[lg policy] Fwd: [Linganth] AAA session proposal: Dynamics of Indigenous multilingualism

Fri Mar 4 15:41:24 UTC 2016

Forwarded From: Jill Vaughan <jill.vaughan at ntnu.no>
Date: Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 6:31 AM

AAA session proposal: Dynamics of Indigenous multilingualism

AAA proposal:

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) and Ruth Singer (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.

_______________________________________________
Linganth mailing list
Linganth at listserv.linguistlist.org
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/linganth

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

-------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20160304/1a18c3f6/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list