Pragmatics - Volume 13, Issue 4, 2003

Barbadian ways of speaking draw their stylistic richness from intertwined and differentially valued resources of Creole (Bajan) and Barbadian English. Barbadians (and linguists) interpret this formal diversity through two ideological paradigms. One (labeled in Bajan, “adjusting to suit”) corresponds to linguist’s “register”. By attending to laminations of individual repertoires and to skills of their selective contextual deployment, the paradigm indexes the richness of speakers’ resources. The other paradigm interprets the stylistic diversity of speakers’ repertoires in essentializing, “sociolectal” terms that iconically link social categories and polarized language varieties. By exaggerating the distinctiveness of language varieties and by turning them into unambiguous indices of fixed social personae, the paradigm colludes with the hierarchies of linguistic and social prestige. These paradigms and hierarchies can be approached in terms of historical processes that defined their social and linguistic targets. Such a framework, however, neglects institutional sites pivotal in the continued production of cultural orders of language - the literature, media, and theater. Within these sites, characterized by hightened metadiscursive awareness, ideological tensions surrounding language and its couplings with social, racial, and national identities are scripted and launched into public domain. Macrohistorical explanations also neglect the processes that turn specific linguistic forms into emblems of Barbadian language varieties while erasing others. By considering strategies and practices of (re)allocation of linguistic styles to characters in literature, journalism, and theater, I explore sociocultural and semiotic underpinnings of drawing Creole and Barbadian English forms into production of linguistically marked social identities and socially marked language varieties.

In this essay I examine the emergence and transformation of linguistic analysis as an authoritative field of knowledge in the context of competing nationalists agendas in Guatemala. I show how various social actors including missionary linguists, North American secular linguists, and Maya linguists are implicated in the struggle for authority in “science of language.” I argue that in these intellectual and political struggles, the awareness and participation of the “native speaker” is central to the efficacy of such analytic work and its corresponding projects of national inclusion and exclusion.

Sanskrit has long been a medium of scholarly, religious, and literary discourse throughout the South Asian subcontinent. But recently, several organizations, imagining Sanskrit as the future lingua franca and emblem of an ermergent Hindu nation, are attempting to turn Sanskrit into a truly “popular” language by encouraging the use of what they call “simple Sanskrit” in everyday conversational contexts. This essay examines several of the semiotic processes involved in simplifying Sanskrit. Specifically, it discusses first the ways in which simple Sanskrit is regularized in order to produce a language which bears many structural similarities to modern Indian vernaculars. Second, the essay turns to a discussion of what simple Sanskrit represents: Through simplification, Sanskrit becomes an icon for the purported democratizing goals of the spoken Sanskrit movement. Sanskrit also represents a tangible index for aspiring speakers, projecting backward to an archaic Golden Age, but also looking forward to an imagined future. These processes have important implications for understanding the role of language ideologies and their effects in the manufacture and maintenance of linguistic identities.

Over the last twenty years, “expert” discourses about the sociolinguistic character of Corsica have shifted from a focus on “diglossia” to an assertion that Corsican is a “polynomic” language. In the context of language shift and efforts at minority language revitalization, these two discourses make different claims about the relationship of language and identity, posit different kinds of power relationships between Corsicans and their two languages, and have different implications for Corsican language policy and advocacy. One of the unintended consequences of a revitalization program built on the idea of “diglossia” was the internal reproduction of dominant language hierarchies that divided rather than unified Corsicans around language. As an antidote, Corsican academics in the late eighties, introduced the notion of Corsican as a “polynomic” language defined both by its internal variation (multiple centers of “authenticity” and “authority”) and by speakers’ recognition of linguistic unity in diversity - a collective stance vis-à-vis linguistic variation that challenges the very principles of dominant (French) language ideologies in its inclusive, non-hierarchical nature. Through analysis of ethnographic data from a month-long bilingual teacher training course and from the way that Corsican orthography is taught in a bilingual school, I explore the ideology of polynomic unity in diversity and how it misrecognizes 1) contemporary speakers’ relationship with regional variation and 2) the new forms of linguistic diversity caused by language shift among both students and teachers in Corsican bilingual classrooms.

This paper focuses on whether the concept of “speech variety” has value as a material-like “object” and whether academic research and outreach study a particular variety can “profit” both community residents using the variety and the academic community valuing the research on it. It examines these issues by exploring how economic processes of “valuation” apply to the discursive circulation of the proper noun Appalachian English and its logotype AE in communities using grammatical forms diagnostic of it. It draws upon ethnographic and interview data from southeastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia communities to argue that linguistic misrecognition of these forms constitute a redirected system of valuation that contradicts and undercuts the overt denotational function of Appalachian English in the academic or popular discursive contexts in which they appear. Examining the pragmatics and semantics of possessive pronoun construction, this paper further concludes that Appalachian English does not and cannot circulate as a valued noun in the existing verbal repertoire of the communities examined. What constitutes acceptable and authoritative knowledge instead becomes “stored” in Appalachian English so that its value is in its potential monopoly of knowledge sparingly distributed under specific protocols distributed by “professionals”.

This paper describes recent efforts to develop and promote a standardized Mixe orthography that can serve as the vehicle of a unified, modern Mixe polity. It then analyzes the guiding assumptions and ideological commitments that have informed these efforts. Ironically, this drive for a single unified spelling system has focused negative attention on precisely those features that distinguish one variety of Mixe from another. Moreover, failure to reach any consensus has frustrated the efforts of Mixe writers and teachers and made it possible for Spanish to gain a greater foothold in Mixe schools. One of the most rancorous debates has involved a certain scandalous diphthong that happens to be an innovation but one that diverges from Spanish phonology. The role of this sound in the sound system of Totontepecano Mixe and its function as an exponent of certain key grammatical distinctions that need to be graphically represented in some fashion has become less of an issue than the indexical linkages between ö and different discourses about the nature of Mixe identity - from whence it comes and how it might continue to remain distinctive.