Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache.Keith H. Basso. Albuquerque University of New Mexico Press, 1996. 171 pp.

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache.

As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.”

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/amet.12112

#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States

Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages.

As an outsider, I would feel very uncomfortable if I were to advocate to a speech community that it ought to try to keep its language alive. It is entirely up to the community or to individuals within a community as to whether they want to put in the effort to develop new speakers for their language. Community members have the right to advocate within their community for the survival of their language; someone from outside the community does not. The right to language choice includes the right to choose against a language. This is the logical result of believing that maintaining an indigenous language is a matter of human rights, a belief virtually all language advocates must share. The outside expert’s role is to assist in providing the means for language survival or revival to motivated community members and perhaps to provide encouragement and a sense of hope that it can be done. (Leanne :151–52)

From linguistic elicitation to eliciting the linguist: Lessons in community empowerment from Melanesia

Practical language development: Whose mission

Language shift can take place rapidly, over a generation or two, or it can take place gradually, but continuously, over several generations. Linguists are becoming increasingly alarmed at the rate at which languages are going out of use. Overviews of the study of language endangerment usually start with a list of statistics about the number of languages in the world, the proportion considered endangered, and so on. Politics also plays an important part in language differentiation. Following nineteenth-century philosophers such as Herder, language has been considered a crucial element of national identity, with 'one state, one people, one language' being seen as the ideal. But languages do not necessarily follow political boundaries. The causes of language endangerment can be divided into four main categories such as: natural catastrophes, famine, disease; war and genocide; overt repression; and cultural/political/economic dominance.

Speakers and language documentation

Apparent reference to a noun’s phonological form is common in noun class and gender systems.1 However, if morphosyntactic operations are mediated by abstract features, as has been argued most explicitly by Anderson (1992), Zwicky (1987), and Zwicky and Pullum (1986), then phonological identities between nouns and their corresponding agreement markers cannot be expressed directly in morphosyntactic rules.

The morphosyntactic reality of phonological form

This collection of papers is an attempt to begin a new conversation among academic linguists about the scope, institutional underpinnings, and implications for academia of the work being carried out by our missionary counterparts, particularly the Bible translation organization SIL International (SIL). The observation that we take as our starting point is one that some linguists might never have considered, while others take it for granted: that there are systematic dependencies between our discipline on the one hand, and a Christian missionary organization and its products on the other. Because it necessarily raises very personal questions of religion and motivation, this topic is a sensitive one that we know many would rather avoid. But as several of the contributors here try to make clear, the time has come for the community of academic linguists to reconsider its role in sustaining this status quo. My interest in the relationship between academic linguistics and SIL grows out of discussions I have had with Jeff Good over the past several years. Good conducts fieldwork on Bantoid languages in Northwest Cameroon and has a long-standing interest in digital aspects of language documentation. My fieldwork has been on the Arapesh languages of Papua New Guinea, where I have explored not only traditional linguistic questions about grammatical structure, but also issues surrounding the communityfieldworker relationship from an anthropological point of view. Like many other academically based field linguists, both Good and I have benefited enormously from mission expertise and infrastructure in the field. We have received generous advice and practical assistance from SIL colleagues in our respective field regions. We have relied on numerous mission resources in carrying out our primary research: Ethnologue, phonetic fonts, and previously collected word lists; library collections, transportation, accommodations in the field; even foreign currency exchange at the best rate in town. Indeed, we can hardly imagine being able to do fieldwork without these things. And yet, the current professional climate of concern for small and endangered languages has led us to question the extent to which SIL, with its guiding project of facilitating the worldwide spread of Christianity, is really a fellow traveler. Preliminary versions of these papers were presented at the 2007 Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Anaheim, CA, in a symposium entitled ‘Missionaries and scholars: The overlapping agendas of linguists in the field’. The participants were invited because of the diverse experiences and disciplinary perspectives they brought to the incipient conversation. Patience Epps is an anthropologically trained linguist who conducted documentary fieldwork in Amazonia, where she observed firsthand the tensions arising from mission activities in native communities. After the symposium, Epps began collaborating with Herb Ladley, whose interest in faith as a motivation for linguistic work led him to carry out research on SIL recruiting and fundraising practices while he was a student at the University of Virginia. He now works in the field of

Lise M. Dobrin

Papers

From linguistic elicitation to eliciting the linguist: Lessons in community empowerment from Melanesia

Practical language development: Whose mission

Speakers and language documentation

The morphosyntactic reality of phonological form

SIL International and the disciplinary culture of linguistics: Introduction