From discouragement to self-empowerment. Insights from an ethnolinguistic vitality survey among the Kashubs in Poland

Justyna Olko; Karolina Hansen; Michał Wypych; Olga Kuzawińska; Macéj Bańdur

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0237395

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 3, 2020
2 Jun 2020 Decision Letter - Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Editor PONE-D-20-04867 From Discouragement to Empowerment. Insights from an ethnolinguistic vitality survey among the Kashubs in Poland PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Olko, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 17 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 7 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure. 3. Please upload a copy of Figure 8, to which you refer in your text on page 23. If the figure is no longer to be included as part of the submission please remove all reference to it within the text. 4. Please include a caption for figure 8. 5. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I recommend the article for publication. The paper is clear and well-written, with well-chosen examples, argues for a good point. I greatly enjoyed reading this paper, which is both intellectually stimulating and very carefully written. A minor suggestion for improvement could be: to possible strengthening of the argument in Discussion and conclusions, you might want to provide more links with similar studies conducted in other settings. Reviewer #2: I think the article could be published as it stands. There are two minor points the authors might wish to consider to help the reader navigate through the article and also make the article slightly more nuanced. (1) The introduction to the article could signpost more what is to come in the rest of the article, through a short framework/outline. At the moment, for example, the linguistic community is very briefly referred to right at the beginning and the reader - particularly if not familiar with the particularities of the Kashubian language community - is given only a few relevant details, but nothing substantial. If would be helpful if the authors could indicate that a more substantive description is to follow below, as this is not obvious from the outset. Ditto for the other points mentioned in the introduction. This framework need only take up a few sentences at the end of the introduction. (2) A minor point but it would be worthwhile the authors considering adjusting the description of speakers of Kashubian, which at the moment is: "While there may indeed be as many as 100,000 active speakers nowadays, there are approximately several tens of thousands of people who know Kashubian but rarely speak it". There will be a whole range of people who engage with Kashubian on a variety of levels, not just 'active speaker - non-active speaker', such as described in "Speakers and communities”, by Colette Grinevald & Michel Bert, pp. 45-65 in The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages (2011). A reference to a more developed speaker framework would add more substance to this section of the article. Reviewer #3: The article is clear and cohesive in its exploration of ELV within the Kashubian language group in Poland. The data analysis conducted provides relevant and unique insight into the current situation and vitality of the language. However the article would however benefit from a more socio-political framing. The authors do not discuss the current situation in Poland with regard to language rights or why Kashubian is now perceived to have a high rate of vitality. If further context is provided at the beginning of the article, the significance of the results will increase. There were also some minor spelling and grammar issues (eg. in figure 1 on y axis), as well as the referencing format being confusing. Why are footnotes used when they are not at the bottom of the page? This makes it difficult to ensure the article is supported by relevant and up to date theoretical frameworks and methodologies. With some minor review I would recommend this paper for publishing as it contributes to current discussion of ethnoloiinguistic vitality and prominence of minority languages, however again, more social background would add strength to the study. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237395.r001
Revision 1
21 Jul 2020 Author Response Firstly, we would like to thank the reviewers for all their comments and recommendations. We found all of them to be very helpful for improving our paper. We have implemented all of the recommendations and, additionally, made some further improvements that build on these recommendations. In full accordance with the recommendations of Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3, we have broadened and depended the introduction to the Kashubian community in the initial section of the paper, focusing on its socio-political situation and status. We have also added more socio-political framing regarding the current situation in Poland in terms of the language rights of national and ethnic minorities, including the state’s attitude toward them and the implications of their current legal status. Contextualizing the findings in this way facilitates a deeper understanding of the results discussed later in the paper and their significance. We have also included more references to the most recent relevant publications, including a book published in 2020 that was unavailable when we prepared the first draft of the paper. At the end of the “Introduction” we have also added a short description of the general structure of the paper, as a sort of “roadmap” for readers. In the section “Context of the study” we have added to the historical overview of the Kashubs, with a special focus on post-1945 policies toward the group, which are important for understanding their present situation. We have also provided a more concise description of the group’s situation and vitality after 1989, as well as the changes that were set in motion after the recognition of Kashubian as a regional language in 2005. This includes an up to date overview of current spaces of language use and development. Moreover, these amendments better contextualize and explain the 2011 census data as it relates to the Kashubs and the Kashubian language. In full accordance with the recommendation of Reviewer #2, we have also provided a description of different types of Kashubian speakers and their language proficiencies, based both on earlier research (with additional references included) and our own knowledge of the topic. The latter embraces the emic knowledge and experience of one of the co-authors, who is a Kashubian scholar, teacher, activist and publicist. We decided to complement this description on kinds of speakers and spaces of language use by deepening the presentation and discussion of the related quantitative data obtained in our survey and described in the section “Results”. This improvement offers sociolinguistic insight that is required for better understanding the profile of our survey participants and for interpreting the survey results. Thus, we have described with more precision and in more detail participants’ self-reported oral and written skills in Kashubian and Polish, along with their domains of language use, adding an additional Table 1 that illustrates our data. Finally, as suggested by Reviewer #1, we have strengthened our arguments in the section “Discussion and conclusions” and we have provided more references to other similar or relevant studies. Thus, we have included more insights from additional studies on the Rejection-Identification Model, which is particularly relevant for our case study and our discussion; we have also added a substantial section on the concept of empowerment and previous approaches to the theme of empowerment of ethnic minorities and, particularly, of speakers of minority/indigenous/endangered languages. In accordance with this discussion and our theoretical framework, we have also decided to change empowerment to self-empowerment in the title and relevant parts of the paper, as it describes more adequately the hypothesis and the interpretation of findings developed in this study, thus strengthening our arguments. Finally, we have consolidated our arguments with regard to the profile of our survey participants who represent an active and engaged sector of the Kashubian community’. We have also corrected spelling and grammar issues in the figures accompanying the paper and we provide them in a much better quality in the form of TIFF files. We also changed the type of charts presented in Figures 2, 3 and 4 to stacked bar charts, which makes them easier to read. Regarding other formatting details, including references, we follow the guidelines of the journal. Finally, we have implemented other minor editing improvements throughout the paper. Summing up, we have fully followed the recommendations of the reviewers, with with which we fully agree. In addition to implementing their direct suggestions, we have also introduced some additional improvements to other parts of the paper that relate to these recommendations and contribute to the overall coherence of the paper, the strength of our arguments and the interpretation of the results. With kind regards, Justyna Olko Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Rebuttal letter Olko.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237395.r002
27 Jul 2020 Decision Letter - Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Editor From Discouragement to Self-Empowerment. Insights from an ethnolinguistic vitality survey among the Kashubs in Poland PONE-D-20-04867R1 Dear Dr. Olko, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Ph.D. Guest Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237395.r003
Formally Accepted
5 Aug 2020 Acceptance Letter - Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Editor PONE-D-20-04867R1 From Discouragement to Self-Empowerment. Insights from an ethnolinguistic vitality survey among the Kashubs in Poland Dear Dr. Olko: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Anastassia Zabrodskaja Guest Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237395.r004

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