Contesting the centre: Low German-speaking Mennonite identity, language, and literacy constructions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We make sense of who we are by talking about ourselves with others, telling stories about ourselves, our experiences, and our feelings. When we do this, we construct sociolinguistic spaces in which we speak, live, work, read, and play. These spaces are connected to geographical realities, or places, but consist far more of the practices in which we engage that give them meaning. When migrants move from one place to another, they construct new migrant spaces that contain aspects of their former place of living as well as their new one. Language plays a crucial role, because it is through language that we speak about ourselves, through language we construct spaces, and through language we position ourselves within those spaces. \nThis project examines how Low German-speaking Mennonite (LGM) migrants to Canada from Mexico construct a migrant space and position themselves and the languages they come into contact with, and how their constructions of identity and literacy are linked to their perceptions and use of language. LGMs are a marginalized minority population connected to the Old Colony Church, a religiously conservative Mennonite denomination who speak Low German (Dietsch) as a primary language. The data for this project consist of 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, individual interviews and focus group discussions. Drawing on an interactional sociolinguistic framework, narratives and conversations about language experiences are examined to illustrate how LGMs construct a migrant (Dietsch) space in Canada. Specifically, conversations about language attitudes, language learning experiences, and literacy practices are analyzed to determine how individuals position themselves and others in relation to the languages they encounter and the role these play in the Dietsch space. The author finds that the LGM participants in the study demonstrate significant agentive capacity by actively constructing and producing a Dietsch space that allows them to contest not only what constitutes the centre of the broader Canadian space, but also contest what constitutes the centre within the LGM migrant group.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".