[lingtalks] REMINDER- Fri., January 27- Judith Irvine- Language Ideologies Workshop

[asnyderf@weber.ucsd.edu]

University of California, San Diego

Workshop on Language Ideology and Change in Multilingual Communities*
(Anthropology and Ethnic Studies)
sponsored by IICAS

presents a colloquium by

Judith T. Irvine
Professor of Anthropology,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

“Discourse at a Distance: Colonial Regimes
of African Linguistic Demography ”

Friday, January 27, 2006 2:30 p.m.
SSB 105 (Anthropology Conference Room)


A reception will follow at 4:00 in the Spiro Library of the Anthropology
Department, SSB 269.  Open and free to the public.

Abstract:
       Among the practices that produce the social identifications that
get called “ethnolinguistic,” some practices are spatially situated
and engaged with formulations of place. They are also historically
contingent, varying over time and relative to the position of the
persons doing the identifying. My particular concern in this paper
is with how languages have been identified and seen as bounded off
from one another. Case materials come from Africa, mainly from the
colonial (and immediately precolonial) periods when African
languages began to be codified and regimented. Under what
circumstances were ways of speaking considered “the same,” and when
were they considered to be different? Who was asking these
questions, how have they been contested, and who gets to decide?
How are these practices distributed in space and time? I explore
some ways in which the practices of identifying languages have been
affected by closeness and distance – the positioning of speakers
and codifiers, within wider regimes of language politics.




Other Upcoming Events in this Series:

Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Bambi Schieffelin and Miki Makihara

Friday, March 10, 2006
Suzanne Romaine

Friday, April 21, 2006
Melissa Moyer

*The Workshop on Language Ideology and Change in Multilingual
Communities brings together anthropologists, ethnic studies specialists,
and linguists to discuss change in linguistic structures and patterns of
use by members of minority language communities in a variety of world
settings.