A documentary ethnography of a Blackfoot language course

This chapter documents the development of a university-level Blackfoot language course in which many of the students are linguistic inheritors (Rampton 1990) of Blackfoot. In attempting to integrate “the study of the culture of language into documentary linguistics” (Hill 2006: 113), we observe how varied language ideological patterns among speakers and learners of different linguistic repertoires came to be organized for the purposes of formal language instruction. Analysis of classroom discourse reveals conflicting language ideologies between variationism (Kroskrity 2009b) and standard (Hill 2008). We propose a model of “Language Ideological Variation and Emergence” (LIVE) to clarify how participant affiliations to competing language ideologies can emerge and shift as different language ideologies come into contact during discourse.

• Affiliations: 1: The University of Montana; 2: The University of Texas – Pan American