ELL: Re: indigenous

[Joan Smith/Kocamahhul]

This is partly my reason for asking - the community I'm interested in
are Arabic speakers in Turkey. As far as I've been able to find out the
communities were originally Aramaic- and Greek-speaking (Greek in the
cities, Aramaic in the rural areas), but there have been Arabic-speakers
in the Area for approxiamately 1000 years, whereas the Turkish-speakers
are comparatively newcomers. Is this the Guarani problem again? Somehow
I think the tendency is to disregard Arabic as an 'indigenous' language
either because so many people speak it or because it is an 'oppressor'
language (even though in Turkey it isn't).

Tasaku Tsunoda wrote:
>
> At 4:14 PM -0700 01.6.20, Victor Golla wrote:
> >6/20/2001
> >
> >
> >
> >If we linguists were as sensitive to language use as we are
> >to structure, we would probably long since have replaced
> >"indigenous" with "pre-European expansion", which is what we
> >usually really mean.  Guarani and Cherokee are certainly that,
> >whatever the blood quantum of their speakers or the sacredness
> >of the soil they are spoken on.
> >
>
>     I think the term 'pre-European expansion' is not sufficient. Consider,
> for example, the Ainu language of Japan.
>
> Tasaku Tsunoda
> --
>
> Tasaku Tsunoda
> Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
> University of Tokyo
> Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan
>
> Phone:  +81-3-5841-3790
> Fax:     +81-3-5803-2784
> ----
> Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
> Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
> Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
> ----

--
Joan Smith/Kocamahhul
Department of Linguistics
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch
NEW ZEALAND

e-mail: j.smithkocamahhul at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
tel: 00-64-3-3667-001 ext 8321
fax: 00-64-3-364-2969
----
Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
----