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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2022
Language, Culture and Society - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2022
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2022
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Had the Neogrammarians spoken Wolof or Basaa…
Author(s): Adrian Pablépp.: 9–21 (13)More LessAbstractIn this response article to Emmanuel Ngué Um’s piece published in Language, Culture and Society, I examine Ngué Um’s thesis that structural linguistics has no reality in the African context, which he presents in the form of a critique of Saussure and Western linguistics. Ngué Um imagines Saussure as a (native) speaker of an African language, who would have refrained from theorizing languages the way he did, namely as theoretical fictions, if only he had received a formation in linguistic anthropology. Against this, I argue that we must assess Saussurean thinking as part of the history of linguistics, i.e., in its proper historical context, and acknowledge that linguistics as we know it is the product of Western metaphysics. Saussure just carried forward the intellectual legacy of which he was a product. Ngué Um wishes to adapt Saussurean linguistics to the contemporary linguistic world and make it a fit for the postcolonial and posthuman paradigms. However, the notions of langue and parole have a precise function in Saussure’s theorizing, and it is questionable whether a decolonial linguistics should approach the African linguistic experience based on any of the Western metaphysical concepts. Doing so will, arguably, lead to a watered-down version of metaphysics and to a not fully emancipated southern linguistic theory.
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Warum Deutsch lernen?
Author(s): Anastasia G. Stamou and Evmorfia Sidiropouloupp.: 22–46 (25)More LessAbstractIn the present study, we explore the discursive construction of German language learning identities on the Goethe Institute website. With this aim, we depart from critical sociolinguistic approaches to multilingualism and draw on an analytical framework which views discourse as a lens through which one can examine the ways identities are actively accomplished in particular contexts. From the analysis, it appears that on the central body of the Institute website, the German language learners are constructed as elite, global and mobile multilinguals. In contrast, the recipients of the Institute portal “Mein Weg nach Deutchland” are attached to the local and non-elite multilingual identities of immigrants / refugees. Thus, the Goethe Institute website is a socially constructed space invested with hierarchical meanings about “where” German language is an elite multilingual skill and “where” it is not.
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Lived beliefs
Author(s): Miki Makihara and Juan L. Rodríguezpp.: 47–67 (21)More LessAbstractRapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) poetry allows us to understand how lived beliefs can be central to the realization of the individual self in community. In this paper, we focus on the poetry of Mata-U’iroa Atan, a Rapa Nui poet who characterizes his political project as walking to fly like a bird. His poem Ki Te Reva (‘To the Flag’) exemplifies a particular form of corporeal consciousness leading to a project of political persuasion. His poems are written in Rapa Nui, an indigenous Polynesian language and draw attention to sociolinguistic and historical “disjunctures” (Meek, 2010) in contemporary Rapa Nui community life. We argue that lived beliefs are produced by corporeal consciousness, and verbal art can be central to the mobilization of lived beliefs in the process of persuasion for emancipatory praxis. Poetry can give people an imagination, and this imagination is constitutive of a kind of truth underlying political projects.
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“I think I belong over there”
Author(s): Cynthia Groff and Daniela Vicherat Mattarpp.: 68–91 (24)More LessAbstractExperiences of belonging and unbelonging are constructed in multiple ways. Two young women share their stories of moving from north to south and their experiences of (un)belonging in the United States and Mexico. Analysis of the semi-structured interviews through interdisciplinary lenses highlights the contested nature of borders and the breaking down of pre-established categories. Beyond territorial borders, the experiences of these two US citizens of Mexican heritage reveal an ongoing negotiation of spatial, social and linguistic border spaces, blurring the distinctions between the two nationalities, multiple social groups, and the linguistic traditions to which they (choose to) belong. Different layers of identity and grounds for belonging intersect in the stories they tell. While family priorities and financial realities condition their choices and their mobility, the stories reveal agency and active (un)bordering on multiple scales, also exemplifying the potential of (un)bordering across academic disciplines.
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