This book offers a critical sociolinguistic perspective on language revitalisation. It is based on the author's 2010 PhD dissertation, which compared the Provençal revitalisation movement to the Scots revitalisation movement, but this volume focuses only on Provençal, allowing the author to go into some historical depth.
The book's eleven chapters are divided into three sections. The first section examines various academic approaches to the study of language revitalisation. The author argues that the core tenets of language revitalisation research have not been properly interrogated and that the tendency to focus on how to diagnose and treat language endangerment is restrictive. He proposes that endangerment and revitalisation are ‘processes of social contact’ and their narratives should be studied as such. The author sees language revitalisation as ‘a struggle over classifications’ through which social movements create minority and majority groups, rather than simply representing existing ones. It is fundamentally political and often acts as a proxy for other claims.
The second section explores the history of the Provençal revitalisation movement. Chapter 5 discusses the context of the movement, while also asking questions about how research should usefully approach the contextualisation of language revitalisation movements, given the danger of treating context as a given and not subjecting narratives offered by various stakeholders to analysis. Chapter 6 discusses how language and nationalism were entwined in the creation of the French state, and chapter 7 shows how the Provençal revitalisation movement adopted this ideological framework to create its charter myth. The author argues that this illustrates how majority and minority groups are created through discourse and how revitalisation movements must borrow ideological frames from the dominant social group in order to engage with it. Chapter 8 examines how the majority/minority division is fractally reproduced in ideological struggles within the Provençal revitalisation movement.
The third section of the book deals with the question of legitimacy, which Costa demonstrates is central to the Provençal revitalisation movement. He discusses the cases of the ‘traditional speaker’ and of children educated through Occitan, both of whom occupy an ambiguous position in the movement, being alternately used as figureheads and criticised for perceived ideological or linguistic shortcomings. The author argues that the decline in the number of traditional speakers does not herald a waning in importance of the question of legitimacy but rather that the definition of ‘legitimate language’ will be reshaped in response to changing demographics.
Costa concludes that language revitalisation is a classification dispute that is not inward-focused but rather seeks to redefine relations with a ‘majority’. It is not a problem to be solved but rather a constantly changing social process, of which disputes over legitimacy are a key aspect. This book provides a valuable contribution to the literature on language revitalisation, offering a detailed insight into the evolution of the Provençal revitalisation movement and raising important questions for all linguists and linguistic anthropologists about how we theorise and study language revitalisation.
