Building Blocks of Cultural Identity: Language's Place in Cultural Sustainability

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2013-05

Department

Program

MA in Cultural Sustainability

Citation of Original Publication

Rights

Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain information or permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Goucher Special Collections & Archives at 410-337-6347 or email archives@goucher.edu.

Abstract

This capstone thesis was written to explore the collaboration between linguistics and cultural identity in the field of cultural sustainability. Moving to Italy while studying cultural sustainability at Goucher College, I was interested and excited to learn about Europe’s diverse linguistic background and the preservation/revitalization efforts that are already being initiated in various parts of the European Union. Inspired by studies of language ideologies, sociolinguistics, cultural identity, and language preservation, my thesis takes previous linguistic and cultural research and language revitalization case studies to come up with a compilation of best practices for cultural sustainability through linguistic sustainability/revitalization. For the analysis part of my thesis, I did my own field research focusing on a dialect in northern Italy known as Venetian. The best practices for language sustainability suggested in this thesis are related to what was observed and learned while studying sociolinguistic and cultural aspects of this speech community.