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The following thesis in library- and information science is a qualitative, comparative analysis of the relationship between the minority populations in Sweden and Finland and the library. The objective with the thesis is to investigate how the state is working to promote minority groups at the library and what lead to today’s situation. The investigation starts, as regards time, with the European charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which was published 1992 and ends with the establishment of the Swedish library law 2014. The method that is used will be a comparative analysis that aims to compare Sweden and Finland. The study is based on Edmund Dahlströms theories regarding ideologies and politics that have been ruling society’s social and legal framework for minorities. The analysis consists of one chapter where both comparison and conclusions are included. It’s discovered that Sweden and Finland have a similar legislation regarding minority languages, with the exception that Finland doesn’t have a universal legislation for the national minorities and therefore, to a degree, excludes the territorially boundless minorities. This is also the case in their library law. Sweden has in their new library law a paragraph where the national minorities are included. This despite the fact that Finland had a system for national minorities before Sweden, who started working towards that first until after the European charted had been decreed.

Contemporary media audiences expect to be able to interact with content, but in a minority language context, audience participation presents challenges related to audiences’ linguistic confidence. This thesis focuses on Wales, where media producers have suggested that audiences are often reluctant to interact with broadcast and online content in Welsh. To begin to understand this unwillingness, and how it might be overcome, the concept of willingness to participate (WTP) is coined as an extension of willingness to communicate (McCroskey & Baer 1985). First, interviews with producers are analysed qualitatively to identify potential influences on audiences’ WTP. The analysis aims to assess the relative importance of various factors: audiences’ feelings of apprehension, self‐perceived competence, language background and Welsh language ability, as well as the modality of participation (oral/written) and the level of demand placed on the audience. Second, a questionnaire is designed and administered to 358 Welsh speakers, to examine audiences’ perceptions of different opportunities to participate in media content. A path model of WTP is proposed and tested using quantitative data from the survey. The results support the hypothesis that audiences’ apprehension and self‐perceived competence predict WTP and that audience response varies according to the media context. While audiences’ Welsh language skills are important in explaining their WTP, other aspects of language background, such as Welsh language acquisition context, are found to be less important. Third, the survey sample is grouped according to common patterns of WTP, to test whether the above effects are consistent across the population or whether different ‘types’ of audience exist. Using a combination of cluster analysis and thematic analysis of audience comments, four types of audience are proposed and described in detail. Finally, implications for sociolinguistic theory, language maintenance and media production practice are considered and recommendations made.

The study investigates prediction factors of children's proficiency in Russian among children from Russian-speaking families in Saskatchewan. For that purpose, 5-7 year old children and their parents were interviewed about their language use, proficiency, and language attitudes, as well as children's Russian language proficiency was measured and compared to monolingual children in Russia.

Over the last few decades, minority language issues have been attracting increasing attention in the media, among academics, and in the affairs of national governments and international organizations. Nowhere has this been truer than in the European Union, where concern over the ‘endangered languages crisis’ has led to an increasing awareness of Europe’s small languages and of the challenges they face in a globalised, English-dominated linguistic marketplace. A more tangible outcome of this concern has been a growth in rhetoric within EU institutions advocating a general respect for multilingualism and linguistic diversity, and a series of support measures and resolutions designed to guarantee this. Despite the widespread rhetoric of concern and support, however, in terms of concrete legislation there is still a wide gap between debate and policy in Europe, and until now it has been left unclear to what extent this gap is actually affecting the vitality and prospects of individual minority languages. This dissertation addresses this question by analysing how the European Union, both in the by-products of the integration process and in its deliberate rhetoric of support, is impacting the vitality of three specific minority language communities: Galician in Spain, Corsican in France and Sorbian in Germany. Drawing upon research collected via sociolinguistic surveys in these communities, it attempts to gauge whether Europe as an integrated entity is positively or negatively affecting the prospects of minority languages within its borders; if member state policies toward their minorities have been positively swayed by European rhetoric; if minority language speakers themselves see a positive effect on language use from European policy and promotion; and whether the role of English as a necessary lingua franca inside and outside Europe is eroding the position of the minority languages as the second language of choice. Quantitative and qualitative analysis on the survey results indicate that unfortunately, despite the amount of attention these minority languages receive from both government and media, language decline seems to show no sign of abating in any of these communities, and indeed the actions of the EU are apparently having very little impact on individual language situations. In addition, the survey indicates that hostile or indifferent member state policy is continuing to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to minority language maintenance in Europe. From this perspective it seems reasonable to assess that the EU has in effect failed at what it claims to be trying to achieve, namely to provide a social and political climate that is favourable to minority language maintenance, and to assume that if this is the case in these three communities it is likely to be the case across Europe. With this in mind, the study concludes with the recommendation that the EU reconsider its involvement in language matters across the board, particularly in its current working-language structure and the reluctance to put some force of law behind its minority language support, and cautions that without this, the EU will likely face the imminent erosion of much of the very diversity upon which it has been built.

The present study deals with the current phenomenon of the revitalisation of the Breton language. The work is divided into three parts. The first presents a theoretical basis to the following parts. The second is devoted to Breton in a larger context and it contains the following: the language policy in France, information about Brittany and its languages, and the evolution of using the Breton. The core of the work is the last part, which is based on an ethnological field research that the author carried out in the years 2008 and 2011 among students of Breton at the university of Rennes 2. Its aim is to illustrate the studied phenomenon by the concete stories of his actors. One of its main results is the confirmation of the hypothesis about the symbolic importance of Breton as one of the basic pillars of the Breton identity. The sources of this study are, apart from the research mentioned above, French, Czech and English secondary resources.

The Right to Use a Minority Language in European Law Key words Minority languages, European Union, Council of Europe Summary The purpose of my thesis is to describe and analyse the right to use minority languages in the Council of Europe and in the European Union. The change of lifestyle and globalisation lead to the increased pressure on the European minority languages, from which many occur in the Atlas of the Worlds' Languages in Danger published by UNESCO. It is the description of the starting points and possibilities of the law protection, primarily on the ground of the two above mentioned international organisations that could reverse a rather unfavourable development in this area, which form the basis of this paper. The attention is paid to the positive rights of so called traditional minorities; the prohibition of discrimination is mentioned only marginally, as well as the problem of migrants' languages and related topics. First part of the thesis is focused on the description of bases of the language law and politics and their relation to the protection of (national) minorities, whose part is the right to use minority languages, as well as the analysis of the single components of this right. First chapter brings an overview of the legal regulation of minority rights in the context of the European...

La situation sociolinguistique du Chili, historiquement marquée par un processus de glottophagie (Calvet, 1974, 1997, 1999), place actuellement le mapudungun parmi les langues originaires minorisées de cet Etat-Nation officiellement monolingue (espagnol). Le statut de cette langue mapuche et l’abandon progressif de sa transmission intergénérationnelle posent la question de sa «revitalisation» (Hinton & Hale, 2001 ; Costa, 2010) au sein de mouvements militants. Cette thèse de doctorat se fonde sur une recherche ethnographique et collaborative au long cours dans un contexte d’enseignement/apprentissage du mapudungun en direction d’un public urbain de jeunes adultes de Santiago du Chili. Analyser les pratiques pédagogiques contemporaines au sein d’un mouvement militant mapuche et en dégager des pistes pour la didactique des langues minoritaires ont constitué les objectifs prioritaires de cette recherche. Il ressort que l’enseignement du mapudungun, comme celui d’autres langues minoritaires, concerne autant la praxis d’une didactique contextualisée que la prise en compte, dans cette même perspective, d’une tension entre tradition vs modernité qu’il s’agit d’intégrer pleinement à la réflexion didactique pour que le parler des «gens de la terre» ait quelque chance de devenir aussi celui des «gens du bitume». / The sociolinguistic situation of Chile, which has been historically marked by a process of glottophagia (Calvet, 1974, 1997, 1999), now regards mapudungun as one of the native minority languages of this officially monolingual Nation­state (Spanish). The status of the mapuche language and the progressive loss of its intergenerational transmission have raised the question of “revitalization” (Hinton & Hale, 2001; Costa, 2010) among militant movements. This Ph.D study conducts a long­term ethnographical collaborative research on mapudungun learning/teaching contexts for an audience of young urban adults from the city of Santiago de Chile. To analyse contemporary educational practices within a militant mapuche movement and to establish new avenues of research for the didactics of minority languages were the priority objectives of this research.It appears that the teaching of mapudungun, as well as that of the other minority languages, concerns both the praxis of contextualized didactics, and the consideration, in the same prospect, of a tension between tradition and modernity, a question that should be fully integrated in the didactic reflection, so that the language of “the people of the earth” might also become that of “the people of the asphalt”.

This study focuses on the representations of the Gallo language spoken in the Eastern part of Brittany among elder native speakers (group 1) and students of Gallo (group 2). Jones & Singh (2005) and Williams (2000) both stress the importance of an asserted community identity for language transmission and the active involvement of community members in the revitalization process. In light of these two studies and the revitalization models proposed by Grenoble & Whaley (2005), the present research establishes that, in order to obtain a more appropriate and possibly successful revitalization program, it is necessary to consult and probe the approval of native speakers of Gallo. Informants from both groups show little involvement in language planning activities; in contrast, revitalization efforts in the last decades have increased within associative and militant groups. Based on the findings of Jones & Singh (2005) and Williams (2000) on Jersey Norman French and Welsh respectively, this study provides evidence that Gallo is on the verge of achieving a different status. The framework used for the fieldwork was adapted from Boas TGPD project on Texas German (2001). Most of the interviews were conducted in a private setting. Two groups of individuals were involved in this study: older, native speakers (41) and students (17), and half of the respondents participated in a follow-up interview (1-2 hours). The results of field research on language attitudes show a positive Gallo identity: 50% of the native speakers answered that Gallo was part of their identity as much as French and 78.6% of the students selected the same statement. Only 20% of group 1 and 21.4% of group 2 declared that Gallo was not an important part of their identity. In the same set of questions on identity and representations, 90% of group 1 and 85.7% of group 2 expressed positive linguistic attitudes when asked whether or not speaking and/or understanding Gallo was valuable. Overall, above 80% of the informants think that the knowledge of Gallo is an advantage. This research demonstrates that the speech community expresses a more positive Gallo identity than expected, one of the main factors necessary to secure language maintenance. / text