glossari

Non alphabetic glossary

first language: language acquired by the child from the very beginning, normally within the familiar domain. It is also referred to as ‘mother tongue’; in biparental families with parents being speakers of different languages, it may well be the case that children acquire two or (seldom) more first languages.
second language: language acquired mainly outside the familiar domain (school, street, professional world, emigration...)
alloglotism: language policy intended to establish equality in multilingual institutions forcing their members to communicate in a language other than their first language
bilingual: anyone who speaks two first languages
bilingualism: quality of bilingual
monoglot: anyone who does not command a second language; synonim of monolingual
biglot: anyone who commands a second language; not synonim of billingual
polyglotism: quality of polyglot
biglotism: quality of biglot. This term (and its stem ‘biglot’) is needed to account for different situations. Thus it is not the same stating that “Catalans are bilingual” (a frequent mistake) and saying that “virtually all Catalan native speakers are biglot”. Actually if bilingualism was a feature of all Catalans, then the Catalan language would not be maintained for more than 25 years... By contrast, the fact that Catalan speakers are biglot or polyglot does not seem to affect its maintenance.
xenophobia: strong dislike of foreign people
endophobia: strong dislike of one’s own diversity
genocide: systematic application of measures addressed to murder ethnic groups (it is usually referred to as physical murderer, not to the shift of culture)
ethnocide: murderer of ethnic groups’ civilisation by other more powerful groups
ethnic group: group of people who share a number of civilisation features, especially those of language and culture
assimilation: process in which people and/or groups are introduced to a foreign community and as a result of it differences are wiped out, because the target society absorbs the newcomers, or because the latter absorbs the target community inasmuch as language and customs, or even, because of the appearance of a new hybrid society
ius linguae: assessment of a minimal level of knowledge of territory languages so as to get access to all or part of the citizens’ civil rights
nomad language: language that is not spoken throughout in a given territory (in the Iberian Peninsula Romany would be the prototype); it is also referred to as the emigrant language.
sedentary: language language that stays next to one or more nomad languages, without being nomad itself
territoriality: applied to sedentary languages, principle according to which the collective nature of most of linguistic rights cannot be invoked if the language’s habitat is not recognized and respected.
minority: biased attribution concerning oppressed languages, often applied carelessly even to languages that are clearly major in their territory. It is biased in that its conveys the subtle message that the hegemonic language is the major one. This message is intended to legitimate the measures taken in favour of the allochtonous language and invalidate those measures favouring the territory language, taking advantage of the frequent confusion between polycracy and democracy (if something is major, then it is democratic)
democracy: system of government based on the people’s choice; any system violates democracy when there is not a simple respect for the society’s basic rights, including those of the minorities.
polycracy: government of non democratic majorities; the most notorious case is that of nazism. From a linguistic point of view, any State is polycratic when a majority has the power and dismisses the linguistic rights of the rest
passive polyglotism: type of interpersonal communication in which speakers use actively their first language and passively any other language
symmetrical conversation: conversation in which speakers remain in parallel conditions, because they all belong to the same linguistic group, because they carry a passive polyglotism, or even because there is an alloglotic conversation
asymmetrical conversation: conversation, broadly monolingual, in which some speakers use their first language which in turn is the other speakers’ second language.