Linguistic liberalism: Ethnography, property, northern Australia, and the making of the endangered language, 1919–1992

Abstract

Throughout the history of the European colonial enterprise, the ensemble of motivations, working assumptions, and day-to-day practical activities implicated in linguists\u27 efforts to map the dialect geography and reconstruct the linguistic genealogy of colonized populations was intertwined with the ensemble of motivations, assumptions, and practices implicated in publicists\u27 efforts to devise a system for the creation, distribution, and protection of property in colonized places. No place better illustrates this overlap of linguistics and law than Australia, where the historical interplay of field linguistics and legal liberalism reverberates through present-day efforts at land claims adjudication and indigenous cultural revitalization. Contemporary common law approaches to decolonization in settler states reflect an emerging principle of non-territorial sovereignty predicated on the specification of terms of access to semiotic resources. This shift in legal understandings of sovereignty reflects in turn the dialogue between anthropological linguistics and law. Linguistic fieldwork has shaped the common law of aboriginal title, providing criteria for assessing claimants\u27 membership in land-holding collectivities, the continuity over time of indigenous political institutions, and the endangered status of communities defined by semiotic institutions