[Linganth] Piers Kelly on the CaMP anthropology blog

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Pers Kelly answers  Carolina Rodriguez Alzza's questions
addressing his book, The Last Language on Earth.

https://campanthropology.org/

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: *The Last Language on Earth* is an ethnographic history of the
disputed Eskayan language, spoken today by an isolated upland community
living on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. After Eskaya
people were first 'discovered' in 1980, visitors described the group as a
lost tribe preserving a unique language and writing system. Others argued
that the Eskaya were merely members of a utopian rural cult who had
invented their own language and script. Rather than adjudicating outsider
polemics, this book engages directly with the language itself as well as
the direct perspectives of those who use it today.

Through written and oral accounts, Eskaya people have represented their
language as an ancestral creation derived from a human body. Reinforcing
this traditional view, Piers Kelly's linguistic analysis shows how a
complex new register was brought into being by fusing new vocabulary onto a
modified local grammar. In a synthesis of linguistic, ethnographic, and
historical evidence, a picture emerges of a coastal community that fled the
ravages of the U.S. invasion of the island in 1901 in order to build a
utopian society in the hills. Here they predicted that the world's
languages would decline leaving Eskayan as the last language on earth.
Marshalling anthropological theories of nationalism, authenticity, and
language ideology, along with comparisons to similar events across highland
Southeast Asia, Kelly offers a convincing account of this linguistic
mystery and also shows its broader relevance to linguistic anthropology.
Although the Eskayan situation is unusual, it has the power to illuminate
the pivotal role that language plays in the pursuit of identity-building
and political resistance.
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