Indigenous

[Salikoko Mufwene]

At 02:10 PM 12/14/2000 -0600, Donald Lance wrote:

> I think Sali's initial question was asking about recent connotations that
>reflect a new brand of insensitivity.
>
     It was not as much a question of sensitivity as a question of deviation
from traditional usage. In almost all the responses I have read, "indigenous"
(interpreted as "native," with a small "n") has been used in contexts that
lead
the reader to say "X is indigenous/ native to Y" (where X is an individual and
Y a part of the world). That is what I meant by relative use. In some cases,
this is made more obvious, as in the above example, by combining "indigenous"
with a preposition phrase headed by "to." In some other cases, the part of the
world has already been identified. Then a speaker/writer can speak of
indigenous people, plants, languages, etc. without the preposition phrase,
while reference to it is understood from the context. This not the usage in
most of the examples I have posted since yesterday. Take for instance one of
those I posted this moring: "The world's indigenous people and their languages
are dying out." I have to be extremely cooperative in interpreting "indigenous
people and languages" here as intended (if my guess is right), i.e., 'people
and languages in Third World countries' (based on what I have read so far in
Nettle & Romaine).  Ignoring the rest of the book (which I cannot), nothing in
the wording prevents thinking that if Martians had colonized our planet and we
were shifting from our languages to theirs, one of them could make this
statement. I hope my daughter or grandchildren won't live this form of
colonization :)

Sali.

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Salikoko S. Mufwene                        s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
University of Chicago                      773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/linguistics/faculty/mufwene.html
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