Overview
- Considers how discourses, interactions, ideologies, and practices contribute to the roles of languages in diverse communities and contexts
- Examines the range of ways that language can be mobilized as a symbol of identity and community
- Asks how macro-, meso-, and micro-level processes can be foregrounded in examinations of how metalinguistic communities are formed
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities (PSMLC)
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About this book
This edited volume brings together ten compelling ethnographic case studies from a range of global settings to explore how people build metalinguistic communities defined not by use of a language, but primarily by language ideologies and symbolic practices about the language. The authors examine themes of agency, belonging, negotiating hegemony, and combating cultural erasure and genocide in cultivating meaningful metalinguistic communities. Case studies include Spanish and Hebrew in the USA, Kurdish in Japan, Pataxó Hãhãhãe in Brazil, and Gallo in France. The afterword, by Wesley L. Leonard, provides theoretical and on-the-ground context as well as a forward-looking focus on metalinguistic futurities. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary students and scholars in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology and migration studies.
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Keywords
Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Language Defining Belonging
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Front Matter
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Language as a Tool Against Erasure
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Front Matter
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Language Mediating Relations with the State
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Front Matter
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Afterword
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This volume offers both insider and outsider perspectives about metalinguistic communities, using concepts such as linguistic objectification, ethnolinguistic infusion, linguistic reindigenization, nostalgia socialization, and raciolinguistics, among others, by which speakers of minoritized languages show enthusiasm for their language and differentiate themselves from outsiders, and how outsiders differentiate against insiders—thus foregrounding speakers’ agency. Linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and anyone working on language revitalization and second language acquisition will find the volume helpful.” (Olamide Eniola, Language in Society, Vol. 52 (5), 2023) “Metalinguistic Communities: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Languages offers a wide array of deeply ethnographic explorations of symbolic uses of language to create broad communities of belonging. This volume’s emphasis on interactions and relationships moves us beyond narrow focuses on “fluency” or “grammaticality” to broadly inclusive and emic perspectives on language use, inviting us into a community-centered and decolonial approach to understanding how communities make use of a range of language practices in constituting themselves. Each case study provides a powerful challenge to dominant language ideologies about “good” or “authentic” language use, centering community agency and linguistic wealth instead. I highly recommend this important and rich work.”
-Jocelyn Ahlers, Professor, Linguistics & Chair, Liberal Studies Department, California State University, San Marcos
“In this important volume, the authors hail our full attention to the new ways that languages are recruited to the task of nucleating communities and conferring valued identities to their members. Through wonderfully detailed and ethnographically contexted studies from across the globe, Metalinguistic Communities displays the broad range of meaningful projects that non-dominant languages perform through the agency of their members in acts of identity, place-making, belonging, and authority construction.”
-Paul V. Kroskrity, Professor of Anthropology, UCLA. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities (2000), Engaging Native American Publics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Collaborative Key (2017) (co-edited with Barbra Meek).
“In as much as these ethnographic case studies explore local and particular details, they also reveal similarities of outward orientation. Indigenous and minority metalinguistic communities are shown, at their heart, to be counter-hegemonic projects. By claiming a language as their own, historically marginalized people represent themselves in terms that are also at least partially recognizable from the institutions of the relevant dominant society. A community becomes visible to itself by becoming visible to yet others. The key concern is with recognition and valorization. Fluency and/or shift to the heritage language in other domains of life may not be a central concern. By defining the problem of metalinguistic communities, the book illuminates a recurrent theme in the applied linguistics literature: tensions between minority heritage language projects and professional linguistics and language education. Disciplinary experts can be embraced as allies or avoided for imposing unwelcome scrutiny and inconvenience. This collection makes sense of that tension; and poses, with Leonard’s conclusion, terms from which to move forward collaboratively.”
-Marybeth Nevins, Associate Professor, Anthropology and Director, Linguistics Program, Middlebury College
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Netta Avineri is an Associate Professor of Language Teacher Education and Chair of the Intercultural Competence Committee at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, USA. An applied linguistic anthropologist, she is the author of Research Methods for Language Teaching: Inquiry, Process, and Synthesis, co-editor of Language and Social Justice in Practice, and Series Editor for Critical Approaches in Applied Linguistics (De Gruyter Mouton).
Jesse Harasta is an Associate Professor of Social Science and program director for International Studies at Cazenovia College, USA. A cultural and linguistic anthropologist, he studies the symbolic and political uses of language and language as an object (e.g. signage, font). He researches Kernewek and other European lesser-used languages.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Metalinguistic Communities
Book Subtitle: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language
Editors: Netta Avineri, Jesse Harasta
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76899-7Published: 28 September 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76902-4Published: 29 September 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-76900-0Published: 27 September 2021
Series ISSN: 2947-5880
Series E-ISSN: 2947-5899
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 264
Number of Illustrations: 11 b/w illustrations, 21 illustrations in colour
Topics: Minority Languages, Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics, Cultural Heritage, Applied Linguistics