Introduction

[alexandra jaffe]

Hello, my name is Alexandra Jaffe, and I have just joined the DISCOURS
list. I am a linguistic anthropologist who has been doing research on
the island of Corsica since 1988. Corsica is a place where there is
ongoing language shift from a minority to a dominant language (Corsican
to French). Since the late sixties, there has also been a language
revitalization movement (connected with ethnoregional/nationalist one).
Much of my work concerns the ideological bases of discourses about
language and cultural/political identity in this bilingual and diglossic
context. I have studied and written about public debates over language
issues such as, bilingual education, spelling standards, and "official
Corsican" laws). I have also studied language ideologies in bilingual
classroom practice and in the production and reception of bilingual
radio programming.    	
	I'm also working on issues of language, stigma and representation here
in Mississippi. In the last two years, I have been collaborating with my
colleague Shana Walton on a project on the orthographic representation
of non-standard speech. We used a sort of "written matched guise"
methodology with a performance dimension, asking participants read out
loud from transcripts we represented in three different orthographies
(standard, light ‘eye-dialect', heavy, semi-phonemic orthography). Our
phonological and stylistic analysis confirms that linguistic and social
ideologies and hierarchies are embedded in choices in orthographic
representation: differences in the orthographic representations of
non-standard speech can prompt readers to "hear" different voices to
which different linguistic and social judgments are attached. Perhaps
most interestingly, we found that participating in this experiment
forced Southern speakers to "position" themselves vis-a-vis the image of
stigma they read into any non-standard orthography
	I am planning to return on sabbatical to study bilingual Corsican
elementary classrooms, and would welcome any suggestions, references,
methods from list members who have worked in school settings. I would be
particularly interested to hear from those who have studied bilingual
classrooms in which the minority language is not the L1 of most of the
children in the class, for this is the case in Corsica. I am interested
in how teachers position the cultural value of this language vs. the
dominant one, and I am interested in how the meanings and values
attributed to the two languages of the classroom by the children.

Finally, I would like to mention a panel I am organizing with  with
Michele Koven (Illinois-Champagne) the 1999 American Anthropological
Association meetings, to be held November 17-21, in Chicago IL.  I'd
like to post the CFP/abstract, below, because this topic may be of
interest to DISCOURS list members. We are trying to finalize the panel
before the end of February, so if any of you are interested, please
contact us by email as soon as possible.

PANEL:  "(Mis)recognizing others from their speech: studies of local
practices of linguistic
evaluation."
 The goal of the panel is to focus on how speakers not only produce, but
receive, interpret, and evaluate each others' verbally mediated
actions.  Attention to local evaluations of speech and speakers sheds
light on how local language ideologies naturalize links between speech
forms and frameworks of socioculturally recognized norms and (de)valued
identities. Possible paper topics include: audience evaluation of verbal
performance; "esthetics" as a culturally distinct evaluative framework;
how different performance media (lyrics vs. music vs. gesture/body
movement etc.) are judged; discussion/use of both naturally occurring
metapragmatic commentaries as well as data elicited from matched guise
and other related techniques; evaluation of language practices in
educational contexts and child socialization; interactional instances
and consequences of feedback/evaluation on language usage; linguistic
characteristics of discourses of evaluation; self-correction/evaluation;
evaluative inferences in conversational structures. Please e-mail
proposed abstracts to either: ajaffe at ocean.otr.usm.edu or
mkoven at uiuc.edu