non‐speakers of these languages can have opinions regarding their importance to national identity. In the Scotland example, while Gaelic has been the focus of proactive government legislation and education initiatives, Scots is still struggling for status as a recognised language. Both languages are in some way constituent parts of Scottish identity that at times may seem in competition with one another. Using original survey data, we delve deeper into questions of language, identity and politics in Scotland. First, we describe how public opinion is divided over the importance of Gaelic and Scots to Scottish identity. Second, we use attitudes towards these languages as a dependent variable looking at Scottish identity and attachment. Finally, we use these attitudes towards Gaelic and Scots as an independent variable in models for party identification in Scotland.     

NARRATORS OF THE ARCTIC: IMAGES AND MOVEMENTS IN NORTHLAND NARRATIVES

While the use of public policy to construct a Canadian identity has been established in the literature, what is less well understood is whether national identity, once established, might shape Canadians' feelings about these same public policies. This article examines the extent to which citizens' national identities influence their pride in Canada's social security system, and how this relationship may be changing over time. Using data from the International Social Science Programme's 1995 and 2003 National Identity Modules, the article argues that citizens' national identities help explain the contours of social security attitudes in Canada, and that this relationship persists despite significant policy change in the field. Additionally, the paper suggests that political actors may successfully increase public support for their social security policies by “framing” them in ways that appeal to citizens' definitions of Canada.     

Reconciling custom,citizenship and colonial legacies: Ni‐Vanuatu tertiary student attitudes to national identity

Nation‐building remains a key challenge in Vanuatu. From the origins of this new nation in 1980, it was clear that creating a unifying sense of national identity and political community from multiple languages and diverse traditional cultures would be difficult. This paper presents new survey and focus group data on attitudes to national identity among tertiary students in Vanuatu. The survey identifies areas of common attitudes towards nationalism and national identity, shared by both Anglophone and Francophone Ni‐Vanuatu. However, despite the weakening ties between language of education and political affiliation over recent years, the findings suggest that there remain some key areas of strong association between socio‐linguistic background, and attitudes to the nation, and national identity. These findings cast new light on the attitudes of likely future elites towards regional, ethnic, intergenerational and linguistic fault lines in Vanuatu and the challenges of building a cohesive sense of political community and national identity.     

Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity: an investigation of the conversion of national‐identity in Taiwan

National‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. ‘Converts’ usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the ‘awakening’ plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous ‘wrong’ self and a current ‘correct’ self is mentioned, and the ‘awakening’ is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have ‘a self in the making’ which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that ‘awakeners’ usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the ‘grand’ awakening (‘Awakening’). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015     

From Madonna to Marx: Towards a Re‐theorisation of Homelessness

Homeless people, so the story goes, are regularly excluded from spaces of consumption because they offend customers. For a significant portion of homelessness scholarship, such exclusion is the point of departure for subsequent analysis. Others, by examining homelessness within these consumption spaces, theorise that anti‐homeless policies and attitudes emerge because homeless people cannot or have not properly consumed (e.g. nice clothes, housing). This article, conversely, argues that homeless people's “offensiveness” derives from their relation to production (rather than consumption), from their class position. Homeless people's spatial incongruity, specifically, originates in their apparent unproductivity, their violation of the capitalist law of value and its ideological justifications. This historical materialist analysis is not only more revealing, it also positions homeless people as a working class faction in need of political organising rather than an abstract population in need of pitiful charity.     

The right to be heard: Citizenship and language

In this paper we address the importance and contestation of language in terms of citizenship and the development of political communities by focusing on the example of a minority language – British Sign Language. Language is crucial to debates about citizenship and belonging because the State has to rely on language for its very functioning, indeed political practice itself is a form of communicative action. For individuals language is deeply implicated in their ability to claim and maintain their rights and in their affective connections with others and sense of identification. The paper therefore begins by identifying that Deaf people's legal entitlements (e.g. to vote) are an abstract form of citizenship because as sign language users they have difficulties understanding both political and wider civil institutions and practices, and so lack the cultural proficiencies necessary to exercise citizenship in a substantive sense. We then go onto consider citizenship in the broader sense of how groups are included or situated in the public sphere, and in doing so to consider the extent to which Deaf people might be understood to have a liveable place in an oral society. The final section examines how the sense of injustice which flows from Deaf people's experiences of marginalisation in the public realm means that they are developing alternative forms of political commitment predicated on non-state spaces of belonging – where they can live their language – at both local and transnational scales. The paper concludes by reflecting on the notion of differentiated citizenship and the implications of Deaf people's claims to language rights.     

Young people's involvement in policy research

This article reviews the legacy of young people's involvement in policy research in the UK and proposes an approach of collaboration with young people that may be useful in other settings. It critiques the sociocultural and socioeconomic context relevant to young people's involvement in research, using the Young Researcher Network (YRN) as a case study. A key benefit of using the YRN has been the ability to identify and analyse potential barriers and facilitators influencing the relationships of young people and organisations whilst both groups worked together to improve policy. This allowed young people to connect to the policy environment in a meaningful way. The approach has been embedded into The Office for the Children's Commissioner in England, the National Institute for Health Research as well as other leading youth organisations in the UK, which is likely to increase the direct involvement of young people in policy research.     

Sounding “brown”: Everyday aural discrimination and othering

Recent political geographic scholarship has revisited the relevance of banal, everyday nationalism in the context of identity. This article contributes to that literature by focusing more specifically on the role of sound – accent and language – in everyday, banal “othering” and discrimination driven by heightened nationalism. Examining sound, both how it is perceived and experienced, lends insights into how nationalism and exclusion play out in everyday life. Contextualizing and nuancing broader issues of “othering” and discrimination through sound demonstrates that exclusion is not always visual or overt. Based on three years of fieldwork and interviews with Indian Tamils living in the United States, this research examines the banality of nationalism in aural encounters. First, it highlights subtle othering and microaggressions as well as their physical, emotional, and psychological effects. Second, it demonstrates how language and accent can be used to “flag” otherness in ordinary daily interactions and spaces. Third, it shows how attention to aural ‘flagging’ reveals nuance of complex identities often binarized during climates of heightened nationalism. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the impacts of nationalism are embedded in people's daily lives and identities through subtle discriminatory aural encounters.     

Regional Identity in Regional Development and Planning1

This paper analyses the regional identity and social capital formation process and components. Regional identity is the special kind of phenomenon, which forms throughout historical and territorial socialization. The great ambition of this paper is to interrelate Anssi Paasi (1986) and other cultural geographers' and sociologists' ideas with recent regional economic development and planning discussion and to enhance regional identity as a planning tool. The theoretical part describes components and the process of regional identity formation. We assume that regional identity correlates with people's volition in achieving common goals, raises their personal activity and influences due to that regional development and planning. The regional identity is crucial in securing public participation in planning. The empirical part of the paper is based on mass survey analysis.     

Geographic patterns of Zhuang (Tai) kinship terms in Guangxi and border areas: a GIS analysis of language and culture change

Historically-speaking, centuries of interactions between Han Chinese newcomers from the north of China and indigenous Tai-speaking ethnic minorities in the south have left deep, indelible traces in the language and culture of the latter and raise questions of identity and language policy in modern times. The language and culture in this study is Zhuang, one of many Tai languages and the largest minority language in China today. Using kinship terms as an example, we employ the analytical tools of Geographic Information System (GIS) to map and analyze the spatial pattern of sinification of kinship terms and attempt to explain the process of cultural and linguistic interaction that may have led to such distribution in the Zhuang domain. We use published data on Zhuang kinship terms from thiry-four representative locations in Guangxi and border areas (four in eastern Yunnan and one in western Guangdong) and semi-quantify them according to their pronunciations: three for Han-like pronunciations, one for more clearly Zhuang, and two for linguistic forms in between. The spatial pattern of kinship term sinification scores based on interpolation of the sampling locations shows that high degrees of sinification are located in areas close to the coast or international border with Vietnam, with gentle land slope and close proximity to major transportation hubs, reflecting the importance of both physical features and economic development in those areas in facilitating interactions between the two cultures in the sinification process. The degree of sinification of kinship terms also varies with their positions in a family kinship tree, perhaps reflecting Han social customs and male dominance in society more than traditional Tai kinship systems, which are generally more bilateral in nature.     

The student is not the fisherman: temporal displacement of young people's identities in Tanzania

This paper examines how young Tanzanians have their identities as environmental actors displaced into the future by local adults, teachers, educational institutions and teaching materials which seek to educate them about environmental sustainability and conservation. Whilst there has been considerable attention to young people's agency in reproducing their own identities, I argue here that the temporal displacement of young identities operates through a network of interlinked structures which act on young people's lives, including the identity work of young people themselves. Educational material produced by non-governmental organisations and the discursive work of adults both seek to position young people as having agency to act in and make decisions about the environment at an undetermined time in the future. Young people themselves can perform different identities within the space of the school and in the community or family, yet they may also understand their own identities as only having agency at a temporally distant point. The displacement of young identities has important implications for pedagogy which relates to environmental education, and for how the reproduction of young people's identities is conceptualised.     

印尼华裔青少年语言与认同的个案分析--华侨大学华文学院印尼华裔学生的调查研究

本文依据对华侨大学华文学院印尼华裔学生的调查研究,探讨印尼华裔青少年一代的语言环境、语言使用、语言能力及其认同问题.调查表明,印尼华裔学生是以印尼语为主、具有双语或多语能力的语言使用者;虽经数十年的严厉禁止,但他们在印尼现仍有一个使用汉语言文字的环境;他们程度不一地具有汉语方言的能力;他们学习汉语的目的动机与华人身份的认同紧密联系在一起.     

Bodies,Shrines, and Roads: violence, (im)mobility and displacement in Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, gender and national identities intersect to shape people's mobility and security in the context of conflict. This article aims to illustrate the gendered processes of identity construction in the context of competing militarised nationalisms. We contend that a feminist approach is crucial, and that gender analysis alone is insufficient. Gender cannot be considered analytically independent from nationalism or ethno‐national identities because competing Tamil and Sinhala nationalist discourses produce particular gender identities and relations. Fraught and cross‐cutting relations of gender, nation, class and location shape people's movement, safety and potential for displacement. In the conflict‐ridden areas of Sri Lanka's North and East during 1999–2000, we set out to examine relations of gender and nation within the context of conflict. Our specific aim in this article is to analyse the ways in which certain identities are performed, on one hand, and subverted through premeditated performances of national identity on the other hand. We examine these processes at three sites—shrines, roads and people's bodies. Each is a strategic site of security/insecurity, depending on one's gender and ethno‐national identity, as well as geographical location.