Some interesting comments on the education system in general in a New York Times Editorial on Haitian Education These comments were posted in response to the Petition to have textbooks in Kreyòl in the schools (the last post on this SLA Blog): Nancy Reyes says Are you implying that Haitian kids are dumber than kids [...]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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Petition on Haitian Kreyòl
Posted for: Michel DeGraff, MIT Linguistics & Philosophy
Dear friends and colleagues,
We ask that you please take time to read, sign and distribute Professor Yves Dejean’s urgent public petition about school reform in Haiti.
The petition is available online at:
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Bad Words
Why I find “geek”, when used as a slur, more offensive than words which may commonly be viewed as quite foul and offensive.
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The Making of the AAA Meetings
This year’s AAA meetings have the highest number of registrants on record. As one of the student assistants on the Executive Program Committee, the level of interest was both reassuring and daunting. Last month, I traveled to Washington DC to the AAA offices to help with the enormous task of scheduling the academic program. It [...]
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South African languages
About the vuvuzela term: first, the suffix -ela is an “applicative” extension in isiZulu. The suffix “ela” means “an action… performed for, on behalf of, or in the direction of something or someone” (Mbeje 2005:229). Second, there are a large number of ideophones in isiZulu (in fact, the term was first invented as a grammatical category for the linguistic analysis of isiZulu). An ideophone is basically type of onomatopoeia. Thus the term “vuvuzela” can be understood as ‘the thing with which you make the vuvu sound for someone or something’. -
Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #8
Taping marriages One of the most frequent uses of linguistic anthropology is to help us understand how people in marriages communicate with each other. Article on people “learning to be married” and the importance of using videotapes to understand how people interact with each other. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061804509.html?sid=ST2010062404889 This article is on studies from UCLA’s Center for [...]
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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.
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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.
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SLA President announces new JLA editors
On behalf of the SLA Executive Committee and the JLA editorship, I’m very pleased to announce the appointment of the incoming JLA editorial team for the term of January 2011 through December 2013. Alexandra (Misty) Jaffe, Professor of Linguistics at Cal State University, Long Beach, will serve as Editor. Misty brings to the position 6 [...]
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Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #5
Fifth linguistic anthropology roundup, by Leila Monaghan
Linguistic Diversity
Linguistic diversity has been in the news in the last few weeks in a couple of different guises.
First, there was an article about the many languages of New York City (particularly Queens)
Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages
The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.
Just starting are Twitter adventures: Twitter.comAs you have only 140 characters per tweet, twittering has some very arcane ins and outs.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Celso Alvarez Caccamo on Catalan Language Policies
Celso Alvarez Caccamo had such an interesting response to my first roundup that I have pasted it in full so anyone seeing the blog will see it. I was tempted to remove the Altalang.com link but will leave it (and its evidence of my utter lack of knowledge about Spanish dialects and Iberian penninsula languages) [...]
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Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #2: Our Man at the Times, Ben Zimmer
A special edition of the Linguistic Anthropology Roundup to introduce, Ben Zimmer, a Chicago-trained linguistic anthropologist, linguist and lexicographer who was just appointed as the New York Times’s Sunday Magazine, “On Language” columnist. -
Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #1
Welcome to the inaugural Society for Linguistic Anthropology Roundup Blogpost that will briefly summarize some of the current interesting linguistic anthropology related materials available on the web. Three of us, Alex Enkerli (SLA Web Guru), Chad Nilep (a regular blogger on this site), and myself (Leila Monaghan, SLA Digital Content Editor), will share the duties [...]
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Wyoming Language, Culture and History Conference
We got so many interesting paper proposals that we have extended the conference for an extra half day so we could fit them all in. The Wyoming Language, Culture and History Conference now runs from Thursday, July to Saturday, July 3. See full blog post for the preliminary program -
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.
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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.
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CFP AAA: Circulating Discourses of Past and Present: Linguistic Anthropology and History
History traditionally was part of linguistic anthropology but in more recent years much of the focus of the field has been on close analysis of specific events rather than ideas of the past and historical patterns. This panel aims to bring many notions of history back into circulation within the field of linguistic anthropology and [...]
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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.
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SLA Call for Invited Sessions
It’s that time of year again: The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, on November 17-21. As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an exciting meeting in New Orleans this November. The theme of the 2010 Meeting is “Circulation.” I hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme, although you do not have to do so. -
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.
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Language, Culture and History Conference
Language, Culture and History conference
Call for Papers, Abstracts due March 1
Official Website: http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/anthropology/info.asp?p=19234
Department of Anthropology
Co-sponsored by the journal Ethnohistory
University of Wyoming
July 1-2, 2010 -
Joint Call for Papers for Society for Linguistic Anthropology and Council on Anthropology and Education
Charting Multilingual Confluences within Education Eric Johnson (ejj AT tricity.wsu.edu) Building on the “Circulation” theme for the 2010 AAA meetings, the committee on Multicultural and Multilingual Education within the Council on Anthropology & Education would like to invite presentation proposals to be considered for participation on an “Invited” session panel. The general aim of this [...]
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