Nr 2 (2013): Minor Languages, Minor Literatures, Minor Cultures
Editors-in-Charge of the issue [Redaktorki Prowadzące] 2/2013: Ewa Łukaszyk and Katarzyna Chruszczewska
Complete list of reviewers for the issue 2 [Lista recenzentów numeru 2]
Why minor literatures, minor cultures, minor languages? They offer new fields of research, tempting with the possibilities of doing things that have not been done before. Emergent literary phenomena give to the scholar a fascinating opportunity of seeing cultural identities in statu nascendi, or accompanyig the rebirth of ancient cultures leaving the shadow of the systems that had reduced them for centuries to a subaltern position. Quite often there is also a possibility of participation, assisting and helping peoples in their emancipation and quest for independent expression.
The emancipation of minor cultures and the flourishing of minor literatures is not always propitious for minor languages. New literatures of minor cultures, in search of the reading public and the organized book markets, often adopt major languages. Putting down his or her own linguistic tools is a legitimate option for the native writer who, as any other writer, may, in the first place, seek a wider readership, fame or even profit. Though it should be noted that the interconnections and cause-effect sequences in this domain are far from linear. Be it as it may, we are living in times of doom for minor languages, which are massively losing their speakers in favor of the major tongues. The task of revitalization is urgent and all the attention focused on the minor languages is more than justified. In many cases, the only thing that the researcher can do is to document them before they disappear. Nonetheless, even such documentation is an important task. Even if the probability that some of these languages might one day be reborn from the ashes and reintroduced to everyday communication is very low, we still need to preserve at least some trace of humanity’s linguistic diversity. It is a task that concerns all of us, not only the peoples whose direct heritage these languages are. We are still unable to answer many of the fundamental questions in linguistics, concerning such aspects as the origin of human speech and the general traits or structures that underlie all human forms of communication. If languages continue dying at the pace they do, soon we will have no material left to carry on this quest any further.
This issue of Colloquia Humanistica offers an opportunity of a journey into the unexplored space of global minority. Having taken the northwestern end of Europe for a starting point, we cross the Mediterenean and the Atlantic Ocean, searching for both the universals and the idiosyncrasies of the minor condition: tempting and rejected, constructed and chosen, inherited and projected towards the future.
Ewa Łukaszyk, Why Minor, Not Major?
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This is an archived issue. It contains the metadata and abstracts of all articles and the full version only of those articles whose authors have approved publication in an electronic Open Access version under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License. All articles are available via CEEOL (http://www.ceeol.com). [Numer archiwalny. Zawiera metadane oraz abstrakty wszystkich artykułów, natomiast pełne teksty tylko tych, których autorzy wyrazili zgodę na publikację tekstu w wersji elektronicznej, w wolnym dostępie, na licencji CC BY 3.0 PL. Pełny numer jest dostępny w bazie CEEOL (http://www.ceeol.com).]
Opublikowane:
2015-06-13
