Becoming Monolingual: The Impact of Language Ideologies on the Loss of Multilingualism on São Tomé Island
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the loss of the creole languages on São Tomé Island and the societal move from multilingualism to monolingualism in Portuguese. It argues that recognizing the ideologies attached to these languages is key in understanding the language shift, but also the processes leading toward monolingualism. This qualitative study is based on three main theories: Language as social practice, language ideology, and monoglot standardization. Data comes from ethnographic fieldwork and sociolinguistic interviews with 56 speakers from the capital of São Tomé and Príncipe. I argue that the existence of multilingualism on São Tomé Island is not valued at a societal level because of the pejorative ideologies that have been held about the creole languages since colonial times. Also, the use of the creole languages stood as a problem for the creation of a unified Santomean nation, as the different racial groups on the islands had their own creole. Results show how ideologies about the Portuguese language and its association with national unity, modernity, and European-ness favored its expansion on São Tomé Island and a move toward monolingualism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".