The Verbal Artistry of Julius Malema
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE The Verbal Artistry of Julius Malema From the Anthro News Blog Language and Culture Column. Guest Columnist Steven P. Black Steven P. Black, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University In November of 2011, political youth leader Julius Malema was suspended from the ruling party of South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC). The [...]
Educating Tibetans in Tibetan?
A Fork in the Chinese Road: Educating Tibetans in Tibetan? Susan D. Blum December 23, 2011 Earlier this month a Tibetan monk set himself on fire. It was the twelfth incidence of Tibetan self-immolation by a monk or nun since March, according to unverified but plausible reports. These acts of desperation continue a long line [...]
Occupying Language
H. Samy Alim writing in the NY Times about “What if We Occupied Language?” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/what-if-we-occupied-language/ When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has [...]
JLA “Racializing Discourses”
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology special issue, “Racializing Discourses,” now available online! Misty Jaffe and Paul Garrett are very pleased to announce the publication of the first-ever online issue of JLA. (Further information about JLA online issues is available here.) Guest-edited and with an introduction by Hilary Dick and Kristina Wirtz, this special themed issue includes [...]
For Ebonics, the New Milennium Is Pretty Much Like the Old One
Language and Culture (Anthro News Blog) I am delighted to announce the launch of the Language and Culture column on the Anthropology News blog. Jacqueline Messing, Richard Senghas and I will be sharing editorial duties for the blog for the coming year. My first act as co-editor was to ask Ronald Kephardt for an update on [...]
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 [...]
Increasing number of US students study ASL
According to an article in the New York Times, American Sign Language is now the fourth most-studied language among US college and university students. While enrollment in foreign-language courses generally has held steady or increased only modestly, enrollment in ASL courses increased more than sixteen percent between 2006 and 2009. Instructor Amy Ruth McGraw suggests [...]
The Naming of Africa
Steven Black, UCSD
This morning (Sept. 20, 2010) while drinking my coffee I did a perfunctory survey of the news on Africa, only to be jolted out of my pre-coffee stupor by an article on cnn.com with the title, “Group: Use of ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ Disparaging.” This immediately concerned me. While I prefer to describe ‘southern Africa’ generally or ‘South Africa’ specifically, I myself have unquestioningly used the term ‘sub-Saharan’ in past work in order to indicate the boundary of Arabic-dominant cultural practices. Some academics prefer the (inevitably more bulky) phrase, “Africa south of the Sahara,” but I wonder if this shift in terminology is really enough for the phrase to point to a different set of indexical meanings.
Susan DiGiacomo on Catalan
Reposted comment by Susan M. DiGiacomo John Tagliabue’s New York Times article on the new Catalan law mandating the dubbing and/or subtitling of 50% of foreign films into Catalan (“Trumpeting Catalan on the Big Screen,” March 10, 2010) contains a number of inaccuracies and tendentious arguments not easily recognized as such by the uninformed reader. [...]
Michel DeGraff on Haitian Kreyòl
Comments by Michel DeGraff on responses to his petition on Haitian Kreyòl As it turns out, these responses echo age-old arguments about the (mis)use of language in Haitian schools and in Haitian society at large. Yves Dejean and many others have addressed such arguments in previous publications. See, for example, Yves Dejean’s 2006 book _Yon [...]
