The concept of community of practice in the context of a selected group of speakers of a Fala de Xálima The purpose of this paper is to study the current sociolinguistic situation of the language community of Xálima through the prism of the theory of community of practice. We define the community of practice as an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour of preserving and promoting their vernacular language. The empirical material will be a series of anthropological observations and comments on the semi-directed interviews, made in situ by the authors, in which we will analyse the efforts towards the orthographic standardization and their possible effects. We aim to demonstrate that the methodological principle of community of practice is applicable and suitable to shed new light over sociolinguistic minorized contexts, especially when conducting research in the field of the so-called third wave of sociolinguistics.

(Non)fuzziness of Identity in the Spanish-Portuguese Borderland: The Case of the Linguistic Community of A Fala de Xálima (Spain)This article analyses the social dynamics observable in a conversation with a minoritized language activist about the neighbouring speech communities. The study demonstrates that the local variety, along with its socially meaningful context, can be an important factor for the interactionally constructed local identity. The interviewee is a member of the community of practice of A Fala de Xálima, a Galician-Portuguese Romance minoritized language with about 5,000 speakers; they live in the Spanish province of Cáceres (on the border with Portugal). The analysis applies the ontological and epistemological principles of sociocultural linguistics in order to identify some indexical interactional orientations, such as stance and ideology. (Nie)ostrość tożsamości na pograniczu hiszpańsko-portugalskim – przypadek społeczności językowej A Fala de Xálima (Hiszpania)Celem artykułu jest analiza dynamik społecznych, które można zaobserwować w konwersacji z aktywistą na rzecz języka mniejszościowego, prowadzonej na temat sąsiednich społeczności językowych. W dalszej kolejności, celem jest ukazanie, że lokalna odmiana językowa, brana pod uwagę wraz ze swoim społecznie znaczącym kontekstem, może znacząco wpływać na lokalną tożsamość językową, budowaną w sposób interakcjonalny. Rozmowa została przeprowadzona z członkiem wspólnoty praktyki A Fala de Xálima – języka mniejszościowego należącego do galicyjsko-portugalskiej grupy języków romańskich – która liczy ok. 5000 użytkowników mieszkających w hiszpańskiej prowincji Cáceres (na granicy z Portugalią). W analizie autor posługuje się zasadami ontologiczno-epistemologicznymi tzw. językoznawstwa społeczno-kulturowego i przy ich użyciu opisuje wybrane orientacje indeksykalne o charakterze interakcjonalnym, takie jak pozycjonowania społeczne (ang. stance) i ideologie.

About the identity of a researcher who wants to talk about identitiesThis article is a series of auto-reflexive comments about the impact the identity of the researcher has on the linguistic data obtained. The author analyses the flow of some particular interviews made by him in the community of Fala de Xálima approx. 5,000 inhabitants which speaks a minority language coming from old Galaico-Portuguese, in Cáceres province Spain. Discussing such topics as the orthographic proposals, smuggling practices or supposed Galician identity of these people, we make some in-depth comments on how the perceived “outsider and foreigner” identity of the author makes people eager or reluctant to address such questions. For this, we use some methodological tools applied by fieldwork linguistics and anthropology Hazen, Bowern, Cooper & Vaux, as well as the theoretical principles of the study of identity by Bucholtz & Hall, Meyerhoff, and Eckert & McConnell-Ginet.

A publicação é subsidiada pelo Ministério da Ciência e do Ensino Superior da Polónia (auxílio de minimis) e pela Faculdade de Filologia da Universidade Jagelónica Publicado em forma de e-book junto com as 150 cópias em papel A versão principal é a versão em formato digital