Languages are closely connected with politics, societies, and cultures. They express and reconfirm cultural-cognitive models and attitudes, they share a common communicative space in multilingual habitats, and choices from among them signal differences in functions, social identities, and political power. Their vocabularies reflect much more than political orientations. Issues having to do with languages are studied from a range of theoretical and methodological angles in linguistic subdisciplines like language and culture, cognitive linguistics, sociology of communication (media), language and politics, multilingualism, and language contact. The term national language (NL), the central concept in this entry, is connected with official language (OL), working language (WL), Amtssprache (German: administrative language), standard language, standardization, and (relevant) foreign languages (FL)—all set in multilingual and multidialectal societies and polities. ...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles