Language in Society

Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley ... ABSTRACT Our use of language embodies attitudes as well as referential meanings. 'Woman's language' has as foundation the attitude that women are marginal to the ...

All social life is based on people's ability to recognize what others are doing. Recently, the mechanisms underlying this human ability have become the focus of a growing multidisciplinary interest. This article contributes to this line of research by considering how people's orientations to who they are to each other are built-in in the organization action. We outline a unifying theoretical framework in which the basic facets of human social relations are seen as being anchored in three orders—epistemic order, deontic order, and emotional order—each of which, we argue, also pertains to action recognition. This framework allows us to account for common ambiguities in action recognition and to describe relationship negotiations involving a complex interface between knowledge, power, and emotion. (Action recognition, social relations, conversation analysis, status, stance, epistemic rights, deontic rights, emotion)*

Le volume traite de la médiation des savoirs sur le langage et l’appréhende sous deux aspects. D’une part, le volume propose quelques pistes pour mieux comprendre ce qu’engage de fabriquer des savoirs sur le langage lorsque la relation entre linguistes et public investigué est celle d’une attention mutuelle des deux parties plutôt que celle d’une position surplombante de l’une sur l’autre. D’autre part, il présente certaines manières par lesquelles les savoirs construits en sciences du langage sont diffusés par les linguistes auprès du public, qu’il soit professionnel ou ‘profane’, sans prétentions à en épuiser l’inventaire.

Le choix d’articuler ces deux aspects s’explique d’abord par le fait que la médiation des savoirs sur le langage, au contraire peut-être de nos a priori, ne s’observe pas seulement au moment de la communication, de la vulgarisation ou de la transposition des résultats mais tout au long du processus de recherche. Dans un cas comme dans l’autre, se réunissent autour de l’objet langage des instances aux positions épistémiques et sociales différenciées. L’articulation de questionnements relatifs à la fabrication et à la diffusion des savoirs sur le langage répond également à la préoccupation de sortir la recherche de sa tour d’ivoire pour en envisager les implications. Dans la perspective d’une science aux prises avec le monde social, et dans le prolongement d'une réflexion sur la co-construction des connaissances, la médiation des savoirs apparait comme une des conditions, un des moyens et une des finalités incontournables de la recherche.

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how the field of Jewish interlinguistics and a case study of Jewish Russian (JR) can contribute to the general understanding of ethnolects. JR is a cluster of post-Yiddish varieties of Russian used as a special in-group register by Ashkenazic Jews in Russia. Differences between varieties of JR may be explained in terms of differing degrees of copying from Yiddish. The case of JR allows the general conclusions that (i) the diffusion of ethnolectal features into mainstream use is facilitated not only by a ...

Academic Reference:

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad & Monaghan, Paul (2012). "Revival linguistics and the new media: Talknology in the service of the Barngarla language reclamation", pp. 119-126 of Foundation for Endangered Languages XVI Conference: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century:Globalisation, Technology & New Media. Auckland, New Zealand.

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Revival Linguistics and the New Media:
Talknology in the service of the Barngarla Language Reclamation


Ghil‘ad Zuckermann

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[ghilad.zuckermann@adelaide.edu.au]


Paul Monaghan

Mobile Language Team
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[paul.monaghan@adelaide.edu.au]


Abstract

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (see Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

The study: The Barngarla language (spelled Parnkalla by Schürmann 1844) is a no-longer spoken Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan Aboriginal language of the Lakes Cultural Region of South Australia. Most recently Zuckermann, Monaghan and the Barngarla community have launched a reclamation of this sleeping beauty in three major rural/urban centres on the Eyre Peninsula, namely Port Lincoln, Whyalla, and Port Augusta. The presence of three Barngarla populations several hours drive apart presents the revival linguist with a need for a sophisticated reclamation involving ‘talknological’ innovations, such as online chatting, newsgroups, photo and resource sharing through a Barngarla wiki. This paper also examines the tensions accompanying the creation of a Barngarla ‘community of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998) in a post-traditional Aboriginal context. In important ways, the new talknology poses a direct challenge to existing authority structures relating to the everyday management of knowledge, collaboration and participation. We predict that how the broader Barngarla community negotiates these issues will have an important bearing on the ultimate results of the reclamation project.




Revival Linguistics

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

Revival Linguistics complements the established field of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep. Revival Linguistics ought to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): Grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation, i.e. in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s 1844 spelling of the Barngarla word nunyara ‘recovery’, which ignores the English environment, thus resulting in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara.

Closely related to contact linguistics, Revival Linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics, e.g. by weakening the Family Tree model, which implies that a language ought to have only one parent. Assisting Aboriginal communities in a realistic, non-purisitic way, without selling them myths, Revival Linguistics promotes efficiency and efficacy in language reclamation.

Certainly Australia has been made the ‘Unlucky Country’ through the historical processes of linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating). These twin forces were in operation from the early colonial period. In her detailed study of the role missionary language practices in the early years of the South Australian colony, Scrimgeour quotes the following colonial language ideology: ‘Mr Forster afterwards adverted to the present mode of teaching the children in their own language. He, with all respect to the Missionaries, would say, on several grounds, that this was wrong. The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.  He gave the Missionaries full credit for their talents and zeal, but he thought it would be better to teach the children in English’ (from Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843; Scrimgeour, 2007: 116, italics added).

In the case of glottophagy, Governor George Grey noted: ‘The merchant in London who lays on a vessel for a certain port, regards the affair as a mere mercantile speculation, but could he trace out the results he effects in their remotest ramifications, he would stand astonished at the changes he produces.  With the wizard wand of commerce, he touches a lone and trackless forest, and at his bidding, cities arise, and the hum and dust of trade collect – away are swept ancient races; antique laws and customs moulder into oblivion.  The strong-holds of murder and superstition are cleansed, and the Gospel is preached amongst ignorant and savage men. The ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201, italics added). Grey was a strong supporter of Aboriginal languages, encouraging Schürmann’s work documenting the Adelaide language (Kaurna) and Barngarla at Port Lincoln (see below).

With globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups all over the world added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival: for example, social justice, diversity and employability, respectively.

Zuckermann (2012) has enthusiastically called for Native Tongue Title and linguistic human rights, suggesting that the Australian government ought to compensate Indigenous people not only for the loss of land but equally importantly for the loss of language. Zuckermann has suggested to the Australian government to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages.

Furthermore, it is predicted that in the future the very insights offered by Revival Linguistics will themselves become part of Indigenous Intellectual Property, when Slovenes and Estonians come to Australia and New Zealand to ask Aboriginal Australians and Maori to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

There is an urgent need to produce perspicacious LINGUISTIC and socio-linguistic insights relevant to language reclamation. Otherwise, linguists or language workers would not be able to offer, if asked by Indigenous people, efficient and efficacious advice. There are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and First Nations leaders to work more efficiently; for example, to focus more on basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than on sounds and word order – see Zuckermann (2009: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf.

Revival linguistics would assist revivalists to be more realistic and to abandon discouraging slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!" The following are among the basic principles that the revival linguist encourages in Aboriginal communities:

i. If your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive!
ii. If you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue; and
iii. If your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

The Study


Figure 1: Map of Traditional Aboriginal Country after Norman Tindale (adapted from Hercus 1999)

The Barngarla language reclamation project has arisen through partnerships between the University of Adelaide (Linguistics and the Mobile Language Team) and the Barngarla people. Although still in its infancy, consultations began in September 2011, a number of very significant steps have been made towards reclaiming this ‘sleeping beauty’. Without doubt, the key challenge has been to develop a strategy for the reclamation of the language simultaneously and without favour in three major regional centres. In ways that will be elaborated below, this multi-sited, regional or peripheral reclamation makes demands that are very different to those often found in metropolitan reclamation contexts (e.g. Kaurna, cf. Amery...

It is received wisdom in variationist sociolinguistics that linguistic and social factors go hand in hand in structuring variability in language and any consequent instances of language change. We address the complexity of such factors by exploring data from several Arabic dialects in the eastern Arab World. We demonstrate that language change does not always follow expected phonological trajectories, even in cases where older changes are reconstructed to have operated along so-called universal patterns. In our explanation of recent changes in these dialects, we emphasise the role of social motivations for language change and the interactions between these social constraints and purely linguistic ones. Our analysis of change is supported by historical accounts of variation and change in Arabic. We illustrate how general principles of sociolinguistic theory apply to the Arabic data and provide additional layers of sociolinguistic information that highlight the importance of diverse d...

Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley ... ABSTRACT Our use of language embodies attitudes as well as referential meanings. 'Woman's language' has as foundation the attitude that women are marginal to the ...

Abstract: The argument I will develop in this essay is that the foreign students are a latent human resource who can assist with overcoming English monolingualism in the Australian population. Foreign students, properly rewarded, can be a major source of skills transfer. Every one of those students is a walking compendium of language and cultural skills that Australians need to know.

In an effort to carve a distinct place for social facts without lapsing into a holistic ontology, John Greenwood has sought to define social phenomena solely in terms of the attitudes held by the actor(s) in question. I argue that his proposal allows for the possibility of a “lone collectivity” that is (1) unpalatable in its own right and (2) incompatible with the claim that sociology is autonomous from psychology. As such, I conclude that the relevant beliefs need to be held by more than one person.

The contributors to this volume provide a critical examination of the notion of bilingualism as it has developed in linguistics and of its use in discourses of social regulation in state and civil society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They attempt to move the field away from a "common sense," but in fact highly ideologized, view of bilingualism as the co-existence of two linguistic systems, and to develop a critical perspective which approaches "bilingualism" as a wide variety of sets of sociolinguistic practices connected to the construction of social difference and of social inequality under specific historical conditions.

This paper explores how ‘laughter’ is communicated in a structured language learning forum. The participants are English language learners at levels A1-B1 (according to the Common European Framework), and their teachers. I start by surveying what can be analysed as ‘laughter’ including the textual representation of laughter sounds; laughter/humour related terms; emoticons; intensification; the co-construction of a humorous frame. I then go on to look at the interactional functions of the laughter in this context through analysing who laughs, what at, when, and what it accomplishes.

All social life is based on people's ability to recognize what others are doing. Recently, the mechanisms underlying this human ability have become the focus of a growing multidisciplinary interest. This article contributes to this line of research by considering how people's orientations to who they are to each other are built-in in the organization action. We outline a unifying theoretical framework in which the basic facets of human social relations are seen as being anchored in three orders—epistemic order, deontic order, and emotional order—each of which, we argue, also pertains to action recognition. This framework allows us to account for common ambiguities in action recognition and to describe relationship negotiations involving a complex interface between knowledge, power, and emotion. (Action recognition, social relations, conversation analysis, status, stance, epistemic rights, deontic rights, emotion)*

ABSTRACTEvery language has its own key words, which reflect the core values of the culture. Consequently, cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key words. But to be able to study, compare, and explain cultures in terms of their key words, we need a culture-independent analytical framework. A framework of this kind is provided by the natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author and colleagues over the last two decades. In the present article, the author explores and analyzes six Japanese concepts widely regarded as being almost more that any others culture-specific and culturally revealing – amae, enryo, wa, on, giri, and seishin – and shows how the use of the natural semantic metalanguage (based on universal semantic primitives) helps to make these concepts clear and how it facilitates better insight into Japanese culture and society (Japanese language, Japanese culture, cross-cultural semantics, key words, core values)

... 2002 for a discussion of interviewing procedures and the two communities.) In both sites, interviews were conducted by a team including Su-Hua Wang, a native of Taiwan, and ToddSandel, a native of the United States who is fluent in Mandarin and Tai-gi and has lived in ...

From the 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa to Korea’s annexation in 1910, the last thirty-five years of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) were witness to some of the most impactful events in Korea’s modern history. Through encounters with Western powers and the influence, both direct and indirect, of a rapidly modernizing Japan, many Koreans began to reappraise their country’s Sino-centric past and the once-shared knowledge, symbols, and practices of the traditional East Asian cosmopolitan order. A major consequence of this reappraisal was the demotion of Literary Sinitic (commonly known as Classical Chinese) from its long-held status as the de facto official written standard of state and its removal from the center of the curriculum of state-sponsored education to the periphery in the guise of a newly created classroom subject hanmunkwa.

This thesis details how shifts in the terminology for both Literary Sinitic and the vernacular script, the educational activities of Western missionaries, the abolition of Korea’s traditional civil service examination system, the establishment of a Western-style educational system, the proliferation of new Literary Sinitic teaching materials and methodologies, and the influence of Japan combined at the end of the Chosŏn dynasty to demote the learning and use of Literary Sinitic. Furthermore, this thesis shows that Literary Sinitic’s demise was not simply the collateral damage of a predestined and unavoidable rise of Korea’s native script, but was, by the time of annexation, already a long though still unfinished process.

The reappraisal and demotion of Literary Sinitic in Korea is important for more than merely understanding the precolonial moment in Korea. It is vital to improving our understanding of Korea’s part in the disintegration of a once vibrant East Asian cosmopolitanism, while further exploring the early development of hanmunkwa will also help us apprehend the lingering effects and influences exercised by once transcultured practices, even after those practices are reimagined and reconfigured according to new, nationalized frameworks.

In this Occasional Paper, I would like to emphasise one way in which language ideological issues permeate literary discourse in Scotland. Focusing on issues related to Scots, I will analyse two (in my view complementary) introductions to anthologies of texts in Scots published over the past twenty years, and show how they participate in a wider ideological debate on language and society in Scotland.

This essay is about the place of English in the multilingual literary consciousness and the work it does as a mediator in the Indian linguistic landscape. It links the transnational production of literature, especially the framing of Salman Rushdie in Granta in 1980 versus in the New Yorker seventeen years later, to a comparison of Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai's In Custody.

Preface and Introduction to the edited volume *The Tyranny of Writing: Ideologies of the Written Word* (eds. Constanze Weth & Kasper Juffermans), Bloomsbury (Advances in Sociolinguistics), 2018.

The book is an attempt to make sense of the written word and its powerful role in society. By using the word ‘tyranny’ we take an explicitly critical stance towards writing inspired above all by Saussure’s argument against writing as an object of linguistic research and what he called 'la tyrannie de la lettre'. He denounced writing as an imperfect, distorted image of speech that obscures our view of language and its structure. In this introduction to The Tyranny of Writing: Ideologies of the Written Word, we discuss the ‘tyranny of writing’ as a critical metaphor for sociolinguistics. The idea of the ‘tyranny of writing’ serves as a heuristic for exploring ideologies of language and literacy in culture and society as well as the tensions and contradictions between the written and the spoken word, linguistic normativity, creativity and authenticity, and centres and peripheries in language practices.

Dall’osservazione dello spazio urbano della città di Roma, effettuato fra gennaio 2011 e giugno 2012, sono stati censiti e documentati 247 graffiti. Ciò che viene presentato in questo saggio è una prima analisi tematica del materiale raccolto. A questa centrale riflessione se ne accompagnano altre incentrate sul contributo che lo studio del graffitismo, osservato e documentato nello spazio urbano e linguistico della capitale italiana, può offrire relativamente a tematiche quali, per esempio, il rapporto diamesico fra lingua scritta e parlata, l’analisi delle varietà giovanili, le interferenze del dialetto e la creazione di neologismi.

As social creatures, humans will never be able to live alone and always interact with each other. For this purpose, humans use language as a communication tool as well as a group identity. Language is also a group identity that has certain characteristics that make it different from other group languages (Surbhi, 2015). This can be proven by the formation of various languages in the world, which have its characteristics of each unique and different from other languages. Those variations are caused by several reasons. According to Romaine (2000) one of the reasons is social class which is seen as the most important thing in sociolinguistic field. Mallinson (2007) states that class is defined by people’s relationships to various income generating resources or assets. In social class, there are some allotments based on some factors such as education, profession, income, and then looked to see how language variation acts as a marker and instrument for social and racial stratification (Aliakbari & Allahmoradi, 2014). Therefore, the authors here want to specify profession as the main topic of discussion and also want to find the correlation between social class and the use of language and its effects toward the language variation itself.

Aldar Köse is a hero-trickster who is part of Central Asian oral tradition. I explore the language ideologies that emerge in an appropriated version of a traditional Aldar Köse tale (2001) that is designed to present the “New Kazakhs”. In particular, I consider the cultural frames of “cunning” and “gentleness”. Key words alone are not sufficient for frame analysis, but must be complemented by related metaphors and lines of reasoning. Thus, I set up a FaceBook group to invite Kazakhs residing in California to take part in focus groups to consider the appropriation.

Key words: folklore appropriation, societal frames, Kazakhs, language ideologies.

Page 1. REVIEWS Language in Society 35 (2006). Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S0047404506210340 MIRIAM A. LOCHER, Power and politeness in action: Disagreements in oral com-munication. Language, Power and Social Process, 12. ...