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This volume allows 13 besieged languages to tell their own stories by way of their consummate battles with languages that dominate their traditional spaces and ways of thinking. It tells of the value of these languages through linkages with the past and present and where continuation of this might further share those values with wider audiences beyond the current language users. As such, the book captures a discourse on the existence of minority languages in countries and states where they are under threat by the ‘Governing’ language.
This volume allows 13 besieged languages to tell their own stories by way of their consummate battles with languages that dominate their traditional spaces and ways of thinking. It tells of the value of these languages through linkages with the past and present and where continuation of this might further share those values with wider audiences beyond the current language users. As such, the book captures a discourse on the existence of minority languages in countries and states where they are under threat by the Governing language.
This collection considers such issues as the cognitive, linguistic and emotional benefits of speaking two languages, the perceptions, attitudes and issues relating to identity in minority language areas, and the number of grammatical aspects amongst those who speak these minority languages. The premise of the book is based on the fact that these minority languages have, in the past, been in danger of becoming obsolete, mainly because of negative attitudes regarding the benefits of speaking languages that are considered irrelevant internationally. However, in recent times, the benefits of speaking two languages, including where one is a minority language, have been recognised in ways that were not previously understood. Perhaps because of this, alongside the introduction of legislation in some areas in Europe that has been designed to support the preservation of some of these languages, there has been a re-emergence of many minority languages throughout the continent. Questions remain whether this has led to the languages becoming more widely spoken and whether there are specific benefits that can be gained from speaking them. Exploring these questions has led to an increasing amount of research being undertaken on various aspects of bilingualism in minority language areas in Europe. The book contributes to this debate and underlines the relevance and significance of bilingualism in the specific context where European minority languages are still spoken.
The greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece of parodic fiction that plays with Western literary traditions, philosophy, and middle-class Chinese society in the Republican era. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien (á la Emma Bovary), with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.
Employing an approach informed by language ecology and linguistic ethnography, Exploring Multilingual Hawaiʻi examines situated language usage and underlying ideological beliefs to explore and understand Hawaiʻi’s multilingualism. This book begins with a description of the ideologies that developed as a result of contact with the West and then offers analyses that concentrate specifically on the roles of Hawaiian, Pidgin, Japanese, and the languages of Micronesia, and also the occurrence of language mixing in Hawaiian society. Scott Saft’s discussion and analysis underscore how continued exploration of language usage in Hawaiʻi can contribute to our general understanding of multilingualism as a dynamic phenomenon.
Analyses the current state of minority language policy in Western Europe and provides comprehensive, evidence-based policy recommendations.
We live in a world that sees and also contesting ideas of Eurocentrism in the interpretation of various issues, including African literatures and cultures. This book seeks to engage readers into a critical examination of the meaning, history, ambiguity, status and perceptions surrounding African languages and literature. It presents current shifts in form and practice surrounding regional, national, and "e;postcolonial"e; models towards "e;world literature"e; by focusing on African literature as a focal point for understanding perceptions of the world towards African languages and literature. The book shows the importance of wrestling with issues of global aftermaths of slavery, audience, readership, diasporic and transnational connections, as well as digital and social media without undermining the conflicts that literature presents in and on its own merit.
Under the Soviet regime, millions of zeks (prisoners) were incarcerated in the forced labor camps, the Gulag. There many died of starvation, disease, and exhaustion, and some were killed by criminals and camp guards. In 1939, as the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland, many Polish citizens found themselves swept up by the Soviet occupation and sent into the Gulag. One such victim was Julius Margolin, a Pinsk-born Jewish philosopher and writer living in Palestine who was in Poland on family matters. Margolin's Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back offers a powerful, first-person account of one of the most shocking chapters of the violent twentieth century. Opening with the outbreak of World War II in Poland, Margolin relates its devastating impact on the Jews and his arrest and imprisonment in the Gulag system. During his incarceration from 1940 to 1945, he nearly died from starvation and overwork but was able to return to Western Europe and rejoin his family in Palestine. With a philosopher's astute analysis of man and society, as well as with humor, his memoir of flight, entrapment, and survival details the choices and dilemmas faced by an individual under extreme duress. Margolin's moving account illuminates universal issues of human rights under a totalitarian regime and ultimately the triumph of human dignity and decency. This translation by Stefani Hoffman is the first English-language edition of this classic work, originally written in Russian in 1947 and published in an abridged French version in 1949. Circulated in a Russian samizdat version in the USSR, it exerted considerable influence on the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs and was eagerly read by Soviet dissidents. Timothy Snyder's foreword and Katherine Jolluck's introduction contextualize the creation of this remarkable account of a Jewish world ravaged in the Stalinist empire--and the life of the man who was determined to reveal the horrors of the gulag camps and the plight of the zeks to the world.