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/