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The Ecology of Language Evolution in Latin America: A Haitian Postscript toward a Postcolonial Sequel

Michel Degraff

in Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America

How can studies of language change in Iberian America help us better understand related phenomena in the Caribbean, and vice-versa? I raise some fundamental issues about language contact and its ... More

How can studies of language change in Iberian America help us better understand related phenomena in the Caribbean, and vice-versa? I raise some fundamental issues about language contact and its linguistic, cultural and socio-political consequences in Latin America, alongside challenging questions regarding the relationship between power and the production of knowledge in and about Latin America. These issues conjure up the foundations and politics of Creole studies and of education in Haiti. Here, Haiti serves as a spectacular case study to probe the effects of (neo-)colonialism on language diversification, vitality and endangerment throughout Latin America. Rejecting Creole Exceptionalism (i.e., the dogma that Creole languages are exceptional languages on either developmental or structural grounds), I compare Haitian Creole with its counterparts in continental Latin America, particularly Amerindian languages. This exercise sheds new light on the common socio-historical roots of various myths about Creole and Indigenous languages. I then consider how the past can help us analyze, then deconstruct, some of the racially- and ethnically-based hierarchies in Latin America. I conclude with a plea for a North-South collaboration among linguists and, also, between the latter and educators—collaboration toward social justice through quality education for all in Latin America and beyond.Less

Some Observations on Research Methodology in Lexicostatistical Studies of Sign Languages

James Woodward

in Deaf around the World: The Impact of Language

This chapter gives an overview of how historical linguists classify languages into families. While the comparative method and internal reconstruction are preferable when abundant data are available, ... More

This chapter gives an overview of how historical linguists classify languages into families. While the comparative method and internal reconstruction are preferable when abundant data are available, the limited data on sign languages indicate that lexicostatistics is the most useful method. This method is made reliable by using the Swadesh word list revised appropriately for sign languages. Languages can have multiple ancestors, that is, languages that have contributed significantly to the daughters (thus creolization is included). The history of sign languages must be studied, not assumed, in order to be understood. An examination of families of signs in Southeast Asia and Central America alerts us to the endangered status of indigenous sign languages, often at the hand of ASL.Less

Zapotec, Mixtec, and Purepecha Youth: Multilingualism and the Marginalization of Indigenous Immigrants in the United States

William Perez, Rafael Vasquez, and Raymond Buriel

in Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race

The immigration of indigenous Mexicans to the United States has received increasing attention in the research literature, yet very few studies have focused on youth, their linguistic abilities, or ... More

The immigration of indigenous Mexicans to the United States has received increasing attention in the research literature, yet very few studies have focused on youth, their linguistic abilities, or their educational experiences. While some school districts have identified one or more indigenous languages spoken at home and school, to our knowledge, no previous study has examined Purepecha, Mixtec, and Zapotec students’ linguistic abilities. We examined their English, Spanish, and indigenous language use as part of a study in the Greater Los Angeles area. In addition to illustrating trilingual language brokering and multilingual language practices, importantly, we consider such practices to be possible tools for the educational enhancement of indigenous immigrant youth in U.S. schools.Less

Linguistic diversity and English in the Philippines

Curtis D. McFarland

in Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary

The Philippines possesses a great wealth of indigenous languages, and while these languages are related, the differences among them are also extensive. This chapter examines this linguistic ... More

The Philippines possesses a great wealth of indigenous languages, and while these languages are related, the differences among them are also extensive. This chapter examines this linguistic diversity. It discusses the eight largest language groups, suggesting that not only are they closely related, but also exhibit a remarkable degree of difference. It also examines their differences in all linguistic aspects: lexicon, phonology, syntax.Less

“Acquainted by Some Signes”: Communication, Knowledge, and Sign Language in Native America

Céline Carayon

in Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

Throughout the colonial period, the remarkable linguistic diversity of Indigenous America puzzled, amazed, and frustrated European colonists. But pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples across the continent ... More

Throughout the colonial period, the remarkable linguistic diversity of Indigenous America puzzled, amazed, and frustrated European colonists. But pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples across the continent were already experts at communicating with foreigners through alternate means, including whistle speech, smoke signals, and gestures. In this chapter, complex Indigenous nonverbal traditions of communication are situated within the rich linguistic landscape that existed in America prior to the colonial encounter. Native expressiveness, the author argues, must be understood through its multimedia combination of visual, verbal, material, and nonverbal dimensions. The chapter also offers an overview of the regions and cultures where early French colonists were most likely to encounter fully conventional forms of Indigenous sign language and other nonverbal practices, which profoundly shaped the form and outcome of early colonial interactions. The French often drew simplistic conclusions about the varying degrees of “civilization” or “barbarism” of the groups they met based on their communicational successes and failures with these groups. The chapter argues that their writings obscure (but can also reveal) the true diversity and richness of Indigenous communication in Northeastern North America, South America, and the Circum-Caribbean region.Less

In Australia, it’s ‘Aboriginal’ with a Capital ‘A’: Aboriginality, Politics and Identity

Barbara Glowczewski

in Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze

The politics of identity discussed here are still at the heart of current Indigenous Australian struggles for recognition. In the 1960s, for ethical and political reasons, the term Aboriginal became ... More

The politics of identity discussed here are still at the heart of current Indigenous Australian struggles for recognition. In the 1960s, for ethical and political reasons, the term Aboriginal became an ethnonym written with a capital ‘A’ to designate the descendants of the first inhabitants of Australia, some 500 groups speaking different languages. Aboriginal groups have not only different language names and cultural backgrounds, but different histories — massacres, forced sedentarisation in reserves, separation from their parents of children of mixed descent, discrimination, criminalisation — all of which broke the transmission of some peoples’ heritage. Yet many claim their ‘Aboriginality’ which gathers all under an Aboriginal flag (since 1972), even if not everyone agrees on the definition of a common identity. Some priviledge an identity of continuity, based on language, localised spirit-children and ritual links with the land, pre-contact modes of existence; others put forward an identity of resistance, rewriting colonial history, valorising a national Aboriginal identity that encompasses all mixed descendants, struggling for land-rights, against bad living conditions, exclusion and exploitation. First published in 1997.Less

French in the Lower Lafourche Basin

Nathalie Dajko

in French on Shifting Ground: Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana

Chapter Four provides a detailed account of the French of the Lafourche basin, outlining particularities especially at the lexical and phonetic/phonological levels. It shows how the language varies ... More

Chapter Four provides a detailed account of the French of the Lafourche basin, outlining particularities especially at the lexical and phonetic/phonological levels. It shows how the language varies by ethnic group (Indigenous vs Cajun), and illustrates the importance the language plays for both Cajun and Indian ethnic identity–indeed, French is an Indian language in Terrebonne-Lafourche. Using excerpts from recorded interviews, the chapter then shows that these documented the unique features of the region are often recognized, and that residents feel an attachment not just to French, but to a very local variety of it: it is this French that is at the heart of identity in Terrebonne-Lafourche. The language identifies them as authentic members of the community; no other dialect of the language could perform this role.Less

The Chitimacha Language: A History

Daniel W. Hieber

in Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture

This chapter explores the efforts by the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana to preserve their language, including linguistic documentation

The Tunica Language

Patricia Anderson and Judith M. Maxwell

in Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture

Members of the Tunica Language Project describe their work on reviving Tunica, including descriptions of language characteristics and tribal pedagogical materials

Kowassaaton Ilhaalos: Let us Hear Koasati

Linda Langley and Bertney Langley

in Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture

This chapter is an update on the recent efforts of the Coushatta Tribe in Louisiana to document their language, including a major National Science Foundation grant to create learning materials and ... More

This chapter is an update on the recent efforts of the Coushatta Tribe in Louisiana to document their language, including a major National Science Foundation grant to create learning materials and work on a new orthography.Less

Almost Extinct: Elegy, Pastoral, and Sounds in and Out of Thoreau

Wai Chee Dimock

in Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

This chapter chronicles the hazards and resilience of the planet through two other genres, elegy and pastoral, each bearing witness to prospects of non-survival faced by humans and nonhumans: by ... More

This chapter chronicles the hazards and resilience of the planet through two other genres, elegy and pastoral, each bearing witness to prospects of non-survival faced by humans and nonhumans: by frogs and toads, wolves, loons, and Native Americans. Taking these genres through an emerging field, sound studies, the chapter traces a history of near-extinction as a sonic history, running from the works of Thoreau to Maya Lin’s “What is Missing,” a sound installation and “last memorial” to all endangered and vanished species. This history, though dire, is not without a counterpoint. In the climate activism of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL Pipeline, coupled with the resurgence of indigenous languages and the eloquence of recently elected Native legislators, we hear an audible alternative to the silence of extinction. A call to action rather than an act of mourning, these newly arisen sounds are those of a crisis-honed "new pastoral," reaching beyond elegy to propose an experimental genre for the twenty-first century. Dedicated to life while mindful of death, this is a "green print" improvised out of devastation, responsive to both past and future, and honoring ancestors and descendants both.Less

Multilingualism and the Periphery

Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes

in Multilingualism and the Periphery

This introductory chapter provides a review of three conceptual areas, which are central to the thesis of the volume: core-periphery dynamics, multilingualism, and language ideological processes in ... More

This introductory chapter provides a review of three conceptual areas, which are central to the thesis of the volume: core-periphery dynamics, multilingualism, and language ideological processes in relation to minority and indigenous language spaces. Core-periphery dynamics – and how they are imagined – have a significant impact on the way that multilingualism in minority and indigenous language contexts is conceptualized and practised. An unstable model of core-periphery calls for a reassessment of what linguistic and cultural peripheries are, under globalization, and an exploration of how people evaluate and work discursively with these reconfigurations. Minority language sites are subject, by necessity, to various – and often conflicting – language ideologies, norms and practices. The chapter aims to providing a framework for exploring the evolution of language practices which, on the one hand, challenge and disregard the centrist ideology of parallel monolingualism, whilst on the other hand relying on it as a necessary resource.Less

Talking with the Moai on Easter Island: Placing Rapa Nui Language

Forrest Wade Young

in At Home and in the Field: Ethnographic Encounters in Asia and the Pacific Islands

This chapter illustrates how the meaning of the indigenous Rapa Nui language on Easter Island is established in ritual practices that living Rapa Nui people conduct to communicate with the ancestral ... More

This chapter illustrates how the meaning of the indigenous Rapa Nui language on Easter Island is established in ritual practices that living Rapa Nui people conduct to communicate with the ancestral spirit world. Through language studies with an indigenous teacher, the author discovers that his interpretation of Rapa Nui culture, language, and politics has become radically recontextualized. Moreover, this chapter argues that Rapa Nui language speakers, ultimately, are entangled in a political struggle for indigenous place against settler colonial discourse normalizing Easter Island as a Chilean space. The discursive practice of Rapa Nui language, as opposed to Chilean Spanish, will likely continue to be an important cultural resource for the Rapa Nui people to maintain an identity and “sense of place” distinguished from Chile.Less

The Maintenance of Koasati

Geoffrey Kimball

in Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture

In this chapter, the linguist who wrote the first grammar of Koasati explores some trial history and the power of the language in the community.

Ishak Words: Language Renewal Prospects for a Historical Gulf Coast Tribe

Jeffery U. Darensbourg and David Kaufman

in Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture

This chapter recounts the initial efforts of the Ishak people of Louisiana (sometimes called Atakapa) to wake their sleeping language.

A Literary Standard and Its Discontents

Kathryn E. Graber

in Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia

This chapter analyzes Buryat language standardization as an example of truncated standardization, a problem that characterizes many minority languages in postcolonial contexts. It discusses why ... More

This chapter analyzes Buryat language standardization as an example of truncated standardization, a problem that characterizes many minority languages in postcolonial contexts. It discusses why indigenous languages like Buryat are more likely to be surrounded by a different lingua franca, such as Russian, and used between speakers of different dialects to reduce the immediate need for a standardized indigenous language. It assesses how media makers and other language elites persist in trying for standardization in an effort to create and maintain a strong literary standard as a crucial component of the Buryat modernizing project. The chapter also talks about contemporary audiences who control colloquial forms of Buryat but have a hard time understanding Buryat-language media, particularly news media. It investigates linguistic resources, such as dialects and Russian–Buryat mixed forms, that are not part of the literary standard but serve important social functions in certain contexts.Less

What Is Speaking onto the Page and How Does Freewriting Teach It?

Peter Elbow

in Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing

This chapter explores the concept of speaking onto the page and how freewriting teaches how to use the unplanned speaking gear as a disciplined practice for part of the writing process. After ... More

This chapter explores the concept of speaking onto the page and how freewriting teaches how to use the unplanned speaking gear as a disciplined practice for part of the writing process. After discussing freewriting as pure exercise and how it can be used to achieve serious results, the chapter considers inkshedding, an application of freewriting that foregrounds speech, and invisible writing, a version of freewriting that foregrounds the role of attention. Finally, it cites two books by Maria Rosa Menocal that describe how indigenous languages flourished, along with oral and written literature, around Romania during the “Dark Ages”.Less