AAA panel on Dialect

[Alexander Thomson]

Dear Linganth Members,

Edwin Everhart and I are organizing a panel for the 2013 AAA Annual Meeting on dialects (i.e. non-standard language varieties that are closely related to and/or mutually intelligible with a standard language variety). See our draft session abstract, below.

Our research is in northern Japan and the Shetland Isles, respectively, and we welcome other regional specializations. Please submit 250-word abstracts to both Edwin Everhart (eke at ucla.edu) and Alexander Thomson (athomson1990 at hotmail.com) by April 11th.

Thank you for considering this topic!

Alexander Thomson
UCLA Department of Anthroplogy


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Organized by Edwin Everhart and Alexander Thomson, UCLA Department of Anthropology

Linguistic anthropologists have reached a general consensus that beliefs and feelings about language – along with metalinguistic activity – broadly determine the status of a language variety, and ultimately, its very survival. While this analysis has been profitably applied to the relations between clearly distinct languages, e.g. Shoshoni and English, the question of relations between closely-related language varieties has been largely left to other fields. To begin to remedy this lacuna, we propose a panel on dialects – in other words, non-standard language varieties that are closely related to and/or mutually intelligible with a standard language variety.

Minority languages may be marginalized, but when they are sufficiently different from the standard, it is at least possible to argue for their valorization on account of their distinctiveness. Dialects, whether defined by regional origin or other social measures, are frequently perceived as merely corrupted versions of a standard language variety. Paradoxically, their very similarity to standard languages often makes them difficult to valorize in their own right. Meanwhile, discrimination on the basis of dialect affects a vast number of people, and arguably amounts to a moral threat. In many cases, speakers of marginalized dialects have taken the initiative in raising the status of their language. This panel will address these efforts at status-raising, whether through corpus preservation, revitalization activism, or some other means. In keeping with this year’s theme, our panel will engage with the ethical obligations that we bear in a world full of dialect variation, but widespread erasure of the legitimacy or even existence of dialects.

Given that anthropologists are now interacting with more and more diverse publics, we must rethink the manner in which we reach out to these groups. This onus weighs especially heavily on sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists because our causes, subjects and sites are firmly rooted in the here and now. That is to say, the actions we take now often shape the “emerging future” of the languages and dialects with which we work. In recognition of this fact, we intend this panel to be a discussion and exposition of problems inherent to meta-dialect activism, including folk ideologies held by politicians, activists and other parties. We also intend this panel to be programmatic insofar as we will discuss strategies that might be fruitfully employed to reach these diverse publics, rendering our work accessible, intelligible and significant to them. Sub-themes include an analysis of contemporary language revitalization projects and governmental policies pertaining to dialect.