Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) proposes a revision to the Indian education system. The document foregrounds “mother tongue,” a concept that has been highly salient in India since the mid-nineteenth century, by specifying that students should learn in it. But it makes little mention of English, despite its importance, and the desire for it, at every level of education. The construction of nation and language in the NEP begs a question: how do the constructions, foci, and relative silences of policy resonate with people's understandings and uses of languages? This article incorporates interviews at an engineering university in western India, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, to examine graduate students' reflections on mother tongue in relation to their multilingual practices on campus and at home. The students exhibited a range of ideological perspectives on mother tongue and English that are not addressed in policy measures. Using the heuristic of postcolonial semiotics, we show that the students were unable to simultaneously identify with the nation (via mother tongue) and English. We contribute to linguistic anthropology and South Asian studies by foregrounding people's metadiscourse in how they make sense of, and ultimately problematize, constructions of colonial and postcolonial policy.

The Georgian feuilleton developed in fits and starts in the first 5 years of the first Georgian newspaper, Droeba. The feuilleton is an exemplary genre in the development of Georgian publics, both urban and print. The digressive narrative of the feuilleton meanders between, ties together, and dialogizes the disembodied world of public texts and the embodied world of real public places, drawing together two different, seemingly antithetical senses of “public”. First, the “metatopical” public created by the circulation of Droeba, a disembodied reflexive intertextual world of stranger-contemporaries, fellow readers of the newspaper reading in their private homes, writing about different somewheres from the perspective of a voice from nowhere. Second, the concrete spatialized set of public places and the quoted, overheard, voices of crowds, stranger-consociates, to be found in those public places, the streets and especially gardens, of the city of Tbilisi which is the exemplary locale which can be presupposed as a “here” shared between the writer and his readers. The feuilletonist dialogizes the garden heterotopias of the city, just as he dialogizes the heteroglossia of the city. The feuilletonist-qua-flâneur then arises at the conjuncture of two public worlds, two parallel streams of circulation of literature and life.

This article examines the historical, institutional, and interactional processes by which “Poly” (i.e., Polynesian) has come to be understood as a race and language within a context in the California Bay Area. Rather than understanding “races” as discrete categories—as well as sociolinguistic features as permanently attributable and patterned to specific racialized groups—I argue that racialization is ever-changing and rooted in power relations that are (re)produced from interaction to interaction, and moment to moment. I primarily draw upon a semi-structured interview with a Tongan young woman (“Maklea”), and more broadly ethnographic research conducted within her local language context, and argue that a racialized Polyness (i.e., Polynesianness) is becoming raciolinguistically enregistered due to experiences with White supremacy and processes of colonialism. That is, Polyness is in the process of being rendered mutually perceivable as a racial category and coherent set of semiotic practices as Polynesian diasporic peoples in this community are confronting policing, gentrification, and an ideology of oppressionlessness. The raciolinguistic enregisterment of Polyness is occurring as Maklea, and more broadly Polynesian young people, are grappling with and challenging the ways White supremacist institutions and systems are seeking to violently structure their lives and ways of knowing, being, valuing, and speaking.

Tests of English proficiency for international graduate students at US universities are neoliberal institutions which make (mis)communication the responsibility of individual workers. While cloaking themselves in a discourse of linguistic expertise, they require test-takers to assimilate to white, upper class, American mannerisms. In this ethnographic study of two testing centers, we address their material and ideological consequences: increases in precarity and xenophobia, losses in pay and students' communicative competence. We trace tests' distribution of interpretive labor (Graeber 2015) and propose a new interactionally informed approach to intelligibility which accounts for the co-operation (Goodwin 2018) of multiple subjects.

This paper applies the lens of child language brokering to explore parent–child everyday interaction as an Afghan migrant family re-grounds itself in the new linguistic and social context of Denmark. Whereas brokering is often seen as children's translating, this ethnographic study shows that children contribute with explaining, rather than only translating. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic data analysis, the study presents that these explaining activities are occasions for children and their parents to re/define their own role relations and for parents to display family ideologies about the quality of family relations to self and others, conveying that this family is thriving.