REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS Journal of Linguistic Anthropology special issue on LANGUAGE AND WHITE SUPREMACY Guest Editors: Krystal Smalls, Arthur Spears, and Jonathan Rosa (*Revised call for papers… Read More »Call for Papers, JLA Special Issue on Language and White Supremacy
How do I tell my health care provider about a pain that I can’t name? How are symptoms experienced when they emerge from a part… Read More »AN News: “(Not) Talking about Unmentionable Symptoms” by Christine Labuski (Virginia Tech)
Recently Elise Berman asked colleagues via the LINGANTH email list to recommend recent ethnographies of language and culture. Several people responded; some titles and links to publishers are collected here.
See below for a list of recent ethnographies on language and gender, which will appeal to educators and students of anthropology, particularly at the undergraduate level, as well… Read More »Ethnographies of Language and Gender: Resources for Teaching Undergraduate Anthropology
The Fresh Air interview of David Thorpe and Susan Sankin makes me look forward to Thorpe’s film, “Do I Sound Gay?” But Sankin’s suggestions that women and young people’s speech is pathological leads me to re-read Robin Lakoff, Deborah Cameron, and Nelson Flores.
On behalf of William Leap (American University), Co-editor, Journal of Language and Sexuality: The Journal of Language and Sexuality (www.benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/jls) is now in its fifth year of publication. JL&S explores… Read More »The Journal of Language & Sexuality
Gabriel Arana recently published a defense of creaky voice at The Atlantic. He notes that recent criticism of young women’s use of creaky voice, or “vocal fry”, is part of a long tradition of critiquing the speaking styles of less powerful groups of people. Arana’s conclusion that “normative judgments about linguistic prestige are relative, and merely reflect social attitudes” is absolutely correct and well-known to linguistic anthropologists and other scholars of language. The particular speech patterns he analyses to support his conclusion – up-talk, like, and creak – are somewhat questionable, however.
The phrase, “women and children” to mean non-combatants killed by war strikes me as somewhat outdated. Non-combatants are not necessarily women or children, and women and children are not necessarily non-combatant. The phrase might risk a mis-recognition of the nature of political violence and its victims.
In “Lesbian bar talk in Shinjuku, Tokyo” Hideko Abe shows how identity positions are constructed and claimed through language use. One passage, which shows how use of the word futsuu (ordinary) includes homosexual and heterosexual subjects in the same category, bears additional analysis.
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
I currently have the privilege of TAing Intro to linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto and in the previous weeks the students read and… Read More »Piecemeal Comments on Language and Gender (or PCs)
P. Kerim Friedman, NDHU In her now classic 1989 paper on language and political economy, Judith Irvine talked about situations where language doesn’t merely index… Read More »Your own private griot