Culture and Language Use

Language and food are universal to humankind. Language accomplishes more than a pure exchange of information, and food caters for more than mere subsistence. Both represent crucial sites for socialization, identity construction, and the everyday fabrication and perception of the world as a meaningful, orderly place. This volume on Culinary Linguistics contains an introduction to the study of food and an extensive overview of the literature focusing on its role in interplay with language. It is the only publication fathoming the field of food and food-related studies from a linguistic perspective. The research articles assembled here encompass a number of linguistic fields, ranging from historical and ethnographic approaches to literary studies, the teaching of English as a foreign language, psycholinguistics, and the study of computer-mediated communication, making this volume compulsory reading for anyone interested in genres of food discourse and the linguistic connection between food and culture.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.

This book is a description of Luwo, a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan. Luwo is used by multilingual, dynamic communities of practice as one language among others that form individual and flexible repertoires. It is a language that serves as a means of expressing the Self, as a medium of art and self-actualization, and sometimes as a medium of writing. It is spoken in the home and in public spaces, by fairly large numbers of people who identify themselves as Luwo and as members of all kinds of other groups. In order to provide insights into these dynamic and diverse realities of Luwo, this book contains both a concise description and analysis of the linguistic features and structures of Luwo, and an approach to the anthropological linguistics of this language. The latter is presented in the form of separate chapters on possession, number, experiencer constructions, spatial orientation, perception and cognition. In all sections of this study, sociolinguistic information is provided wherever this is useful and possible, detailed information on the semantics of grammatical features and constructions is given, and discussions of theory-oriented approaches to various linguistic features of Luwo are presented.

This volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s intention to marry the girl so famous for her beauty, on his long journey to Imdeduya’s village and on their tragic love story. The texts are compared with each other with a final focus on the clash between orality and scripturality. Contrary to Kasaipwalova’s fixed poetic text, the oral Imdeduya versions reveal the variability characteristic for oral tradition. This variability opens up questions about traditional stability and destabilization of oral literature, especially questions about the changing role of myth – and magic – in the Trobriand Islanders' society which gets more and more integrated into the by now “literal” nation of Papua New Guinea.

This volume offers a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic, anthropological, archaeological and historical work focused on Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, in Australia’s northeast. The volume also honours Bruce Rigsby, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Queensland, whose work has inspired all of the contributors. The papers in the volume are organized in terms of five key themes, including the use of historical and archaeological methods to reconstruct aspects of language and social organization, anthropological and linguistic work uncovering aspects of world view embedded in languages and ethnographic data sets, the study of post-contact transformations in language and society, and the return of archival data to communities. Its thematic intersections draw together the varied disciplinary threads in an overview of the cultures and languages of the region, and will appeal to all those interested in Australian Aboriginal studies, linguistics, anthropology and associated disciplines.

This volume brings together a number of important perspectives on language documentation and endangerment in Africa from an international cohort of scholars with vast experience in the field. Offering insights from rural and urban settings throughout the continent, these essays consider topics that range from the development of a writing system to ideologies of language endangerment, from working with displaced communities to the role of colonial languages in reshaping African repertoires, and from the insights of archeology to the challenges of language documentation as a doctoral project. The authors are concerned with both theoretical and practical aspects of language documentation as they address the ways in which the African context both differs from and resembles contexts of endangerment elsewhere in the world. This volume will be useful to fieldworkers and documentalists who work in Africa and beyond.

Through an ethnographically based study of local communicative practices in the Pacific atoll society of Tokelau, the book adds to our understanding of how systems of governance are constituted by minute acts of social interaction, and are informed by our conceptions of the nature of sociality. It combines a social anthropological approach to postcolonial studies in which local and trans-national communicative practices related to governance and conflict management are analysed as different language games. The book offers an experience-near approach to local modes of conflict management and patterns of leadership, and documents how micro-level communicative practices have an impact on macro-political processes.

Understanding sociolinguistics as a theoretical and methodological framework hopefully could attempt to promote change and social development in human communities. Yet it still presents important political, epistemological, methodological and theoretical challenges. A sociolinguistics of development, in which the revitalization of linguistic communities is the priority, opens new perspectives for the emerging field of linguistic documentation, in which the societal aspects of research, stressed by sociolinguistics, have frequently been marginal. The need to focus on the documentation of linguistic communities to contribute to the revitalization of these communities requires an in-depth revision of a number of different perspectives. Especially regarding the links between commonly separated fields of enquiry such as sociolinguistics, documentation and revitalization. Instead of creating mere museum pieces of academic contemplation for the future, as has been the major trend up to now in language documentation and even sociolinguistics, there is a growing concern to join forces to revitalize the actual use of endangered languages in order to place languages as a main focus of a community’s development which constitutes a major challenge for both scholars, civil society and speakers alike.

This interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between culture, language and cognition based on the aspects of social structure, space and possession in Tonga, Polynesia. Grounded on extensive field research, Völkel explores the subject from an anthropological as well as from a linguistic perspective. The book provides new insights into the language of respect, an honorific system which is deeply anchored in the societal hierarchy, spatial descriptions that are determined by socio-cultural and geocentric parameters, kinship terminology and possessive categories that perfectly express the system of social status inequalities among relatives. These examples impressively show that language is deeply anchored in its cultural context. Moreover, the linguistic structures reflect the underlying cognitive frame of its speakers. Just as several cultural practices (sitting order, access to land and gift exchange processes) the linguistic means are not only expressions of stratified social networks but also tools to maintain or negotiate the underlying socio-cultural system.

Traveling Conceptualizations is a monograph which is concerned with African cultural conceptualizations in Jamaican. It contributes to the study of Transatlantic relations between Africa and Jamaica, and in particular to the understanding of African influences in Jamaican linguistic practices. The book constitutes a first study of these phenomena from a cognitive-linguistic perspective and investigates traveling conceptualizations at the intersection of language, culture and cognition. The author explores Jamaican linguistic practices in different domains namely conceptualizations involving parts of the (human) body, conceptualizations of events, roles and relations underlying serial verb constructions, and conceptualizations of kinship and names. The study can be regarded as an innovative contribution as it looks not only at linguistic expressions on the surface but discusses the underlying cultural and cognitive basis of semantic structures. The study thus aims at making African-Jamaican connections on the conceptual level visible and also discusses notions of consciousness, agency and emblematicity.

This third volume of our Ute language collection contains the Ute dictionary. It opens with several introductory chapters that link the dictionary to our Ute Reference Grammar (2011) and explain the structure and use of the dictionary. The bulk of the information on the meaning and usage of Ute words is then given in the Ute-English part. The English-Ute part, next, serves primarily as a search-and-reference tool. A short section on traditional semantic-cultural fields follows. Ute is a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Numic sub-family. Together with its northern dialects (Southern Paiute, Uintah, White River), it should be considered a single language, Núuchi ("of the people") or Núu-'apaghapi ("the people's speech"). While our work was done primarily in the southern dialects (Southern Ute, Ute Mountain, Uncompaghre), we have included as many words as could be safely extracted from Powel's and Smith's work on the northern dialects, as well as some from Sapir's work (1931) on Northern Ute, adjusting them to Southern-dialect pronunciation. This brings the work as close as one could hope, at this time, to a comprehensive all-Ute dictionary, a task that yet remains to be done. We have tried to emphasize in the Ute-English entries the historical and derivational connectivity of Ute vocabulary and its gradual growth and expansion. This is also underscored in the introductory chapter on word derivation. While this work remains incomplete, we hope it can be some day expanded into an all-inclusive Ute dictionary, and will help the people – Núuchiu – preserve their language and culture.

This second volume of our Ute trilogy contains a collection of Ute oral texts. Ute oral literature reflects the life experience of a small-scale hunting-and-gathering Society of Intimates and its tight connection to the local terrain, flora and fauna that supported the hunter-gatherer life. Ute story-telling tradition is the people's literary heritage, with the narrative style allowing considerable artistic freedom and diversity in contents and style. Stories were not memorized verbatim, and story-tellers took creative liberty in elaborating and re-inventing the 'same' tale. The core cultural contents of each story are nevertheless preserved across tellers. Ute stories were most likely told at night around the fire, in front of or inside the lodge, to a mixed audience of children and adults who had heard the tale many time before. The stories aimed to both instruct and entertain. Their underlying themes are stoic and oft-cynical reflections on the vagaries of human behavior and harsh existence. They are the foundational literary tradition of The People--Núuchi-u.