Westerm Washington University‘s Judy Pine has started blogging for us and “Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #11″ was a blogpost about “bad words,” invented languages, and youth.

Our revered Digital Content Editor, University of Wyoming‘s Leila Monaghan has posted Haitian linguist’s Yves Dejean‘s petition about Creole language instruction in Haiti, on hebalf of MIT’s Michel DeGraff. As might be expected whenever Creole languages are discussed, that post has sparked some interesting reactions. (As an aside, I haven’t found more information about Yves Dejean’s affiliation or a personal webpage.)

And the “linktrail” from my own Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #10 went on a bit further.

1. In Defense of Difference § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM.
2. Daily Data Dump – Wednesday | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine.
3. Linguistic diversity = poverty | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine.
4. Language loss | john hawks weblog.
5. Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #10 | Society for Linguistic Anthropology.
6. Linguistic Diversity Does Not Equal Poverty | Creighton Barrett (Unfortunately, this blog is currently down.)
7. Linguistic diversity, other views | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine.
8. Language extinction ain’t no big thing? « Neuroanthropology.
9. Cultural Diversity, Economic Development and Societal Instability » Gene Expression.
10. Virginia Heffernan vs. ScienceBlogs « Neuroanthropology.
11. Qeyḥ bāḥrī » Linguistic diversity; good thing… or the cause of African poverty!!.
12. Songs From The Wood » Death of A Language.
13. And possibly some other links.

I stopped looking at these but, with a bit of time spent on this, one could map out the intertextual links. Eventually, some enterprising person could even analyze how language and languages are conceptualized in those blogposts.

Something of an emerging linktrail that I was noticing is about attitudes toward theoretical perspectives on the so-called “Universal Grammar” (UG). I only picked a few items but it’s a rich topic for linguistic anthropology, given both four-field anthropology‘s far-reaching approach to “universals” and linguistic anthropology’s field-specific answers and reactions to linguistics (Lx) as practiced in linguistics departments.

1. Language Log » Universal Grammar haters.
2. Why Chomsky doesn’t count as a gifted linguist | Metaphor Hacker – Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas.
3. languagehat.com: Gifted Linguists.

Finally, a query about “fake translations as bilingual humour” that I sent to our LingAnth mailing-list has generated some reaction.

National Dong Hwa University‘s Kerim Friedman (fake translations as Internet meme in Taiwan and other issues of language humour)

Miami University‘s Mark Allen Peterson (Monty Python’s Hungarian phrasebook sketch)

University of Pennsylvania‘s Harold Schiffman (political humour and translation)
Language policy Cartoon images.

And, again, Kerim Friedman (how Hollywood represents languages).

How Hollywood represents foreign speech: a video slide show. – By Eric Hynes – Slate Magazine.

be sure to visit the actual thread on LingAnth and feel free to add to it.

In addition, University of South Carolina‘s Janina Fenigsen sent us the following list of relevant clips:

It seems to be common practice among bloggers, at least among academic ones, to summarize interesting items from recent online texts. For instance, our colleagues over at Neuroanthropology have their longstanding “Wednesday Round Up” feature. And those at Savage Minds have “Around the Web.”

In some ways, these SLA roundups are our version of this. They’re meant to be informal, diverse, and potentially thought-provoking. The content and form of each roundup are a matter of personal approach and preference. Though some commonalities may be emerging, we don’t have a clearly stated editorial policy.

In other words, we don’t have a set way to do these things. And, at this point, we each do our own thing.

Getting Relevant Content

Personally, I’ve found it difficult to find items which are appropriate for an audience of linguistic anthropologists and which haven’t been covered extensively elsewhere. Not that we want to be exclusive but there’s no reason to repeat what has been said by others unless we can provide something of a unique angle.

(As an aside, if you have compelling items that you think we should cover in these roundups or elsewhere on this site, feel free to email us here.)

(Aside #2: We do accept guest bloggers, as long as they blog about issues relevant to linguistic anthropologists. Again, just contact us and we’ll see if it works.)

(Aside #3: There are new contributors to this site. Including Lindsay Bell, who is the SLA graduate student representative. An idea we’ve had is to post biographical profiles for each contributor. More on this later…)

So, back to the difficulty of finding things to post here…

One “problem” is Language Log.

For anyone with an academic interest in language studies (neurolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, psycholinguistics, philosophy of language, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, linguistics…), Language Log is pretty much what you’d call a “must-read.” Not only is it a valuable resource on issues related to language in a broad perspective but, as an academic blog, it seems to strike a rare balance between approachability and academic depth.

The “problem” is this: folks at LL cover so much ground that it’s hard to find something they haven’t discussed thoroughly.

But, this week, I think I have something.

Linktrail on Language Diversity

Summary

1. In Defense of Difference § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM.
2. Daily Data Dump – Wednesday | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine.
3. Linguistic diversity = poverty | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine.
4. Language loss | john hawks weblog.
5. …

Online, some of the most interesting issues unfold in a series of texts, coming from diverse perspectives. Retrieving the “trail of links” left by such an indirect written conversation can be a fascinating This week, the issue of language loss provides me with such a “linktrail.”

Linktrail Post #1: Seed Magazine

It all started with the following article which was posted on the Seed Magazine on July 9, 2010 (but “originally published in the October 2008 print issue of Seed magazine.”).

In Defense of Difference § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM.

In a way, that article features the work of fellow anthropologist Luisa Maffi. In part, this article links linguistic diversity to biological diversity conceptually and even causally. There might be a consensus as to the necessity to preserve biodiversity. This Seed magazine article discusses the importance of linguistic diversity in terms explicitly linked to the biodiversity discourse.

Not a new concept. For instance, I’ve used chapters of this book in some of my linguistic anthropology classes.

Though Wade Davis isn’t usually working on language, he used the same claims about linguistic diversity to offer a cultural analogue to biodiversity in this Massey lecture.

Some of this is reminiscent of Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s famous line:

«En Afrique, quand un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle» (“In Africa, when an old man dies, it’s a library burning.”)

In my mind, the topic of linguistic diversity seems particularly relevant for linguistic anthropologists. If one were to define anthropology as “the study of human diversity,” linguistic anthropology would fit the four-field model common in North American department as being the part of anthropology devoted to linguistic diversity (the three other fields being concerned with diachronic, biological, and cultural aspects of human diversity). It may sound reductive, but it carries home the point that linguistic anthropologists typically care about language diversity. Not that linguistic anthropologists agree as to the effects or value of linguistic diversity. But it’s clearly a topic of central importance for our field. In other words, it’s not that we want to preserve diversity at all costs. It’s that we’re thinking about the wider implications of language loss. After all, we’re trained to think holistically.

Clearly (and fortunately), linguistic anthropologists aren’t the only people discussing these issues. In fact, language diversity and loss are rather frequently discussed in some contexts. For instance, issues surrounding social and cultural identities often connect with linguistic identity. In some cases, people want to associate themselves with widespread languages while in others uncommon languages are favoured. These are all well-known issues, in our discipline’s literature.

In several of these cases, the (post-Herderian, as one might call it) pairing of languages with cultures is a given. The idea goes that language carries culture and that language loss is directly equivalent to cultural extinction. In some contexts, this “one-for-one relationship” between “a language” and “a culture” is even the object of intense social and even political debate. Several years ago, while teaching linguistic anthropology at Université de Montréal, I’ve noticed a similar attitude among some other native speakers of Québécois French. In that context, language vitality is directly associated with cultural survival and “failure to maintain the French language” would imply the disappearance of Québécois culture.

The Seed article would merit careful analysis. It provides much ground for anthropological discussion, including some challengeable statements and some clear explanations of diversity in general. In fact, I thought about annotating that article in Diigo or some such. But this linktrail is based on the very basic premise that “language loss is a problem.”

Linktrail Post #2: Daily Data Dump

Because what transformed that 2008 article into the origin of a linktrail is this quick reaction, by Razib Khan, a researcher in biology and biochemistry blogging at Gene Expression, one of the blogs from Discover magazine:

Khan’s reaction included interesting tidbits, including the following, with which he opens his piece:

If Eyak language was so awesome, why wasn’t the article written in Eyak?

As Khan later admitted, his attitude was clearly dismissive.

Linktrail Post #3: Poverty

That admission came in the opening to a follow-up piece, posted the day after the first one.

Lindsay Bell is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research interrogates the social relations engendered by large scale natural resource extraction. Her current work focuses on labour migration and class inequalities in Canada’s diamond basin. She has conducted extensive field research in circumpolar North America on such topics as the political economy of language endangerment in Alaska and the political economic consequences of land claim settlements in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Trained as a sociolinguist, Bell’s work underscores a material dialectical approach to the study of language ideologies and economic change.

Arizona lawmakers have been on our minds, recently. In Roundup #5, Leila talked about their ban on ethnic studies classes and move against teachers with accents. As should be expected, that same “accented speech” issue has attracted the attention of the good people at Language Log, for instance in this recent blogpost. Among other things, this issue could help us discuss the perceived relationship between accent and fluency. Judgments about speech are often connected to judgments about speakers and accent perception is a fascinating (though often troubling) dimension of this connection.
In Roundup #6, Chad provided us with insight on Arizona’s immigration laws from the perspectives of members of the Muscogee nation and the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. More recently, Chad wrote a full blogpost on a letter sent by University of Arizona linguists about the “heavily accented” teachers.

Census, Language, and Social Justice

Speaking of letters, the SLA’s own Committee on Language and Social Justice sent one to the US Census Bureau about the term “linguistically isolated” and other language issues from the census. This letter is available through the AAA site. Contextual information about this letter has been sent on this very blog.

Engaging SLA Members

That same Committee on Language and Social Justice has been busy collecting teaching resources which we hope to make available through this site. As is often the case, the process of setting up a method to share resources in one domain makes a broader resource-sharing system easier. In other words, once these teaching resources contributed by the Language and Social Justice folks are put up, it should be easy for us to expand this system to other fields related to the anthropology of language.
In fact, with the relatively reasonable workload some of us are able to enjoy during the summer, it might be an especially good idea to prepare a broad set of teaching and other resources to help prepare for the new academic year.
In the meantime, there are several ways for anyone to collaborate with us. If you send an email to this SLA Web Guru address, it will be my pleasure to discuss ways of enhancing LinguisticAnthropology.org and contributing to the visibility of our field.
You may also “mention” @SocLingAnth on Twitter (send “@replies” to us) and we can start conversations this way. You may also add things to the SLA’s Facebook page and strengthen our social media presence.
If some of you are interested in directly contributing about issues surrounding language and culture, we would certainly welcome more colleagues joining us as contributors, so that Leila and Chad aren’t the only ones posting updates.
Another thing which can be done is to start discussions through the Linganth mailing-list. In the past, this mailing-list has been the place for many an interesting discussion about language in an anthropological perspective. While some of us may have switched part of our focus away from mailing-lists and into several social media possibilities, mailing-lists remain a useful for hash out several issues affecting, directly or indirectly, mailing-list participants.

The letter was written by the newly constituted SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice, which partners with the AAA Committee on Human Rights (CfHR). It suggests several alternatives for the classification of speakers who live in households where no one over the age of 14 speaks English “very well” as “linguistically isolated.” This is a follow up to the AAA’s 2007 AAA resolution (seeStatement on Language Questions in the US Census), and previous correspondence with the Census Bureau. Those letters, which can be viewed through Committee for Human Rights, reveal the unwillingness of the Census Bureau to change the language questions, but a willingness to re-consider their use of “Linguistically Isolated.”  The Committee is hopeful that their efforts over the last four years will finally result in critical changes in the way the Census 2010 data are reported, and we will continue to press for changes in the language questions themselves.

As mentioned before, I tend to be informal. So, in this first roundup I submit, I’m taking some liberty with both how “current” some of these items are and how close the connection to our field may be.

Post-Colonial Francophones

As a French-speaker, I feel I should start with an item about my native language. On March 20, 2010, Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (International Organisation of La Francophonie) turned 40. In a speech celebrating this anniversary, Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë connected the French language with its colonial past:

«La Francophonie a 40 ans. Et la décolonisation a 50 ans. Aujourd’hui 19 mars, c’est le 38e anniversaire du cessez-le-feu en Algérie. J’aimerais souligner à quel point cette langue qui a été un instrument de conquête et de domination doit être une langue de l’égalité, de la fraternité, et de l’ambition du projet culturel partagé»

“La Francophonie is 40 years old. Decolonization is 50 years old. Today, March 19, marks the 38th anniversary of the ceasefire in Algeria. I would like to emphasize the extent to which this language, which has been an instrument of conquest and domination must be a language for equality, brotherhood, and the ambition of a shared cultural project.”

swissinfo – Pour ses 40 ans, la Francophonie «ensemble» à Paris.

French Classics

Speaking of the French language, those of you who can read it may be interested in the following resource, making openly accessible some social science classics published in French and now in the public domain (at least for Canada). A bit like the Gutenberg Project for French-speaking social scientist.

Les Classiques des sciences sociales.

Among classic texts related to linguistic anthropology, I recommend Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues. Où il est parlé de la Mélodie et de l’Imitation musicale (1781).

I said I might stretch the meaning of “current.” In this case, though, the connection with linguistic anthropology seems clear, especially given the path going from Rousseau and Herder to Sapir and the development of our field.

Practical Resource

And while we’re discussing resources, this one might be useful to those of you who have to translate between French and English.

Grand dictionnaire terminologique.

Created by Office québécois de la langue française (Quebec’s French language board, known as the “language police” among English-speaking Quebeckers), this dictionnary contains terms which are officially recognized as translations for a large number of English words. This dictionary can provide insight into the mechanisms through which language planning and language policies may be enacted. In terms of language ideology, this dictionary represents a rather unique case as it is decidedly prescriptivist, as is France’s Académie française, but its approach is mostly utilitarian.

Montreal Anglophones

Speaking of Quebec’s languages, Montreal’s English-language daily newspaper The Gazette (advertised, a while ago as “The English Language. Daily.”)  has published a series of articles on Montreal’s English dialectology

Accent on Montreal.

The title of the introductory piece is quite revealing:

Sociolinguist followed Henry Higgins.

In that rather short piece, Gazette reporter Marion Scott manages to tie some of Labov’s best-known work to both Shaw’s Pygmalion and the current work of McGill sociolinguist and dialectologist Charles Boberg.

The five main parts of this series cover such issues as the diverse aspects of language contact, including loanwords.

1. Hear that ‘O’ in anglo?.
2. Montrealers’ borrowed lingo.
3. That ‘aboat’ sums it up.
4. Bagels & schmooze.
5. Trilingual spice.

Typography, Toponymy, and Identity

While our field tends not to focus that directly on such topics as typography, the following is a rather unusual piece using hyphenation and onomastics as pretexts for discussions of social and even cultural identities.

Get Hyphenated by Joseph Kloc – The Morning News.

Assessing Non-Verbal Cues

A key lesson of ethnography in general and of the ethnography of communication more specifically, is that context is key. In the following post, blogger Brian Lam solicits the help of “body language” consultant Janine Driver in using photographic evidence to assess the degree of  ”awkwardness” between the chief executive officers at Apple and Google.

So Awkward: Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt’s Body Language Analyzed – Gizmodo.

The story of this “awkward” meeting broke out recently, after a rather long series of discussions about relationships between the two corporations. According to a well-publicized New York Times article on the topic, the conflict between the two companies may involve tensed personal relations between their chief executive officers. The “body language” evidence was used to reinforce the thesis of personal tensions. As might be expected, the actual meeting between these two executives as been described, in at least one technology-focused podcast, as a public display of friendliness between the participants. The significance of the phatic function of communication is often made obvious but this case seems particularly clear.

Channeling

Speaking of the ethnography of communication, paleoanthropologist John Hawks recently wrote a blogpost about some uses of backchannel in conferences.

Part of that post is based on some work on computer-mediated backchannel by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen.

PressThink: How the Backchannel Has Changed the Game for Conference Panelists.

In these contexts, “backchannel” tends to refer to the use of public writing during an oral presentation and, more specifically, to the use of Twitter during conferences. Clearly, linguistic anthropologists have a lot to say on these topics.

As an update in his blogpost, John Hawks mentions the case of a rather difficult conference presentation experience lived and told by social media researcher danah boyd:

apophenia » Blog Archive » spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective.

That blogpost by boyd brings up several issues which could spark conversation bring concepts from linguistic anthropology: non-verbal communication, the cultural importance of shared expectations, and the diversity of roles in a communication event.

Literate

Among other links I have recently found relevant, in relation to our field, were several pieces having to do with literacy. These may have struck me more directly because I have been doing work for Quebec’s Adult Learner Week, a context in which literacy is put to the fore.

First among these is an episode of Ockham’s Razor, a show on ABC Radio National. The show previously had LSA Ethics blogger Claire Bowern as a guest to discuss language and prehistory.

This particular show, however, takes a rather different perspective in discussing obstacles to literacy among indigenous Australian children.

Ockham’s Razor – 24 January 2010 – Early language and reading skills in indigenous children in Australia.

A second item connecting literacy with social status concerns a decision, by Virginia governor Robert McDonnell to require that nonviolent felons submit written essays in order to be regain their voting rights.

McDonnell in hot water over nonviolent felons’ rights.

The piece was sent to me with a note asking if this might be a case for scriptocentrism.

The last part of the literacy-focused section of this roundup comes from diverse blogposts by an English teacher calling herself Siobhan Curious.

• Why Study Literature?
• Encountering the Other: How Literature Will Save the World
• Why Children Shouldn’t Read

In these posts, literacy is associated very directly to diverse things we would likely consider anthropological, such as in the following forum thread, mentioned by Siobhan Curious.

Why Study Literature? – Freethought Forum.

The deadline for this contest is May 1, 2010, and we will award a prize of $100 for the winning design.

The logo should work at both larger and smaller scales. Designs should be submitted in TIFF or PNG formats, one full size (200×200 pixels, no larger than 4 inches/100mm in any dimension), one thumbnail size. Our journal color is a lime green. Logo colors are open but should not clash too badly with the lime green.

Web-safe code: #390
Hex: 339900
RGB: 51, 153, 0

Preliminary inquiries sent through this contact form are welcome. All entries should be submitted through the form below by May 1.

The judging will be done by an ad hoc SLA logo committee consisting of three members: Alex Enkerli, Leila Monaghan, and Paul Garrett. All finalists will have their designs posted on the SLA blog.

My name is Alex Enkerli and I define myself as an “informal ethnographer.”

My background is indeed in linguistic anthropology, at least in part, but I’ve been involved in a variety of other ethnographic fields including ethnomusicology and folkloristics. My research interests include the relationships between music and language, verbal art, semiotics, and West Africa along with social networks and so-called “geek” culture. I’ve done formal fieldwork in Mali where I worked with members of hunters associations.

For the past eight years or so, my main academic status is that of a part-time faculty member (adjunct, lecturer) at diverse institutions in the United States and Canada. These days, I mostly teach in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, in Montreal.

I’m a French-speaking Montrealer of Swiss origins and my Francophone identity tends to have some impact on my life, including on my academic activities.

I became the SLA’s “Web Guru” in the summer of 2009 and have contributed to the development of the SLA’s new website in collaboration with Kerim Friedman, who was then the SLA’s Digital Content Editor. We have launched this new site around the time of the 2009 AAA meetings.

Since these meetings, Leila Monaghan has taken Kerim Friedman’s place as Digital Content Editor and my role with the SLA has changed. I handle some behind-the-scene tasks and (should) write regular posts about subjects related to linguistic anthropology.

Feel free to contact me.

Below is my annual partial list of panels and meetings of interest to linguistic anthropologists, including those sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.

There will also be a memorial gathering in honor of Dell Hymes on Saturday from 7:30-9:30pm in Grand Ballroom III of the Courtyard Marriott hotel.

For the full schedule of the annual meeting, see the online program.

As always, please feel free to suggest other events via the comments section.

Labels: American Anthropological Association, annual meeting

Three copies of books submitted for consideration should be sent to the address below by June 15th. (It is sometimes possible for authors to request that their publishers send them.) A committee appointed by the president of the SLA will evaluate all submissions. The winner will be announced at the SLA Business Meeting during the AAA Annual Meeting in December.

Three copies of books submitted for consideration should sent to:

Kathryn A. Woolard
Department of Anthropology, 0532
UCSD
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0532