Receptive multilingualism in ‘monolingual’ media: managing the presence of Slovak on Czech websites

Abstract

This paper investigates how the presence of a minority language closely related to the majority language is received and treated on the World Wide Web. Specifically, it deals with the acceptability and treatment of texts written in Slovak in the .cz domain, which belongs to the Czech Republic, more than a decade after the split of Czechoslovakia. Employing Language Management Theory and focusing on membership categorisation, the investigation first examines user comments which refer to the use of Slovak on .cz websites as inadequate or problematic. The analysis then proceeds in two directions: first, it deals with users’ expectations regarding the use of Slovak on specific websites. Second, it focuses on how users and the website editors subsequently managed the problematic deviations from these expectations. As a result, the study centres around three phenomena which were shown to be relevant for the online participants: Internet nationalism, the intelligibility of Slovak to Czechs and the searchability of webpages in a closely related language.

Keywords:

• receptive multilingualism
• language management
• World Wide Web
• computer-mediated communication
• online discussions
• Slovak
• Czech

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jiří Nekvapil, the reviewers and the respondents for their valuable comments. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (grant no. MSM0021620825), Charles University Grant Agency (grant no. 4409) and Charles University Research Development Programme no. 10, ‘Linguistics’.

Notes

1. According to a recent survey, 18% of Czechs have Slovak relatives and 42% have Slovak friends (n=1126, age 15 and over; Dickins, 2009). In 2009, the accommodation facilities in Czechia registered almost 300,000 Slovak visitors, and the government reported more than 70,000 Slovak citizens as residents of Czechia (Czech Statistical Office, www.czso.cz).

2. ‘Flame war’ is a term used for heated hostile and usually insulting off-topic discussions often involving a large number of users. The posting of messages that initiate a flame war is called ‘flaming’.

3. The number of employed foreigners (only natural persons) amounted to more than 318 thousand in 2009 (Czech Statistical Office, www.czso.cz).