Empowering Speakers of Unstandardized Varieties: The Awareness Approach

Abstract

When this volume was conceived, we asked contributors to give their best answer to the question: how can empowerment be achieved through language and education? We posed the question in this way because we believe that the interface between language and education is critically important for people to become empowered. Of course, the answers we received from the scholars whose contributions are included here, ranged from the predictable to the surprising; from those whose mere narrative of a story of empowerment seems convincing and sufficient, to those who are deliberately reflective and theoretically challenging; from those who have chosen to address small-scale, local problems to those that have preferred to articulate wider, national or even international issues. All, however, answer the question seriously; some even passionately.