Shadow Conversations and the Citational Practices of a Journal
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Dec 1, 2021
Drawing on the resonances between Judith T. Irvine’s (1996) writings about “shadow conversations”... more Drawing on the resonances between Judith T. Irvine’s (1996) writings about “shadow conversations” and the broader linguistic anthropological literature on citational practices (Goodman et al. 2014; Nakassis 2013; Rhodes 2020), I explore how the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology has sought to and continues to engage with the politics of inclusion and diversity in the construction of disciplinary knowledge, focusing in particular on publishing in academic journals. Following an earlier attempt to include an inclusion criterion on the journal’s Scholar One review portal, I now instead endorse the views of my colleagues to adopt a variety of strategies to showcase the work of underrepresented yet critical voices in the discipline. I conclude by highlighting the influential role that linguistic anthropologists play in promoting dialogue about the interdiscursive dimensions of knowledge production in the academy.
Globally circulating discourses associated with heritage language industries often promote tempor... more Globally circulating discourses associated with heritage language industries often promote temporally dichotomous views of spoken and written languages that deny coeval status to linguistic minorities. In the multilingual city of Montreal, Quebec, where Sri Lankan refugees work to preserve a classicalist style of Written Tamil and Indian immigrants work to revitalize a modernist style of Spoken Tamil, this division of labor is undermined by elders and youth who, in mixing colloquial and literary styles of Tamil, French, and English, reframe curricular and nationalist discourses of language loss and degeneration into more empowering narratives of developmental progress and ethnolinguistic identification. [heritage language industry, temporality, urban multilingualism, globalization, Tamil diaspora, Montreal]
This article examines how ideologies of language purism are reformatted by creating interdiscursi... more This article examines how ideologies of language purism are reformatted by creating interdiscursive links across spatial and temporal scales. I trace convergences and divergences between South Asian and Québécois sociohistorical regimes of language purism as they pertain to the contemporary experiences of Montreal's Tamil diasporas. Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils in Montreal emphasize their status differences by claiming that the former speak a modern "vernacular" Tamil and the latter speak an ancient "literary" Tamil. The segregation and purification of these social groups and languages depend upon the intergenerational reproduction of scalar boundaries between linguistic forms, interlocutors, and decentered contexts. [Tamils, Quebec, diaspora, linguistic purism, spatiotemporal scales]
O ver the past few decades, most sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have contributed t... more O ver the past few decades, most sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have contributed to discussions about the relationship between communicative practices and social identities by focusing on specific ethnic, national, racial, gender, sexual, and class groups to make their points. Whereas researchers would now agree that processes of identification are crucial to achieving the co-patterning of culture and language in social life, there remains significant disagreement over which analytic methods best characterize the subjective experiences of linguistic minorities without promoting essentialist views of language use and human agency. One solution has been to develop cross-cultural studies comparing the different temporal and spatial scales through which linguistic practices constitute social relations, and vice versa. This essay explores the value of such comparative approaches in studying the social identification of linguistic minorities, specifically those that share a practical or symbolic relationship with French. My discussion centers on the review of three monographs recently written by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists Monica Heller, Louis-Jacques Dorais, and Alexandre Duchêne, who each adopt different vantage points from within the interdisciplinary field of francophone studies to develop innovative frameworks for comparing multilingual societies and organizations where French plays a dominant role in instantiating colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal politics and subjectivities. Whereas Duchêne (2008) and Heller (2011) associate their comparative methodology with the development of a "critical sociolinguistics" approach, Dorais (2010) instead characterizes his approach as a type of "sociohistorical analysis." Also, both Heller and Dorais informally define "linguistic minorities" as users of languages without official or privileged status in state societies, whereas Duchêne formally defines "linguistic minorities" as discursive products of contested international negotiations over human rights. Despite their different methodological objectives and conceptual frameworks, these monographs all seek to identify how power is disguised in
Between text and talk: Expertise, normativity, and scales of belonging in the Montreal Tamil diasporas
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dis... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Between text and talk: Expertise, normativity, and scales of belonging in the Montreal Tamil diasporas. ...
Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2021
Introduction to the Special Issue, "Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship.... more Introduction to the Special Issue, "Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship."
In Montreal, racial, caste, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities are often masked as neutral-se... more In Montreal, racial, caste, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities are often masked as neutral-seeming linguistic differences of dialect, register, and accent. These sociolinguistic hierarchies are upheld by intersecting language ideologies, or essentialised beliefs about language use and ethnic identity. Quebec nationalist and multicultural policies endorse language ideologies of linguistic purity and sociolinguistic compartmentalisation to depict a cohesive nation while maintaining its racial and ethnic distinctions. Similarly, Montreal Tamil diaspora leaders encourage different Tamil-speaking groups to participate in sociolinguistically segregated domains to preserve purist linguistic standards and maintain socioeconomic, caste, and gender distinctions. Heritage language programmes reproduce these language-based distinctions for differentiating between types of Québécois citizens, while Montreal Tamil youth selectively challenge or endorse such prescriptions to produce a range of...
The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-ninetee... more The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholicism and advanced the scientific study of Tamil, the majority language spoken in the colonial headquarters of Pondicherry. There, a little known press operated by the Paris Foreign Missions shipped seventy-one dictionaries, grammars, and theological works printed in Tamil and French to Catholic schools undergoing secularization in French Guiana, a colony with several thousand Tamil indentured laborers. I analyze the books’ lexical, orthographic, and typographical forms, metalinguistic commentaries, publicity tactics, citational practices, an...
This article explores the language practices and language ideologies of maritime technocracy and ... more This article explores the language practices and language ideologies of maritime technocracy and inquires into the imagined and real gaps involved in sustaining channels of sociable talk aboard cargo ships. Lacking knowledge of the routines, practices, and beliefs impacting seafarers' productivity, shipping industry leaders turn to Christian ministries to identify infrastructural or logistical gaps in the operation of communications media networks and deficiencies in the language policies and interactional practices that animate them. These converging profitdriven and ethical projects collectively support a technocratic language ideology. It locates risks to the supply chain in presumptions of miscommunications caused by the lack of English-language use and unsociability caused by the lack of convivial talk among seafarers for channeling information about these risks. Actualized by strategies that affirm the value of face-to-face talk and online chatting rather than solitary reading, maritime technocracy
Between text and talk: Expertise, normativity, and scales of belonging in the Montreal Tamil diasporas
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Between text and talk: Expertise, normativity, and scales of belonging in the Montreal Tamil diasporas. ...
Les politiques nationalistes et internationales exercent des influences diverses sur la valeur éc... more Les politiques nationalistes et internationales exercent des influences diverses sur la valeur économique et le capital social rattachés à des variétés de tamoul, enseignées comme deux langues d’origine différentes dans les écoles des communautés sri-lankaise et indienne et les écoles publiques de langue française et de langue anglaise à Montréal (Québec). En réinterprétant la division locale du travail linguistique en milieu scolaire francophone et anglophone à Montréal, les immigrants indiens et les réfugiés sri-lankais poursuivent chacun de leur côté différentes stratégies pour financer deux programmes d’enseignement de langue d’origine distincts et s’associent avec différents partenaires pour les mettre sur pied. Alors que les Sri-Lankais veulent conserver une variété littéraire du tamoul perçue comme dépositaire de leur patrimoine culturel et liée à leur prétention d’authenticité culturelle, les immigrants indiens veulent pour leur part moderniser leur variété plus familière du...
Introduction to the Special Issue, "Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship.... more Introduction to the Special Issue, "Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship."
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