[Linganth] AAA session proposal: Dynamics of Indigenous multilingualism

[Jill Vaughan]

Dear all,


We are proposing a Volunteered Session on the dynamics of Indigenous multilingualism, to explore a range of sociolinguistic questions around the continuity of language practices in 'pre-existing' multilingual ecologies (i.e. communities that were already multilingual prior to contact with a dominant language like English or French). The session would be open both to research on current contexts and to historical work on multilingualism (i.e. along the lines of Rice 2005, Wilkins and Nash 2008). See below for a fuller description.



If you are interested please first send your abstract to Jill Vaughan (jill.vaughan at ntnu.no)<mailto:jill.vaughan at ntnu.no)> and Ruth Singer (rsinger at unimelb.edu.au)<mailto:rsinger at unimelb.edu.au)>. Full session proposals are due on 15th April. Papers are to be 15 minutes, you can find further details on the AAA website (http://www.americananthro.org/).



The impetus for the session is that work on aspects of multilingualism (such as on code-mixing, receptive multilingualism, language maintenance) has largely focused on the interactions of Indigenous and (post)colonial languages, rather than those between Indigenous languages that have long co-existed prior to contact. And yet such multilingual ecologies are common throughout the world; there is evidence for widespread multilingualism, both historical and in many contexts continuing, in many regions including the U.S., Australia, South America, Melanesia, and West Africa (e.g. Epps 2009, Evans 2012, Patrick 2012, Sutton 1991). There is much to be understood regarding the dynamics of language in these contexts: what kinds of practices support multilingualism like this? How have marriage practices and other cultural systems interacted with language use? What is the role of variation in such multilingual spaces? Furthermore, there is a great deal to be gained through closer attention to this topic in terms of our understanding of language maintenance and loss, as well as in advancing theory and practice in work on Indigenous multilingualism. To this end we hope to assemble a session encompassing work from diverse regions and contexts.



Epps, Patience. 2009. Language classification, language contact, and Amazonian prehistory. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(2). 581-606.

Evans, Nicholas. 2012. Even more diverse than we had thought: The multiplicity of Trans-Fly languages. In Nicholas Evans & Marian Klamer (eds.), Melanesian Languages on the Edge of Asia: Challenges for the 21st Century, Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 5, 109-149.

Patrick, Donna. 2012. Indigenous contexts. In Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge & Angela Creese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 29-48. London: Routledge.

Rice, Keren. 2005. Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family. Linguistic Typology 8(3). 321-343. doi:10.1515/lity.2004.8.3.321.

Sutton, Peter. 1991. Language in Aboriginal Australia: Social dialects in a geographic idiom. In Susanne Romaine (ed.), Language in Australia, 49-66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilkins, David P & David Nash. 2008. The European "discovery" of a multilingual Australia: the linguistic and ethnographic successes of a failed expedition. In William McGregor (ed.), Encountering Aboriginal languages: studies in the history of Australian linguistics, vol. 591, 485-507. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

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