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SLA Call for Invited Sessions


It’s that time of year again: The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, on November 17-21. As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an exciting meeting in New Orleans this November. The theme of the 2010 Meeting is “Circulation.” I hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme, although you do not have to do so.

Code switching and language alternation

A colleague writes to ask:

I read your article ‘Code Switching’ in Sociocultural Linguistics. What I wonder is [why] you didn’t write something about the author Grosjean (1982, Life with Two Languages). He also used the term Code Switching as one of the first. And I can’t get the differences between ‘ language alternation’ and ‘ code switching’? Can you describe the differences?

These are excellent questions.

Web Guru Intro: Alex Enkerli

Now that we’re getting deeper into 2010 and some dust has settled, it might be a good opportunity for me to introduce myself to you.

My name is Alex Enkerli and I define myself as an “informal ethnographer.” My background is indeed in linguistic anthropology, at least in part, but I’ve been involved in a variety of other ethnographic fields including ethnomusicology and folkloristics.

A quick overview of sign languages

Basic Background:

Sign languages are different from both spoken languages and from each other. There is no universal sign language. Because Deaf people can’t hear the spoken language of the country, a sign language like American Sign Language has a different grammar from spoken language. It is also different from other sign languages—even British Sign Language—because of the separate histories of American and British Deaf communities. Sign languages are also not spelled out words, although fingerspelling can be used if you want to translate a written words like the name of an unfamiliar town into sign language.

Constructed languages on film

According to Ben Zimmer, various aliens in Star Wars spoke Quechua, one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in South America, and Haya, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania.
The new film Avatar features Na’vi, a constructed language said to “out-Klingon Klingon.”

Still learning from Dell Hymes

I was particularly moved by a memorial at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association for Dell Hymes. Hymes founded the ethnography of speaking, developed the concept of communicative competence, and pioneered the study of ethnopoetics.