Transmitting Minority Languages

Michael Hornsby is Head of the Centre for Celtic Studies in the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is the author of Revitalizing Minority Languages: New Speakers of Breton, Yiddish and Lemko (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and co-editor of New Speakers of Minority Languages: Linguistic Ideologies and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).Wilson McLeod is Professor of Gaelic at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of Gaelic in Scotland: Policies, Movements, Ideologies (2020) and co-editor of Language Revitalisation and Social Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Part I: Intergenerational transmission.- Chapter 2. Tús Maith, A Good Start: Intervention and Intergenerational Transmission in the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht.- Chapter 3. Family language policy in the face of a shrinking community language: Gaelic on the Isle of Lewis.- Part II: Transmission in post-traditional families.- Chapter 4. The transmission of Breton in the family: the effect of family rupture and recomposition.- Chapter 5. The importance of wider community stance for Irish-speaking families in the Gaeltacht.- Part III: Alternatives to ‘traditional’ transmission.- Chapter 6. Native and non-native speakers school language practices and transmission in Upper Lusatia.- Chapter 7. Kura Whakarauora: Flax-roots language planning for families in Aotearoa/New Zealand.- Chapter 8. Peer-to-peer language transmission among adults.- Chapter 9. New ways of looking at minority language transmission from the Basque context.- Chapter 10. Transmission of Breton among immersion-school students: the impact of home language.- Part IV: Transmission in diasporic contexts. Chapter 11. Comparing family language policy in Sweden, Cyprus and Estonia: efforts and choices among Russian-speaking families.- Chapter 12. Effective family language policies and intergenerational transmission of minority languages: Parental language management from autochthonous and diasporic contexts.- Chapter 13. ‘We had to make a choice’: Language management in Italian transnational adoptive.- Chapter 14. Conclusion.- Index.

“This edited volume presents alternative transmission models, bringing together individual and collective language transmission strategies across different geographic areas and endangerment levels. … 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. … 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.” (Daniel Amarelo, Language in Society, Vol. 53 (3), June, 2024)