Introduction: American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places

Speech play and language ideologies in Navajo terminology development

“…They also counter the expectations of linguistic failure or loss and the inability of Navajo or other Native peoples to maintain heritage languages that often frame discussions of indigenous language communities (Webster and Peterson 2011). As we (Webster and Peterson 2011: 8) note elsewhere, "Not only do the expectations about Native peoples imagine them as technologically incompetent, but also such racist expectations imagine Native people as "linguistically incompetent," or unable to maintain heritage languages, speak multiple languages, or speak correctly in colonial languages."…”

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011

“…We hear in terms of the categories to which we are habituated. This insight is correctly credited as a precursor to the later development of Boasian relativity (Leavitt 2011, Stocking 1992) and with putting Native American languages, and thus Native peoples, on level logical and psychic footing with the West (Webster and Peterson 2011). It also shows, however, the Boasian view of language and culture as providing categories that vary from group to group in the ways that they “screen or sieve” experience (Stocking 1992:121).…”

“…A special issue on Native American Indian languages in unexpected places exemplifies how linguistic anthropology can contribute to understanding trajectories of local language use in Native communities. Here, empirical attention focuses on forms of language use that might otherwise be dismissed as inauthentic or as counterexamples to creativity (Webster and Peterson 2011). In the light of P. Deloria's (2004, 2011) critique of expectations placed on Native people as an exogenous limiting gaze, here we find detailed ethnographic attention to intertextual links, showing how quotidian life as well as high‐stakes indigenous politics is linguistically mediated and often explicitly focused on language.…”

Negotiating Sociolinguistic Borderlands—Native Youth Language Practices in Space, Time, and Place

“…In these young people's words, we glimpse their multisited language practices (Webster & Peterson, 2011b) as they move from home to school and across geographic and cultural spaces, taking diverse Englishes, Spanishes, and heritage language practices and loyalties with themand often adding new language varieties to their communicative repertoires. As Warriner and Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 00:46 20 February 2015 Wyman (2013) write, these kinds of accounts illustrate "how language and literacy practices facilitate, constrain, and/or mediate experiences of movement within and between communities, locales, practices, and ideological influences" (p. 5).…”