Abstract
This chapter discusses linguistic and ethnic identity formation in European minority groups, drawn from recent studies on the following cases: (1) Arvanítika speakers in Greece; (2) Alsatian speakers in France; (3) Gaelic speakers in Scotland; (4) Caribbean communities and their descendants in the United Kingdom; (5) the Kasabali in Macedonia; and (6) Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I describe the challenges of linguistic loyalty, vitality and revival that face the Sarajevo Sephardim by comparing and contrasting that community to the six other non- Sephardi cases. The purpose is to see how the other examples are helpful for understanding my case study, or at least seeing its main phenomenological contours.
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Notes
- 1.
The generally accepted definition of the mother tongue—that is, the language spoken in an individual’s home—is obviously not always accurate (since the language spoken at home is not always the first one) and this is why first and second languages might be preferable (cf. Romaine 2005: 19).
- 2.
By ‘loyalty’ toward the ‘mother tongue,’ I have the liveliness of the mother language in mind, that is, the level of spokenness and various generations’ different competencies.
The first time I heard Michael Studemund-Halévy speak about Sephardic and Ashkenazic culture (Wrocłav, 09.05.2016), he quoted sentences from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1978:
Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead.
In this book, I approach the concept of the vitality of a mother language with a similar attitude, that is, that the dying of a mother language is a long, transformative and cyclical process and not the same as a language that no longer exists.
- 3.
A revitalization of a language is typically a process that aims to rescue a dying language, as in the case of Welsh (cf. Jones 1998).
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Rock, J. (2019). Parallel Cases of Linguistic and Ethnic Identity Formation in European Minority Groups. In: Intergenerational Memory and Language of the Sarajevo Sephardim. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14046-5_5
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