This study analyses the remaking of dementia as a social and cultural phenomenon in the public media discourse in a welfare state Norway. A content analysis was carried out of articles on dementia published in Norwegian paper media from 1995 to 2015. The study combined the tools from quantitative corpus analyses and qualitative critical discourse analyses, making it possible to detect and interpret diachronic changes in the dementia discourse. Although the main focus in Norwegian dementia discourse has changed from the disease to the personhood, the agents defining what it means to live well with dementia continued to be predominantly institutional: non-governmental organisations, municipalities, health-care institutions and politicians. An analysis of the uses of the politically incorrect Norwegian term for dementia, ‘senility’, revealed that this term offered an alternative to the institutionalised dementia discourse and functioned as an unconventional and therapeutic-free space where older people and persons with dementia could use humour to subvert these norms and power relations.
The present article contributes to attempts to re-conceptualise the top-down perspective on language policy, by analysing the role of local and city governments' agency in language education policy making. Only few studies analyse the role of lower administrative levels in language policy, other than in implementation of governmental policies, why their policy appropriations are seen as policy deviations. Language policy researchers have however recognised that local governments can, due to the regional or local character of some language education problems, also be given a more active role in policy making. My claim is that in order to do so, the analysis has to be based on a conceptual framework that sees language policy developments as part of the general democratisation and decentralisation processes in society. The article therefore also problematises attempts to analyse and make sense of language policy developments separately from political and economic transitions of society. Based on Giddens' structuration theory and language governance studies, I will analyse how two different language policy models in Estonia and Denmark -in terms of allocation of resources and authority -frame local municipalities' opportunity for agency in language education policy matters.
Denmark is known for its rather “liberal” and implicit language policy. Many of the decisions concerning the use, acquisition and status of languages are influenced by political decisions made on other topics and by the changing governments’ hidden political agenda. Language policy is therefore not so much non-existent as it is hidden. The aim of the present article is to uncover the covert mechanisms of language policymaking and its relationship to the prevailing linguistic culture. The roots of the laissez-faire language policy in Denmark are planted deeply in the prevailing linguistic culture in the country, according to which sanctioning and controlling the use of language is conceived as discriminatory, as it is in conflict with the right to freedom of speech. However, recent sociolinguistic research carried out in Denmark bears witness to the fact that the laissez-faire or liberal language policy does not necessarily contribute to linguistic diversity, but quite to the contrary speeds up the opposite processes of standardization and dedialectalization.
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