For racialized speakers living in the wake of colonial modernity, "mother tongues" persist as perilous, precarious terrain. What are these languages' social lives as objects of aspiration on life support—not only necessary, but also denied anchoring in identity, history, gender, labor, and value?
Long Abstract:
For racialized speakers living in the wake of colonial modernity, "mother tongues" persist as perilous, precarious terrain. Participants in this panel trace out the variously essentialized links between collective identities, individuated personhood, and the denotational codes that come to anchor language-community attentions—not just a group's language, but more essentially, their "mother tongue." What transformations, investments, anxieties, blockages, and affinities are necessary to enable these languages' continued, ambivalent existence as being as close as one's "mother"? How do raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic performances of personhood come to feel for participants as if they are anchored by and naturalized through "mother tongues," especially in cases where the connection (or the language) is constructed as variously broken, severed, corrupted, or irrevocably lost? What are these languages' social lives as objects of aspiration that are themselves offered as forms of gendered, socio-cultural "life support" while simultaneously finding themselves on "life support"—not only necessary, but also denied anchoring in identity, history, gender, labor, and value? Panelists explore these questions through ethnographic studies undertaken at a range of historical, institutional, and interactional sites across distinct, yet interconnected geographies.
This paper analyzes public evaluations of "the polyglot" in Singapore, a figure marked not by deficit or lack, but by an effusive plurilingualism. This figure reveals how anxieties over "Mother Tongue" imbue new moralizing layers to broad raciolinguistic anxieties in Singapore.
Paper long abstract:
Singapore is an officially multiracial, multilingual, multicultural locale. Yet members of the individual "races" that comprise Singapore's plural polity are not multilingual, but bilingual by design, speaking both English and the "Mother Tongue" assigned to their "race." Amid ongoing anxieties over English standards and the degree of Singaporeans' bilingualism, I examine a figure marked not by linguistic deficit or lack, but by effusive plurilingualism: "the polyglot." This figure gets publicly evaluated along two axes—fluency and virtuosity—in various combinatorial arrangements. I approach fluency/virtuosity as a metalinguistic model that points not toward ways of speaking, but toward the authority of the evaluator. Paradoxically on its surface, the evaluator does not necessarily get positioned through their acts of evaluation as themselves either fluent or virtuosic, even as their acts of evaluation reinforce the categories of fluency/virtuosity as relevant evaluative metrics. Such evaluations of fluency/virtuosity articulate with, yet are detachable from, "Mother Tongues," which occupy a distinct, privileged status—even for polyglot individuals. I analyze ethnographic observations alongside mediatized reports of Singaporean politicians' and political volunteers' language-use; online commentaries on a viral video of a hawker's code-switching sales pitch in 2020; and public reports on "the polyglot," a Singaporean student with "exceptional" linguistic abilities. I argue that, when considered through the figure of the polyglot, concerns over "Mother Tongue" can be seen to imbue new moralizing layers to generalized raciolinguistic anxieties around speech production in Singapore, thus heightening both the systemic risks and rewards entailed by decisions to publicly speak one's "Mother Tongue"—or not.
Drawing on auto-ethnography (as an Afrikaner linguistic anthropologist), as well as interview materials and reflexive mass-media language discourse by and about various contemporary Afrikaner publics, I explore the sociopolitical dynamics of raciolinguistic suicide in Afrikaner interactions.
Paper long abstract:
Can contemporary Afrikaners be the sympathetic subjects of language endangerment and language loss? What prevailing ethno-racial co(n)texts problematize claims of threatened cultural identity and language sovereignty for post-Apartheid Afrikaners within and beyond South Africa? Drawing on auto-ethnography (as an Afrikaner linguistic anthropologist), as well as interview materials and reflexive mass-media language discourse by and about various contemporary Afrikaner publics; this paper explores the sociopolitical dynamics of what I term raciolinguistic suicide in the maintenance and leveraging of cultural identity among different scales of Afrikaner publics: interactions between diasporic Afrikaner kin; anomic discourse in Afrikaner popular culture; Afrikaner public intellectual debates around the sovereignty of Afrikaans; as well as the raciolinguistic negation of Afrikaaps as a viable language sphere within which Afrikaans might attain political salvation and undergo a re-racialization as a genuinely post-colonial language in a genuinely multi-lingual post-Apartheid South Africa. Bringing together genealogies of black consciousness and black radical thought (Biko 1978 and Newton 1973) as well as pragmatist semiotics (Silverstein 1993, Peirce 1955, and Du Bois 1935) this paper explores an the anthropology of radical hope’s (Lear 2006) existential horizon.
From research using qualitative ethnographic methods in a village involved with social welfare work in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra, inclusive mother tongue language ideologies and pedagogies contribute to citizenship building and address social disparities for more equitable education.
Paper long abstract:
In India, where elementary education is a fundamental right, significant barriers stall educational equity through linguistic inclusivity in contexts of social stratification (Annamalai 2001, Groff 2017, Mohanty 2019). Addressing social segregation, this paper examines intersectional student identities through connections with language where social structures, such as caste and socioeconomic class, present frameworks of privilege and develop connections between social structure, belonging and identity, and language in education (Mohanty 2006, 2019). From research using qualitative ethnographic methods with a settled nomadic Tribe in a rural district in Maharashtra, this paper highlights the social distinctions and disparities in which Banjara youth position themselves from their own perspectives with their Mother Tongue in their communities illuminating language ideologies within a political economy of languages that emerges in and about education. Banjara-speaking students find it more difficult to find a sense of belonging in classrooms and the broader community than their peers whose Mother Tongue is Marathi, the regional language, language of instruction in schools, and the language of power. As it is difficult to speak about the transformative power of education without addressing the continuing need for equitable learning opportunities for students from educationally disenfranchised populations, a key insight of this study are the dynamic intersections of power and impacts of language mapped onto identity and belonging in socially and linguistically stratified settings.
This paper explores the semiotic processes that undergird the making of an essentialized Nahua identity in present-day Mexico. Analyzing state programs of Nahuatl language revival and labor formalization in Morelos, it considers the stakes of this politics of recognition for indigenous justice.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1990s and escalating with the 2018 victory of the populist Morena party, Mexico has undertaken a program of state reform aimed at overcoming injustices of a colonial and neoliberal past. As the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) positions himself in defense of causes of “honesty” (honorabilidad), “democracy” (democracia), and “the good of all, but especially the poor and indigenous,” he discursively voices new semiotic categories of personhood—indigenous, women, children, the “rural” and “poor” –internationally legible as rights-bearing subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research with Nahuatl-speakers in the state of Morelos, in this paper I explore the semiotic processes that undergird the making of an essentialized indigenous identity in contemporary Mexico. I focus on the emergence of two new diacritics of the majority indigenous Nahua population in Morelos: Nahuatl language, and domestic labor, embodied in efforts by the Mexican government to revive and legislate the state’s “mother tongue,” Nahuatl, in primary and secondary schools, and to formalize domestic work. For whom are such diacritics of Nahua subjectivity legible, and to what effects? What ideal future imaginary of nationhood animates these transformations? What is the labor of establishing semiotic regularities across encounters—of cultivating a collective interest to correctly apprehend and display being Nahua? This paper explores the stakes of this politics of recognition for questions of indigenous justice in present-day Latin America.
The study examines the linguistic experiences of three caste categories in North Kerala to comprehend how caste is embodied in language. Their experiences from the educational institutions are analysed and found the causes and effects of linguistic discrimination and standardisation.
Paper long abstract:
This study examines the linguistic experiences of three caste categories in a village in North Kerala in an effort to comprehend how caste is embodied in language. It examines how linguistic inequality is caused by language standardisation and how people that speak non-standard languages deal with the issue without forsaking their mother tongue. Through a comparative comparison of three caste groups, including the scheduled caste (SC), other backward class (OBC), and the general category, the study was carried out in Thachankunnu in Kerala (GEN). The participants' direct experiences from the educational institutions are used to analyse the causes and effects of linguistic discrimination. The theoretical frame of the register has been used as the base of analysis. The study found that participants experienced job loss and linguistic inequality in class participation, demonstrating the existence of language-based discrimination. In various contexts, dialect shifting is regarded as a means of concealing the social status and identity of vernacular language speakers. Identification of the value of mother tongue, language diversity, and resistance to deprivation all play essential roles in achieving language uniformity.
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