The New Speakers Blog

I have recently published a book about new speakers of three minority languages: Breton, Yiddish and Lemko. One of my main aims was to demonstrate that certain aspects of “newspeakerness” seem to be common across a number of different situations of language minoritization.

Common features included:

• non-intergenerational acquisition of the language, even though many of the people interviewed for the book had family members who spoke the language in question fluently;
• a struggle over their status as “legitimate speakers”, that is, wider recognition of their speakerhood; and
• a need to establish a sense of ownership of the language they were new speakers of, in order for it to become (one of) “their” language(s).

A reaction I was not expecting to the publication of the book was contestation over its title.

The COST New Speakers Network provided me with an opportunity to participate in the short term scientific mission at the Centre for General Linguistics in Berlin.

I thank Dr Natalia Gagarina (Centre for General Linguistics in Berlin, Germany) and Dr Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic (University of Warsaw, Poland) in particular for their invitation and collaboration on the project.

I have benefited a lot from my visit to the research centre in Berlin.

Working under the guidance of and in collaboration with Natalia and Agnieszka was a great experience for me - I had a chance to access and acquire new knowledge in terms of theories, concepts and methods, to gain and share research expertise.