Talk:The symbolic ecology of language
a symbolic ecology that studies the co-existence of languages in a given area (Penz and Fill, 2022)
Another line of investigation derived from the work of the Voegelins and Haugen is the study of topics that include language shift, code-switching, pidginization and creolization. (Fill and Steffensen, 2014, p. 8)
"Part of [a language’s] ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology is sociological: its interaction with the society in which it functions as a medium of communication. The ecology of a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit it to others." (Fill and Steffensen, 2014, p. 8) (Haugen, 2001)
21st century ecolinguists tend to, "argue that the symbolic ecology of language is primarily a matter of micro and macro political processes" (Fill and Steffensen, 2014, p.9) human rights and language rights, language has a "legal personality"
If linguists have sound theoretical and empirical reasons to regard the concept of ‘a language’ as a folk construct, and thus reject essentialist views of what language is, they cannot ignore these reasons merely because they do not fit the political agenda of the language rights movement. The same concern surfaces in Blommaert (2004: 62): “Criticizing the linguistic rights paradigm is not a rejection of linguistic rights, nor a denial of the problems motivating the idea. It is what it is: a critique of scholarly practices.” (Fill and Steffensen, 2014, p. 9)
"By performing English, Maya, Spanish, or Chinese, rather than only learning or using these languages, the protagonists in these data signal to each other which symbolic world they identify with at the time of utterance." (https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/29/4/645/183407)
language as a symbol itself?
"It is not surprising that our worldview should be heavily anthropocentric, and since we as humans happen in language, and language is building material for the world we think we live in, with all of its institutional, cultural and technological extensions (Humboldt, 1820; Sapir, 1929; Whorf, 1956; Imoto, 2005, inter alia), the view of language shared by humans (and, especially, by linguists) is thoroughly biased." (Kravchenko 2016:110, just after talking about Fill & Steffensen 2014)
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This page is missing sources for quotations; for example Crystal, 2000.
