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SLA Blog

Official blog of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology

Posts by: Chad Nilep

  1. They are them; we are me and others.

    Stanley Fish notes that critics of the so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’ see the terrorist attacks of September 11 as an act committed by Islam, for which all Muslims are responsible. In contrast, the stabbing of a cab driver by an attacker who reportedly asked the driver if he is Muslim is seen as “the act of a disturbed individual,” not a representative of an anti-Islamic position.

  2. Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #9

    This week’s Roundup comes from the sports department.
    Caster Semenya, gender tests, and bodies out of place
    Sumo scandal
    World Cup woo woo

  3. North American English Dialect Survey

    From Claire Bowern:
    Some colleagues at the University of Auckland and I are conducting a survey on North American English and trialling the use of flash web recording for phonetic analysis. If you would like to participate by recording a short wordlist, please visit our web site.

  4. Idioms are hard

    Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP, has apparently upset some Americans with his reference to “the small people.” My first reaction when I heard Svanberg’s remarks was that he must have been aiming for “the little guy” and produced a near miss.

  5. University of Arizona Department of Linguistics’ letter to state lawmakers

    The Arizona Department of Education is asking school districts to remove teachers who speak “heavily accented or ungrammatical” English from classrooms where students are learning English. In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition.

  6. Linguistic anthropology roundup #6

    In this edition of our bi-weekly Roundup: the satirical journal Speculative Grammarian tackles fieldwork; the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is discussing a resolution condemning Arizona’s new immigration law; work summarized in Science Daily suggests that loss of hearing in one ear affects children’s scores on language tests.

  7. Nova Publishers

    This morning I received two separate emails from Nova Publishers inviting me to contribute to upcoming books.

    After several minutes of reflection, I have decided not to submit my work.

  8. Refreshingly careful definitions of “Socialism”

    The word socialism seems to be much in vogue in the United States recently, primarily as an epithet for one’s political opponents, especially for representatives of the Obama Administration or the Democratic Party, but also for “the Media” collectively.

    I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find two recent blog posts pointing out how this usage differs from the traditional definition of socialism as a political position.

  9. Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #3

    Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #3

    The Boston Globe’s “The Word”, Conversations with Ron Scollon, Monkeys with Internet Access, Voting Osage, and more

  10. Accent, Race, and Social Preferences

    A piece in Scientific American Mind called “Accents Trump Skin Color” reviews work by Katherine Kinzler and colleagues suggesting that, for young children, accent is as important as visual cues to race, gender, and age in selecting friends. The magazine article was interesting, and led me to look for the research paper it was based on.

  11. Toyota and Japanese orthography

    A radio quiz program suggested that Toyota uses a character written with eight strokes, while Toyoda uses one with ten, and that eight is a more auspicious number. This is strange for at least two reasons.

    It turns out that BBC News contributor Kathryn Westcott published an article last week addressing the question, “Why is the car giant Toyota not Toyoda?” which does a pretty good job explaining the apparent inconsistency.

  12. An orphan by any other name…?

    I know very little about adoption practices in Haiti, and all I know about events in that country since the earthquake last January I have learned from the news media. Still, I wonder whether the thing that American missionaries call an orphanage is really the same as what most Haitians think of as an orphelinat. It appears that Haitian orphanages are quite different from my own image of an orphanage.

  13. Code switching and language alternation

    A colleague writes to ask:

    I read your article ‘Code Switching’ in Sociocultural Linguistics. What I wonder is [why] you didn’t write something about the author Grosjean (1982, Life with Two Languages). He also used the term Code Switching as one of the first. And I can’t get the differences between ‘ language alternation’ and ‘ code switching’? Can you describe the differences?

    These are excellent questions.

  14. Constructed languages on film

    According to Ben Zimmer, various aliens in Star Wars spoke Quechua, one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in South America, and Haya, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania.
    The new film Avatar features Na’vi, a constructed language said to “out-Klingon Klingon.”

  15. Still learning from Dell Hymes

    I was particularly moved by a memorial at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association for Dell Hymes. Hymes founded the ethnography of speaking, developed the concept of communicative competence, and pioneered the study of ethnopoetics.