Last week, after years of urging, the Census Bureau released this statement: In response to concerns expressed by data user groups, the Census Bureau decided… Read More »Combatting Linguistic Inaccuracies in the Census
This is the first of columns listing links in the news connected to language. These links do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Society… Read More »Language Links #1
Recently some scholars in language acquisition and education have posted links on Facebook to the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (henceforth CCFC), which is… Read More »Marketing language abilities
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology – Volume 21, Issue 1 – June 2011 – Wiley Online Library. Currently in Free Access Articles Textual Iconicity and the… Read More »Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(1)
The SLA is calling for applications for registration waivers for participants in next year’s Annual Meetings in Montreal. The SLA will have one waiver to… Read More »Call for Section Assembly Meeting Registration Waiver Applications
Dear Linguistic Anthropologists, It’s that time of year again: The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2011 Annual… Read More »Call for Sessions: 2011 Annual Meeting of the AAA
Forty Years After: Tidemarks, Legacies and Futures of Research on Language Contact This year marks forty years since the publication of Pidginization and Creolization of… Read More »Call for papers, AAA 2011: Language Contact
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.… Read More »Letter to the Census Bureau from the SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice
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 a lot of questions which could easily be answered by using Google or Wikipedia, there are a lot of good questions as well; questions which it would be good for anthropologists to answer. But after using the website for a while, trying to help out where I can, I suddenly found myself blocked from asking questions because the computer was assuming I couldn’t speak English based on the fact that I connect to the Internet from Taiwan. I wrote to Quora about this and they quickly fixed the problem, but I wanted to share our e-mail exchange as the use of IP addresses as a proxy for language ability is increasingly common and I would like to see linguistic anthropologists more aware of this issue. But there is also a second issue here which is the attempt to police the use of a forum by non-native English speakers. This too seems highly offensive and questionable. I’d be curious if there aren’t other attempts to control who can access websites in this way?
UPDATE: I wanted to add that I understand one reason why a forum might wish to limit the language used in that forum: the need to moderate the discussion. A shortage of trained moderators in other languages could legitimately require the forum to require that people post in English, at least until they train more moderators. However, I am not questioning this so much as the assumption that the distribution of these speakers can be identified by IP address and the use of a Quiz to try to keep non-native speakers from participating. I’ve posted this on Quora as well, so it will be interesting to see how the discussion evolves there.
Below the fold is my e-mail exchange so far, I will update it when I hear back from Quroa:
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.… Read More »Second CfP: Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (January 31 Deadline)
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,… Read More »Lost, and Translation
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… Read More »Developing Expertise