Heritage Languages in the Digital Age

Birte Arendt is a Lecturer at the Institute for German Philology and Director of the Competence Centre for the Teaching of Low German at the University of Greifswald, Germany. Her research interests include regional language teaching, digital language pedagogy, language acquisition in peer interactions and language attitudes. She is currently leading the project Interuniversity Teaching Network: Low German Teaching.Gertrud Reershemius is Professor of Linguistics and Language Contact at Aston University, UK. Her research focuses on pragmatics, language contact and multilingualism with a focus on speakers of smaller or lesser used languages such as Yiddish and Low German. She is particularly interested in mediatisation processes and the study of semiotic landscapes, and she has published widely on these topics.

• ContributorsGertrud Reershemius and Birte Arendt: Introduction: Can Digital Media Help to Prevent Language Shift?Part 1: Shifting IdeologiesChapter 1. Helen Kelly Holmes: Language Ideologies, Digital Technology and Emerging Hierarchies of KnowledgeChapter 2. Marco Tamburelli: Myth Busters: Online Platforms and Emerging Ideological Shift among Lombard SpeakersChapter 3. Laura Zieseler: Focus on Faroese: Digital Insights into the Smallest North-Germanic Language CommunityChapter 4. Merryn Davies Deacon: Breton in the Online Context: A New Speaker Community?Part 2: Digital Tools and PracticesChapter 5. Rhian Hodges and Cynog Prys: Language, Education and Community in a Digital Age: A Welsh Digital Resources Case StudyChapter 6. Birte Arendt and Ulrike Stern: Teaching a Regional Language in Online Courses: A Learner-Oriented Perspective on Agency, Practices and EvaluationPart 3: Multilingual Practices on Social MediaChapter 7. Hauke Heyen: North Frisian in Social Media: Looking for Computer-Mediated Communication in a Very Small LanguageChapter 8. Lysbeth Jongbloed-Faber: Unravelling Language Choice Online: Frisian Bilingual Teenagers on WhatsApp, Snapchat and InstagramChapter 9. Gertrud Reershemius: ‘Moin mitnanner’: Digital Practices and Low German on InstagramYaron Matras: Epilogue: Agency, Ideologies and the Continuum of Language Practices – Towards an Integrated TheoryIndex

This instructive volume unites case studies of a wide range of minority languages that give the reader an impressive overview of the opportunities that digital media and technologies provide. With its examination of communication practices, teaching tools and language ideologies, this volume will be of interest to linguists and graduate students in media linguistics, sociolinguistics and language didactics.