Julia Sallabank, Language ideologies, practices and policies in New Caledonia, SOAS
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2014-12-01

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This seminar titled "Language ideologies, practices and policies in New Caledonia" was given by Dr Julia Sallabank as part of the Linguistics Department Seminar Series at SOAS, University of London on 10 December 2013.

There are 28 distinct extant Kanak languages in New Caledonia, but rapid cultural and linguistic shift is under way. This paper discusses the circumstances and implications of this shift, and the responses of official bodies and individuals.

Parents, teachers and young people in the Northern Province town of Pouébo report that children now prefer to speak French to the local language, Caac. This is usually blamed on education (which follows the French curriculum) or the Catholic Church, but research has revealed stigmatisation of the language practices of young people. Parents and grandparents complain that children speak ‘deformed Caac’; children respond with reluctance to speak their home language.

New Caledonia is a French territory and until the Nouméa Accord of 1998, Kanak people, their culture and languages were marginalised. Traditional local multilingual practices have been disrupted by colonial policies and urbanisation, and the range of languages now spoken in the capital, Nouméa, is perceived as problematic. The Kanak Languages Academy was founded in 2007: its remit is to codify and promote Kanak languages as ‘languages of culture and of education’. Language policies tend to be top-down, even at community level. They focus on corpus planning, standardisation and orthography development; but the linguists developing materials have little knowledge of social factors in language and literacy, applied linguistics or educational principles.

You can find out more about this event at http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/events/deptseminars/10dec2013-language-ideologies-practices-and-policies-in-new-caledonia.html