Introduction: Studying young people engaged in revitalizing minority languages in Europe “Young people nowadays have no interest in anything,” “they don’t feel connected to the minority and they don’t care for the language of their forefathers,” “all they care for is the virtual world, they cannot form bonds or get involved” – such opinions about young people, both secondary school and university students, can be heard again and again, in different minority groups across Europe. This kind of discourse, known as the discourse of moral panic (Thompson, 1998; Czykwin, 2007), is indeed the dominant one on issues related to the revitalization of minority cultures and languages. Indeed, as theories of reversing language shift (Fishman, 1991) underscore, a necessary condition for language survival is its continuous transmission, which means being used by each consecutive generation. However, in modern times cul- tural transfer across generations has been significantly hampered, if not completely suppressed. Older generations, strongly influenced by monolingual discourse and language policies oriented towards eliminating minority languages, often chose dominant languages to be spoken in their families. In schools, institutions and the media, only those languages were allowed. But more recently, minority groups have gradually won recognition for their languages in public life. Nowadays, not only are some minority languages being taught in schools and used in many domains of life, they are also receiving financial and institutional support. This includes policies aimed at protection and promotion, as well as active revitaliza- tion. Under such circumstances, every member of a minority could in theory use their ethnic language. In practice, however, this is not the case. François Grin (2003) mentions three fundamental conditions that have to be met for a minority language to actually be used: having a sufficient capacity to use it (which can be achieved at home or at school), having an opportunity to use it in a language community or in public life, and having a desire to choose this partic- ular language as a means of communication. In the case of languages covered by revitalization programs, the last of these three conditions appears to be the most difficult to meet. Young minority members are often expected not only to attain a high level of communicative competence in their language but also to identify with it, or even get actively involved in supporting its cause. This is, however, only one of the many possibilities that young people growing up in the twenty-first century have to choose from in shaping their identities and priorities. The old world of closed homogeneous language communities based on direct bonds has ceased to exist, replaced by a world that could be dubbed transcultural, character- ized by unlimited information flow, mobility, and various possibilities to change Nicole Doowy-Rybiska - 9783631827758 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/26/2021 08:28:54AM via free access 14 Introduction one’s place of residence, job or language. Today’s young people are citizens of the world rather than of the traditional “small homelands.” Indifference towards belonging to a minority group and speaking its language, fostered by increasing cultural assimilation, globalization processes, economic conditions and lifestyle change, is one of the major threats faced by minority languages. It is this threat that activists fighting for the recognition of minority language rights seek to coun- teract, trying to draw as many people as possible out of what might be dubbed the “grey zone of ethnicity.” The best remedy for such indifference appears to be active and conscious participation in the minority culture and getting to know the minority language not only as one used at school, or as an otherwise useless forefathers’ language, but as a means of communication amongst a peer group, perceived by young people as their own. This book hinges upon the results of the field research I conducted in recent years among minority communities in various locations in Europe.1 These findings, later confirmed by other studies on young people’s behaviour, including their partici- pation in civil and/or community life, support the central thesis of the book: that having a conscious attitude of belonging to a minority culture and deciding to use and promote a minority language is to a large extent personal and depends on a combination of many factors. The most important such factors include attitudes inherited from the family environment, participation in cultural and social activ- ities, and the emergence of communities of practice within minorities as well as bonds among peers (see Corona Caraveo, Pérez & Hernández, 2010). Developing a conscious attitude of belonging, accompanied by a sense of involvement in minority culture and language, may for instance be triggered by an encounter with an individual particularly able to inspire a young person and incite in them a “spirit of ethnicity.” Or, alternatively, a young person may become friends with someone interested in the community’s past and language, or become member of a group in which participation in a minority culture is valued and appreciated. Young people who develop an interest in ethnic culture and become engaged in the preservation of a minority language may then exert a crucial influence on their peers by preparing for them cultural activities on offer, through which commu- nities of practice are created (Wenger, 1998) and ethnic awareness is gained. This can be achieved by forming a powerful group attracting ethnically undecided indi- viduals, or by initiating and carrying out protests against the extant situation of a minority in such a way that other young people may join in. Therefore, the role of young people involved in the minority cause and that of language activists cannot be overestimated. This assumption is what motivated me to undertake research specifically on young people becoming interested in their culture and language and getting engaged in various activities related to them both within and out- side their community. I wished to discover how their involvement in the life of a 1 I have studied minority languages in Kashubia since 2004, in Lusatia and in Brittany since 2005, and in Wales since 2010. Nicole Doowy-Rybiska - 9783631827758 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/26/2021 08:28:54AM via free access Scope of research and methodology 15 minority comes about, to observe how their cultural and language identity arises and becomes consolidated, to find out what they think about the surrounding world and why they want to change it. Scrutinizing the language and cultural practices of this particular group of young people and trying to adopt their perspective on the world can be a source of precious knowledge on the young generation of individ- uals coming from minority groups. This knowledge, in turn, may help revise some notions and practices concerning revitalization, making them better suited to the expectations and needs of the young generation, commonly recognized as being responsible for the future of minority languages and cultures. Scope of research and methodology In my fieldwork,2 I examined the situation of four language minorities in Europe: the Kashubs in Poland, the Upper Sorbs inhabiting Upper Lusatia in Germany, the Bretons in France and the Welsh in Great Britain. The Kashubs3 are speakers of a Slavic minority language that inhabit a relatively compact region of Poland, known as “Kashubia,” essentially clustered around the region of the city of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea coast, from there trailing inland to the south-west. The Kashubian language is recognized as the sole remaining survivor of a range of Pomeranian tongues once spoken along the Baltic coast in former centuries, and as such it is a West Slavic language closely related to the dominant language of the region, Polish. The intergenerational transmission of Kashubian was significantly interrupted in the second half of the twenty cen- tury. Today the number of Kashubs is estimated as 300,000, based on the criterion of individual declarations, with approximately 100,000 speakers of the language. Kashubs do not have the status of a group officially recognized in Poland, but Kashubian is recognized as a regional language under the Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and the Regional Language. The Upper Sorbs are a minority community residing in Lusatia, a region of eastern Germany close to the border with Poland and the Czech Republic. Their language, Upper Sorbian, is a Slavic minority language surrounded by a dominant Germanic language, namely German. They are in fact one of two closely related minority communities in the same region: the Upper Sorbs live in a portion of the region known as Upper Lusatia, centred on the town of Budyšin/Bautzen, whereas Lower Sorbs (speakers of the related minority language Lower Sorbian) live in 2 The monograph is based on fieldwork carried out in 2012–2014 under a National Science Centre grant “Strategies for engaging young people in ethnic activities of autochthonic minorities across Europe: institutions, activities, identity choices (Kashubs, Sorbs, Bretons, the Welsh)” (UMO-2011/01/D/HS2/02085), affiliated with the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. 3 Note that other spellings have been used in English, including, for instance, “Cashubes” and “Casshubian.” Nicole Doowy-Rybiska - 9783631827758 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/26/2021