This edited volume presents alternative transmission models, bringing together individual and collective language transmission strategies across different geographic areas and endangerment levels. By focusing on critical aspects of minoritization and revitalization, this book explores the sociolinguistic complexity of language transmission through and beyond the family. The need to rethink ‘success’ when transmitting minoritized and heritage languages, the importance of language ideological work against sociolinguistic nostalgia and nativism, and the all-encompassing role of community are at the centre.
Alternative transmission models are part of language policy and planning debates and are thought as counteractants to reverse language shift from contemporary, superdiverse positions. Cassie Smith-Christmas & Orlaith Ruiséal include in those models local, embodied senses of language usage in supporting families to transmit Irish in the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht. Also, Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin touches upon the contrast between Gaeltacht areas and isolated Irish-speaking families in terms of social support for the Irish language, including both fluent habitual speakers and the wider community with attention to beliefs about Irish vitality. In the case of Scottish Gaelic, Michelle Macleod shows other relatives and community members’ support to parents on the Isle of Lewis, while, in the case of Guernesiais, Julia Sallabank defends adult peer-to-peer transmission of the language, whose adult learners and potential reactivating and new speakers represent the strategy for survival. Case studies from Brittany analyse how family rupture and recomposition impacts upon language transmission by changing family language policies (Katell Chantreau & Stefan Moal), and how Breton-medium education relates to the positive impact of home language in producing Breton morphophonological features (Holly Kennard). From the community of practice framework, Nicole Dołowy-Rybińska explores the relationship between German and Upper Sorbian speakers in Lusatia, where Catholic community life is one of the only ways to become a new speaker of this minority language. Similarly, ethnic identification becomes an important factor driving language choice between English and Māori in New Zealand (Vincent Ieni Olsen-Reeder).
Regarding newspeakerism and language socialization theories, the Galician and Basque contexts are explored in Paula Kasares, Ane Ortega, & Estibaliz Amorrortu's chapter on holistic approaches to Basque speakers’ activation and intergenerational transmission, looking at different life stages and community actors; and in Anik Nandi, Ibon Manterola, Facundo Reyna-Muniain, & Paula Kasares’ chapter on new speakers parents’ role as policymakers and language planners at home in terms of collective language governmentality. Sviatlana Karpava, Natalia Ringblom, & Anastassia Zabrodskaja tackle the transmission of Russian as a heritage language in Cyprus, Estonia, and Sweden, tied to language commodification and to parents’ language attitudes. In that sense, a particular but different dynamic in language transmission is the adoption of children as a trigger for multilingual family language policies (Alice Fiorentino).
In sum, Transmitting Minority Languages engages with post-vernacularity and both intra- and intergenerational transmission from community and critical outlooks, posing the insufficiency of census data and macro approaches. While most data are based on questionnaires and interviews from case studies, some ethnographic detail is present in some of the chapters. With this book, the reader will be able to rethink the social valuation of minoritized languages usage and the inherent diversity to their transmission practices and discourses.
