Change and Maintenance of Plurilingualism in the Russian Federation and the European Union: Introduction to the Volume

Abstract

Linguistics, anthropology, social sciences and law have treated languages as more or less closed systems. Scholars have been interested in the variation in language and the linguistic behavior of the people that speak particular languages. Some scholars have postulated that all languages are “invented” and questioned the very existence of languages, speech communities and ethnolinguistic groups. This chapter argues that denying the existence of a particular language may also represent denying the identity of members of minority communities, many of which fight for recognition as an independent ethnic and linguistic identity and stresses that in order to understand the processes leading to language attrition and loss of minority linguistic heritage, one has to create theoretical models that join the perspectives of contact linguistics and variation studies with a framework of careful ethnographic study of social identity and status position and critical research into power relations in a context of changing language use.