Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2022

Prolung Khmer (ព្រលឹងខ្មែរ, meaning “Khmer Soul” or “Khmer Spirit”), is a culturally salient ideological discourse found in modern Cambodian culture in the homeland and the diaspora. Prolung Khmer draws on symbols and practices from Cambodia’s 2000-year cultural heritage, linking Khmer history, religion, language, the arts, and socio-political relationships in an essentialized ideology of Khmer culture. Using a genealogical analysis, this article traces the historical development of Prolung Khmer from earliest times to the present with examples from Cambodia and the diaspora. We argue that through its use, Prolung Khmer delineates, historicizes, and naturalizes what it means to be Khmer in the homeland and the diaspora.

The Amele language of Papua New Guinea is one of many Trans-New Guinea languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. Amele has a negator ‘qee’ (‘q’ represents a voiced dorso-labiovelar plosive), which follows the element negated. Yet, while having verb conjugations for persons and numbers, Amele has no negative conjugation in the present tense. Typologically, some other languages, for example, Finnish, also exhibit negative conjugations of verbs, but these behaviors of the negations differ in interesting ways. This contrastive study investigates the negation of grammars in Amele (Papua New Guinea) and Finnish (Finland, Uralic), by comparing negative particles and negative verb conjugations in both of these languages, while clarifying their morphological behaviors. As such, the study describes Amele’s and Finnish’s positive-negative and present/past distinctions through their verbal morphologies and through their functional markedness in past tenses, ultimately observing these functional points in the languages.

Wayang Kulit performance, the art of shadow puppetry, has long embodied and conveyed political and secular voice throughout South and Southeast Asia, significant for the maintenance of cultural heritage. Throughout Malaysia’s modern history, Wayang as a dominant medium of education has mediated shifts in language ideologies and socialization, to the extent where changes to the Wayang correlate highly with changes to the Malay language. In the 1980s, the Malaysian government sought to attack and hence curtail Wayang performance, and to obscure its lineage, claiming that the Wayang defiles Islam and Malaysia as an Islamic state. The government sought to discontinue the Wayang, or at least to alter it significantly, and to persecute its adherents. With its attempts to mobilize the economy through neoliberal politics and the adoption of new non-poetic language registers, the Malaysian government altered Malaysian vernacular, cultural practices, and ideologies. Yet, little scholarly work, particularly through an Anthropological lens, has discussed the correlations and influences to these shifts.

This paper addresses the significance of Wayang Kulit to the Malay language, that is, its contiguity with standardized language and vernacular, its semiotic complexities during performance and in larger society, and its junctures with Malaysian politics. The study unearths changes in the Wayang, its stylizations, symbolisms and performativities, in the latter 20th century, where these changes have aligned with cultural and language shifts, yet which the government has legitimated as pro Islamic and neoliberal. The data set includes a multi year ethnography of the Wayang, and a corpus of discussions, documentations, and scripts of Wayang performances and narratives.

This study documents onomatopoeia of laughter in Chinese comics and their Japanese translations, by comparing the translation of Chinese laughter onomatopoeia into Japanese laughter onomatopoeia and then by observing and analyzing the sentence-ending particle. The study ultimately seeks to examine the similarities and differences between two languages as their laughter onomatopoeia discourse markers. The results indicate that the onomatopoeia of laughter appears in both languages to describe social and aggressive laughter through discourse markers that advance the flow of conversation. In Chinese face threatening contexts, speakers generally use the onomatopoeia of laughter, where in the Japanese context, speakers largely resort to using a sentence-ending particle, and in the process to alleviate embarrassment.

Ket is the sole surviving member of the Yeniseian language family, spoken in the central part of North Asia. This large territory is also home to other language families: Samoyedic, Ob-Ugric, Tungusic, and Turkic. Apart from Yeniseian, which are strikingly unique, all language groups in the area conform to a common typological profile. Subsequent to contact over several hundred years, many of the core grammatical features that distinguish Yeniseian from the other language families have undergone a ‘typological accommodation,’ a phenomenon most prominent in Modern Ket, to mimic the dominant language type in the area. The present article aims to provide an overview of some ways in which typological accommodation has affected the phonemic tones and nominal and verbal morphology in Modern Ket, and to show that this peculiar phenomenon is also attested at the syntactic level in formation of adverbial and relative clauses. As such, the paper presents that the phonemic and morphological structures of Modern Ket uniquely position the language for discourse and communication. Here, its speakers deploy these communicative devices, specifically designed followed extended contact with other languages, as representative of their language community.

The study focuses on the prosody of Standard Chinese in communication in correlation with gender of speakers. In the field of Standard Chinese prosody is built on the research work done by Oldřich Švarný, who established the system of prosodic transcription and analysis. The connection with the gender of the speakers is completely new and unique. This article uses results of the analysis of SC language corpus transcribed by prosodic transcription and endeavour to find a connection between obtained results and gendered influences on prosodic (suprasegmental) level of language. Basic prosodic phenomena observed here are prosodic word syllable number, speech rate, syllable accentual prominence and the frequency of rhythmic sequence types. The results clearly show there is a connection between gender of the speaker and the prosodic realization of his/her speech.

The study explores the intersections of gender and ethnicity as a point of inquiry in the emerging roles of Meranao women who work in the field of leadership. Drawing on qualitative interviews with seven Meranao women leaders in Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur, in The Philippines, this paper examines the multilayered issues and challenges these women face in their roles as leaders, as they leap into higher decision-making positions. I articulate the ideologies that shape their leadership experiences and their performative repertoires, and examine the ways in which they are able to perform their leadership roles given their opportunities and constraints. Finally, the study describes the agentic pathways the women traverse to effect leadership in Meranao politics and socio political development. Results show that intersectional approaches to investigating leadership, taking into account interconnected and overlapping factors of gender and ethnicity, can not only reveal the issues and challenges women leaders face, but also the individual agencies and strategies they use to overcome such constraints. The intersectionality approach challenges essentialist framings of leadership, and emphasizes an individual’s social location, as reflected in the intersecting identities of these Meranao women. This intersectionality, as I reveal, allows for the emergence of a negotiated form of leadership among women, which requires a delicate balance between meeting social expectations as women and fulfilling roles as leaders.

Throughout antiquity, the Chittagong Hill Tract was a sparsely populated region. This population increased with the immigration of different speech communities, thus changing its linguistic mosaic, and creating conditions for language contact between vernacular Bangla and between its ancestral Indo-Aryan variety Pali, the superstrate, and the Tibeto-Burman variety, the substratum. In the changing language contact situation, language contact involved various phenomena, such as language maintenance, the creation of new contact languages, i.e. pidgins and creoles as well as the acquisition and integration into a dominant L2. Through this language contact, the processes of language contact have had particular linguistic, social, and political outcomes that have shaped the region. The linguistic outcomes include lexical borrowing, calquing, and structural convergence, as well as the creation of a new contact language combining both the Indo-Aryan vernacular and Tibeto-Burman vernacular. This paper discusses these outcomes, and describes that changes in the social and political makeup of the region have ultimately led to language change. The study argues that linguistic change appears at present in several ways: The lexical makeup, phraseology and syntactic structure of Indo-Aryan varieties spoken by the Tibeto-Burman speech communities; pidgins including Chakma and Tanchangya which have emerged from contact between the Indo-Aryan variety and the Arakanese vernacular; a Tibeto-Burman pidgin which has emerged from contact between the superstrata Marma and the substrates Chak, Khumi, and Kheyang, which are spoken by the Marma, Chak, Khumi, and Kheyang ethnicities. Ultimately, the study presents that these social and linguistic outcomes have manifested themselves in the form of bilingualism and so code-mixing, and where the political outcomes of language contact have forged the political makeup of the Chittagong Hill Tract to bring the region to become one part of the larger political superstructure of Bangladesh.