Unger Johann Wolfgang. The Discursive Construction of the Scots Language: Education, Politics and Everyday Life

John Benjamins, 2013. — 178 pages. — (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture). — ISBN: 978-90-272-7134-1In this book it is examined how the Scots language has been talked and written about in a variety of contexts in the past twenty years. I do this by presenting a textual analysis of various ‘official’ written documents produced in connection with Scots, and of focus groups comprised of Scottish people. The purpose of this analysis is to establish how Scots is discursively constructed, both from ‘above’ (through elite, educational and bureaucratic discourses) and from ‘below’ (through the discourses of ‘ordinary people’). Th ultimate aims of my research are to contribute to the body of knowledge about contemporary Scots, and to expand the range of possible applications for critical discursive approaches to language policy and national identity.Overview
Why research the Scots language
Research design
Terminology
The Scots language in context
What is Scots?
The historical development of Scots
Scholarly research on Scots
Studying language policy from a discursive perspective
Thoretical and methodological influences
Diffrent levels of theory
Critical discourse analysis (CDA)
Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic capital’ and the ‘linguistic market’
Bakhtin’s notions of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘dialogicality’
Critical approaches to language policy (CALP)
From theoretical concepts to objects of investigation
Selection of written texts
Focus groups
Summary: From eclectic theories to cohesive framework
‘Top-down’ discourse on Scots at the start of the Twenty-fist Century
Four salient texts
Fields: Th socio-political context
Genres: What kinds of texts?
Contents: What do the texts say?
Discursive strategies and their linguistic realisations
Summary: Intertextual and interdiscursive links
Voices ‘from below’: Strategic ambivalence
Analysis of focus groups
Design and composition of the focus groups
Languages and language varieties
Th challenges of written and spoken Scots in the Lancaster focus group
Genre, field and the prompts in the Fife focus group
Discourse topics
Conclusion: Ambivalent attitudes
The political present and future of the Scots language
What happens next?
The growing political profie of Scots: Parliamentary groups and roles
The audit
The survey
The Ministerial Working Group report
The Aye Can campaign
The Curriculum for Excellence
A policy-sea change
Manufacturing and maintaining constructions of Scots
Summary of findings
Challenges and opportunities for Scots
The final word