Recent macrolinguistic surveys

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 507.

The previous section dealt with surveys produced within a framework developed by practitioners of the new discipline of sociolinguistics, but sociolinguistics is, of course, by no means confined to Labovian urban dialectology. A quite different, macrolin-guistic type of study also developed during the 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of sociolinguists. Studies of this latter kind seek, broadly speaking, to answer the question: Who speaks what, about what subjects, where, when, to whom, etc.? Some investigators have worked with second-hand data obtained from government censuses, etc., but more recently the need has been felt for more precise, theoretically sounder surveys carried out by experts.

One of the best-known such surveys is that carried out by the Linguistic Minorities Project, financed by the British Department of Education and Science. This project was concerned with the newer minority languages of the United Kingdom – those used by originally immigrant communities from Asia, the European continent and else-where. Earlier surveys (e.g. by the Inner London Education Authority in 1978; ILEA 1979) had revealed the complexity of the linguistic situation in the schools of London and other British cities, and in addition had increased awareness of the educational consequences of failure to develop positive policies to deal with the many minority languages involved. The Linguistic Minorities Project commenced operation in 1980 and conducted questionnaire-based studies in several cities, dealing mainly with school-age subjects. The questionnaires sought to establish: patterns of usage (fluency, frequency and domain of selection of each available laguage, etc.); nomenclature; literacy; attitudes (including attitudes to the use of the languages in education and to their possible status as examination subjects), etc. As a result of the findings of these studies, various educational programmes were instigated or altered in character, generally in the direction of providing more encouragement for and recognition of the home languages of students from immigrant/ minority backgrounds.

Issues of this kind have also been exam-ned in countries and communities where bilingualism/multilingualism is common and where the status and domain distribution of the various languages is different, e.g., in Wales (Council for the Welsh Language/Cyngor yr Iaith Gymraeg 1978) and Canada (Cauldwell 1982). There is still scope and need for many other such studies and for programmes (educational, planning in the media, etc.) based on their results.

M.Nk

Suggestions for further reading

Ferguson, C.A. and Heath, S.B. (eds) (1981)

Language in the USA, Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Francis, W.N. (1983) Dialectology, London: Longman.

Trudgill, P.J. (ed.) (1984) Language in the British Isles, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-