Higher Speaker Density Conference

Professor Conchúr Ó Giollagáin delivered the keynote address at the International Conference on Territories of Higher Speaker Density in Minoritised Language Communities on the 16th and 17th of October in the Basque Country, in which he recommended that the policy focus on minority institutions in recent decades now should be replaced with a sociologically informed approach to the real-world issues of minority communities.

The talk expanded on the following abstract:

"Academic and official approaches in recent decades to language promotion have been an obstacle to minority-language vernacular community protection. Much of contemporary language policy and planning simply ignores or is in denial about the ubiquitous societal decline of minority vernacular communities. In response to demise, this paper sets out: a) a new theoretical framework by which we can interpret the minority-language societal condition and, b) inform strategic approaches to minority-language promotion with sufficient vernacular community protection, i.e. develop socially meaningful language revitalisation. This new conceptualisation of ethnolinguistic vitality reassesses minority-language sustainability from an interactional social dynamic framework. Ethnolinguistic vitality from this perspective entails four foundational developmental stages: 1) primary socialisation; 2) secondary socialisation; 3) civic reinforcement; and 4) socio-political processes leading to coherence in perceptions of collective identity. Progression individually and collectively through these stages is key to a language community’s capacity to develop and bolster its societal sustainability. Successful language policy is dependent, therefore, on the cultural, political and institutional ability of a language group to align strategies with pressures of societal change, interactional processes, and social dynamics which are foundational to a language group’s ethnolinguistic vitality. The policy focus on minority institutions in recent decades now should be replaced with a sociologically informed approach to the real-world issues of minority communities."

You can see the full presentation in the video below.

Euskal Herria also has a written report on the presentation which is available in English through auto-translation.