Letter to the Census Bureau from the SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice
January 5, 2011 David S. Johnson, Division Chief Housing and Household Economic Statistics U.S. Census Bureau 4600 Silver Hill Road Washington, DC 20233 Dear Mr. Johnson, Thank you for your Dec 22, 2010 response to our May 27, 2010 letter concerning the Census Bureau’s use of the term “linguistically isolated.” Speaking on behalf of the [...]
IP Addresses Not A Proxy For Language Ability
As Mark Allen Peterson wrote in his post on “Developing Expertise,” we have been having a discussion about the importance of bringing anthropological knowledge to the social web. For this reason I called upon people who follow me on Twitter (@kerim) to bring their anthropological expertise to the new question-and-answer forum, Quora. While there are [...]
Second CfP: Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (January 31 Deadline)
SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS *Please give widest distribution* Please note that the abstract submission deadline for this conference has been extended to January 31, 2011. THE 17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE, INTERACTION, AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION University of California, Santa Barbara May 12-14, 2011 Presented by: The Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO) Graduate Student Organization [...]
Lost, and Translation
The Chinese language phrase book I picked up in my first week in the city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, People’s Republic of China, asserts in a blurb on the back cover that travelers to China experience “instant illiteracy” and certainly this was a significant aspect of my first extended stay in that country. [...]
Developing Expertise
By Mark Allen Peterson (MiamiU) Journalist Alix Spiegel’s feature story “When Did We Become Mentally Modern?” on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered in August 2010 raised a wide-ranging discussion on the Linganth listserv about the expertise of linguistic anthropologists. While a well-intentioned effort, its descriptions of language and semiotics were… simplistic—to be generous. The [...]
