Linguistic Anthropology at the End of the Naughts: A Review of 2009

Abstract

Here I consider some of the major themes that emerged in linguistic anthropology in 2009, focusing on intersections with other disciplinary fields. Research on globalization, citizenship, publics, footing, and register formation shows how linguistic anthropology has developed a distinctive set of tools to address broad questions in the human sciences. The subdiscipline remains centrally concerned with the semiotic qualities specific to language and the forms of social life that these qualities enable. "Language" has not yet dissolved into a weak adjective in quite the same way that "culture" or "society" seem to have done, and much of the most sophisticated conceptual work on the semiotics of life lived collectively continues to focus on the concrete aspects of this multifaceted phenomenon.Linguistic anthropology maintains a relatively stable theoretical core compared to its subdisciplinary siblings, even if few of us would agree on what constitutes the limits of the field.

Linguistic Anthropology in 2012: Language Matter(s)

“…As has been noted in past year‐in‐review articles, a constellation of topics (including but not limited to language ideologies, language socialization, linguistic relativity, and stylistic variation) has become more or less canonical in linguistic anthropology (Cody ; Monaghan ). Below, I discuss some of the ways that current scholarship benefits from reappraisals of and revisions to these established research frameworks—gaining, that is, by not taking such topics for granted.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

“…The contention of this essay, evinced in the diverse objects and modes of analysis taken up by linguistic anthropological inquiry in 2015, is that the critical intervention—and methodological, analytical, and theoretical bedrock—of contemporary linguistic anthropology is that “language” is not a coherent, autonomous object of analysis such that linguistic anthropology could be the study of it . This is despite, or rather because of, the fact that language—as an analytic and ethnographic and ideological object—cannot be done away with in linguistic anthropological thought, pedagogy, or practice (Cody ).…”

Confucius Institute Programming in the United States: Language Ideology, Hegemony, and the Making of Chinese Culture in University Classes

“…Certainly, models that link language use with typifications of people frequently hinge on essentialist ideas of culture, that is, on ideas that associate particular practices with the nature or traditions of a group—even when these typifications are implicit or discrete. However, the concept of ideology might be balanced with that of hegemony to account for the process of the development of emergent new meanings and semantically indeterminate terrains across which “signs and ideologies move” (Wortham and Reyes :148; see also Agha ; Cody ). For this, the concept language domain captures a certain fluidity of meaning.…”