Designing a Dictionary for an Endangered Language Community: Lexicographical Deliberations, Language Ideological Clarifications

Dictionaries of endangered languages represent especially important products of language documentation, in part because they are usually the most familiar and useful genre of linguistic representation to endangered language community members. This familiarity, however, can become problematic when it is accompanied by language ideologies that equate dictionaries with word lists (‘words for things’), prescriptive linguistics, and researchers’ neoliberal assumptions regarding the circulation of knowledge. Recent and ongoing research in the Village of Tewa (N. Arizona, Kiowa-Tanoan language family) designed to produce a practical dictionary in support of the community’s language renewal efforts provides some examples of the need to contextualize the project within the community and to understand the pervasive role of language ideologies when working collaboratively. This research project aims to promote and fortify lexical documentation so that the practical dictionary is an adequate guide for future community members, while still conforming to cultural protocols about lexical representation and circulation, both within and outside the language community.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Borders traversed, boundaries erected: Creating discursive identities and language communities in the Village of Tewa

Today the Village of Tewa, First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in Northern Arizona experiences unprecedented linguistic diversity and change due to language shift to English. Despite a wide range of speaker fluency, the now emblematic Tewa language that their ancestors transported from the Rio Grande Valley almost 325 years ago, is widely valorized within the community. However Language factions have emerged andtheir debates and contestations focus on legitimate language learning and the proper maintenance of their emblematic language. Boundary creation and crossing are featuresof discourses that rationalize possible forms of language revitalization and construct communities across temporal barriers. The theoretical implications of these discourseson both local and theoretical notions of language/speech community are explored. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Appeals to semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts of variation

Discussions of folklinguistic accounts of language use are frequently focused on dismissing them because of their limitations. As a result, not a lot is written regarding how such accounts are done and how they ‘work’. This article examines how folklinguistic evaluations are achieved in interaction, particularly through appeals to semiotic registers (Agha 2007). It describes how in explaining their beliefs regarding linguistic variation, speakers frequently produce voicings with varying transparency. These rely on understandings of the social world and bring large collections of linguistic resources into play. They offer rich insights if analytic attention is given to their details because even when evaluating a single variant, whole ways of speaking, and even being, may be utilized. The paper explores in turn how analysis reveals the inseparability of variants, understandings of context and audience, the relationship between linguistic forms and social types, and the performance of social types via the evaluation of semiotic resources. In each section, discussion is grounded in extracts from interviews on Australian English with speakers of this variety of English. Cumulatively they show the primacy of semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts.N/

Does language loss follow a principled structural path? Evidence from Jersey Norman French

ABSTRACTThis study examines contact-induced change in Jèrriais, the severely endangered Norman variety currently spoken by some 1% of the population of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands. Today, English dominates all linguistic domains of island life, and all speakers of Jèrriais are bilingual. The analysis uses original data to test empirically whether Myers-Scotton's (2002) five theoretical assumptions about the structural path of language attrition (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the individual) also have relevance for the process of language obsolescence (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the community). It explores i) whether Jèrriais is undergoing contact influenced language change owing to its abstract grammatical structure being split and recombined with English, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's Abstract Level model; and ii) whether different morpheme types of Jèrriais are related to the production process in different ways and are, accordingly, more or less susceptible to change during the process of language obsolescence, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's 4-M model. In addition to its contribution to linguistic theory, this study increases existing knowledge about Jèrriais and makes data from this language available for systematic comparison with other languages.</jats:p

The genre regime of research evaluation:Contradictory systems of value around academics' writing

This paper addresses how academics navigate different kinds of prestige and different systems of value around what 'counts' in academic writing, focusing particularly on the impact of the genre regime associated with research evaluation in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). It draws on data from an ESRC-funded project working with academics across different disciplines and different institutions in England. We interviewed people about their writing practices several times, exploring their practices, life histories, institutional contexts, and the tools and resources they draw on as they write. Academics' research writing is framed within explicit institutional and departmental strategies around the numbers and publication venues of research outputs, driven by institutions’ need to succeed in the national competitive research evaluation system. Such institutional strategies do not always map well onto other values systems in which academics have been trained and within which they locate themselves. The paper analyses the interviews we carried out, exploring how academics negotiate tensions between these systems of value and considering the implications of this for what is considered to be important in academic work and, therefore, what it means to be an academic

Immersion education outcomes and the Gaelic community:Identities and language ideologies among Gaelic-medium educated adults in Scotland

Scholars have consistently theorised that language ideologies can influence the ways in which bilingual speakers in minority language settings identify and engage with the linguistic varieties available to them. Research conducted by the author examined the interplay of language use and ideologies among a purposive sample of adults who started in Gaelic medium education during the first years of its availability. Crucially, the majority of participants’ Gaelic use today is limited, although notable exceptions were found among individuals who were substantially socialised in the language at home during childhood, and a small number of new speakers. In this paper, I draw attention to some of the language ideologies that interviewees conveyed when describing their cultural identifications with Gaelic. I argue that the ideologies that informants express seem to militate against their more frequent use of the language and their association with the wider Gaelic community. In particular, I discuss interviewees’ negative perceptions of the traditionally defined, ethnolinguistic identity category ‘Gael(s)’ in their expression of language ideologies and identities, and the implications of this finding for other contexts of minority language revitalisation