Culture and Language Use (vols. 1–14,16–17, 2010–2015)
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Culture and Language Use (vols. 1–14,16–17, 2010–2015)
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Collection Contents
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Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
More LessThis 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.
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Languages of Governance in Conflict
More LessThrough 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.
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Language Maintenance and Language Death
More LessThis book provides the first extensive description of Texas Alsatian, a critically-endangered Texas German dialect, as spoken in Medina County in the 21st century. The dialect was brought to Texas in the 1840s by colonists recruited by French entrepreneur Henri Castro and has been preserved with minimal change for six generations. Texas Alsatian has maintained lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic features which differentiate it from the prevalent standard-near varieties of Texas German. This study both describes its grammatical features and discusses extra-linguistic factors contributing to the dialect’s preservation or accelerating its decline, e.g., social, historical, political, and economic factors, and speaker attitudes and ideologies linked to cultural identity. The work’s multi-faceted approach makes its relevant to a broad range of scholars such as dialectologists, historical linguists, sociolinguists, ethnographers, and anthropologists interested in language variation and change, language and identity, immigrant dialects, and language maintenance and death.
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Landscape in Language
More LessLandscape is fundamental to human experience. Yet until recently, the study of landscape has been fragmented among the disciplines. This volume focuses on how landscape is represented in language and thought, and what this reveals about the relationships of people to place and to land. Scientists of various disciplines such as anthropologists, geographers, information scientists, linguists, and philosophers address several questions, including: Are there cross-cultural and cross-linguistic variations in the delimitation, classification, and naming of geographic features? Can alternative world-views and conceptualizations of landscape be used to produce culturally-appropriate Geographic Information Systems (GIS)? Topics included: ontology of landscape; landscape terms and concepts; toponyms; spiritual aspects of land and landscape terms; research methods; ethical dimensions of the research; and its potential value to indigenous communities involved in this type of research.
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