Metalinguistic Communities: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language (Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities) 3030768996, 9783030768997

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction: Exploring Agency, Ideology, and Semiotics of Language Across Communities
Language, Semiotics, and Community
Creation of the Volume
Ethos of the Volume
Reconceptualizing Language and Use
Metalinguistic Community
Chapter Themes
Overarching Themes
Chapter Descriptions
Section 1: Language Defining Belonging
Section 2: Language as a Tool Against Erasure
Section 3: Language Mediating Relations with the State
Section 4: Afterword
Concluding Remarks
Reflection Questions for the Volume
References
Language Defining Belonging
Contested Hebrew: Metalinguistic Communities and Ethnolinguistic Infusion in U.S. Jewish Complementary Schools
Introduction
Historical Background
Metalinguistic Communities and Ethnolinguistic Infusion
Research Questions
Methodology
Fostering Metalinguistic Communities
Socialization into Language Ideologies, Language Use is Primarily Pedagogical
Conflation of Language and Culture
Use of Code in Specific Interactional Contexts / Ethnolinguistic Infusion
Hebrew Loanwords / Jewish Life Vocabulary
Schoolscapes: Hebrew Writing on Whiteboards, Worksheets, and Walls
Conclusion
References
“Anyone Who Speaks Just a Little Bit of Náhuat Knows She’s Only Babbling…”: Metapragmatic Discourses on Proficiency in the Náhuat Language Revitalization (El Salvador)
Introduction
Metapragmatic Typifications of Proficiency
Colonialism, Metalinguistic Labeling, and Proficiency
“She’s only babbling…”: Náhuat revitalization and enregisterment
Conclusion
References
Intimate Politics and Language Revitalization in Veneto, Northern Italy
Introduction
Intimacy, Intimate Identities, and Language Affiliation
The Lega Nord and Its Anti-immigrant Politics
Intimate Language, Culture, and History in Veneto
Language Revitalization and Intimate Identities in Educational Settings
Intimate Revitalization in Public Signage
Concluding Remarks
Transcription Conventions
References
Metalinguistic Discourse and “Grenglish” in Narratives of Return Migration
Introduction
Polycentric Positioning and Identity
Returning to Greece
Data Collection
Analysis of Metalinguistic Discourse
Conflating Dimensions of Linguistic Variation
Demonstrations of Grenglish
Shifting Alignments in Narratives About Grenglish
Metalinguistic Discourse and Interactional Positioning
Appendix: Transcription Conventions
References
Language as a Tool Against Erasure
Where the Language Appears, We also Appear: Tehuelche Language Reclamation in Patagonia
Tehuelche “Coming Out Through Language”
(Re)connecting with the Language: Tehuelche Ideological Clarification
The Iconization of the “last Speaker” and the Reconfiguration of Ethnolinguistic Labor
The Display of Tehuelche as an Identity Authenticator
Sticking Out My Tongue: The Materialization of the Language
Tehuelche Linguistic Souvenirs: Literacy and Language Visibilisation
Authentic vs. Fake Tehuelche: Linguistic Representations as Borderline Marks
Conclusion: Reversing Tehuelche Language Shift
References
Utilization of Ethnolinguistic Infusion in the Construction of a Trifurcated Metalinguistic Community: An Example from the Kernewek (Cornish) Language of Britain
Introduction
Cornwall and Kernewek
Theoretical Tools for Exploring Ideology, Community and Ethnicity
The Case of Kernewek
Infusing Space Through Placenames
Understanding the Trifurcated Role of Kernewek
Conclusion
References
Retaking Hãhãhãe: Revitalization and Reindigenization in a Context of Indigenous Erasure
Introduction
Indigenous Erasure in Northeastern Brazil and the Amazon as Source for Signs of Indigeneity
Semiotic Reindigenization at Caramuru-Paraguaçu.
Linguistic Reindigenization
Discussion
References
Language Mediating Relations with the State
“I Didn’t Know It Was a Language Back Then”: The Ideological Value of Recognition Among Gallo Advocates in Brittany
Introduction
Stance, Ideology, and Community
Ethnographic Background
Tracing the Recognizer Role Across Community Genres
Genre 1: Advocate Narratives of Past Ignorance and Present Knowledge
Genre 2: Promotional Texts Moving Audiences from Ignorance to Knowledge
Genre 3: A Play Socializing Audience Members into Gallo Recognition
Conclusions, or Le galo: Qhi q’c’ét don ?
References
Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Spanish Speakers in a California Child Welfare Court
Introduction
Methods
Spanish Speakers as Lacking in “Sophistication”
Spanish Speakers as Vulnerable Non-Citizens
Spanish Speakers as Passive Clients
Spanish Speakers as Deficient Parents
Conclusion
References
The Historical Tie that Binds: Deploying Kurdish to Index Ownership, Authenticity, Collective Memory, and Distinction within Kawaguchi’s Kurdish Metalinguistic Community
Introduction
Language, Historicity, and the Kurdish Socio-Political Positionality
Theoretical and Methodological Underpinnings
The Japan Kurdish Cultural Association, Their Signs, and Interviewees
Analysis and Discussion
Naming, Language, Identity, and Resistance
The Role of Language for Performing Kurdishness for the Local Japanese Community
Conclusion
References
Afterword
Afterword: Reclamation and Metalinguistic Communities
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MINORITY LANGUAGES AND COMMUNITIES

Metalinguistic Communities Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language Edited by Netta Avineri · Jesse Harasta

Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities

Series Editor Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania

Worldwide migration and unprecedented economic, political and social integration present serious challenges to the nature and position of language minorities. Some communities receive protective legislation and active support from states through policies that promote and sustain cultural and linguistic diversity; others succumb to global homogenisation and assimilation. At the same time, discourses on diversity and emancipation have produced greater demands for the management of difference. This series publishes new research based on single or comparative case studies on minority languages worldwide. We focus on their use, status and prospects, and on linguistic pluralism in areas with immigrant or traditional minority communities or with shifting borders. Each volume is written in an accessible style for researchers and students in linguistics, education, politics and anthropology, and for practitioners interested in language minorities and diversity. We welcome submissions in either monograph or Pivot format.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14611

Netta Avineri · Jesse Harasta Editors

Metalinguistic Communities Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language

Editors Netta Avineri Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey Monterey, CA, USA

Jesse Harasta Cazenovia College Cazenovia, NY, USA

Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities ISBN 978-3-030-76899-7 ISBN 978-3-030-76900-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Uschools/GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all of the people and organizations who supported our work during the multi-year process of creating this text. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) at UCLA for creating spaces and facilitating opportunities for scholars to collectively explore these topics of professional interest. We thank all of the NHLRC 2018 panel and AAA 2018 participants, as well as the thoughtful questions from the audience. The conversations on those days were among the opening impetuses for this work. Thank you to all of the contributors for their thoughtful engagement with us and with one another throughout the entire manuscript process. The assistance and professionalism of Cathy Scott, Alice Green, and all of the staff at Palgrave Macmillan were essential to the smooth process and the success of the overall product. Finally, we are so grateful to Miranda Doremus-Reznor (Netta’s research assistant) for her diligence and hard work that was essential to the success of the volume. Jesse Harasta: I would like to thank all of the people in Cornwall who have shared so much with me over the years—Meur ras! Kernow

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Acknowledgements

bys vyken! —as well as the instructors and colleagues who have helped me through many challenges. Thank you John Fleet, may you rest in peace knowing your good work continues. Thanks to Netta who shared not only her time but also her experience and insight with me on this project; it has been a pleasure. This work would also not be possible without the support of my colleagues at the SBS division at Cazenovia College. I am especially grateful to Carolina and Julian for tolerating my endless fascination with lesser-used languages and Carolina for her advice, insight, support, and love throughout the process from fieldwork to final edits. No podría haberlo hecho sin ti. Netta Avineri: I would like to thank all of the Yiddish metalinguistic community members with whom I worked during my dissertation years (a sheynem dank!) as well as the individuals and groups involved in our more recent collaborative research on Hebrew part-time schools (toda raba!). Thank you to my dissertation committee Chuck Goodwin, Paul Kroskrity, Elinor Ochs, John Heritage, Olga Kagan, and Sarah Bunin Benor for helping me to shape the metalinguistic community model. I sincerely appreciate all of the ongoing support from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, which has allowed me to meet with and learn from colleagues at professional conferences and continue my ongoing work with research assistance. Thank you to Jesse for being an awesome collaborator on this exciting project—we did it! A big thank you/muchas gracias to mi Eduardo for your dulzura, amor, y apoyo throughout all of my research and writing endeavors—and for your keen interest in minority language communities around the world. Muchas gracias también to our cherished Liliana for your sweetness, curiosity, and patience while I have worked on this project. La amamos mucho! And as always—Eema—I appreciate your love and your listening when I share about my research with you!

Contents

Introduction: Exploring Agency, Ideology, and Semiotics of Language Across Communities Netta Avineri and Jesse Harasta

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Language Defining Belonging Contested Hebrew: Metalinguistic Communities and Ethnolinguistic Infusion in U.S. Jewish Complementary Schools Netta Avineri, Sarah Bunin Benor, and Nicki Greninger “Anyone Who Speaks Just a Little Bit of Náhuat Knows She’s Only Babbling…”: Metapragmatic Discourses on Proficiency in the Náhuat Language Revitalization (El Salvador) Quentin Boitel Intimate Politics and Language Revitalization in Veneto, Northern Italy Sabina M. Perrino

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Metalinguistic Discourse and “Grenglish” in Narratives of Return Migration Jennifer Sclafani and Alexander Nikolaou

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Language as a Tool Against Erasure Where the Language Appears, We also Appear: Tehuelche Language Reclamation in Patagonia Javier Domingo Utilization of Ethnolinguistic Infusion in the Construction of a Trifurcated Metalinguistic Community: An Example from the Kernewek (Cornish) Language of Britain Jesse Harasta Retaking Hãhãhãe: Revitalization and Reindigenization in a Context of Indigenous Erasure Jessica Fae Nelson

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Language Mediating Relations with the State “I Didn’t Know It Was a Language Back Then”: The Ideological Value of Recognition Among Gallo Advocates in Brittany Sandra Keller Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Spanish Speakers in a California Child Welfare Court Jessica López-Espino The Historical Tie that Binds: Deploying Kurdish to Index Ownership, Authenticity, Collective Memory, and Distinction within Kawaguchi’s Kurdish Metalinguistic Community Anne Ambler Schluter

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Afterword Afterword: Reclamation and Metalinguistic Communities Wesley Y. Leonard

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Netta Avineri Language Teacher Education Associate Professor, Intercultural Competence Committee Chair. Applied linguistic anthropologist who researches heritage language socialization, critical servicelearning, and language/social justice. Author of Research Methods for Language Teaching: Inquiry, Process, and Synthesis, Co-editor of Language and Social Justice in Practice, Series Editor for Critical Approaches in Applied Linguistics. Sarah Bunin Benor Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics. Researches sociolinguistics, language and ethnicity, and Jewish language practices. Her books include Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps. She directs the HUC Jewish Language Project. Quentin Boitel a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociolinguistics, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork on Náhuat language revitalization in El Salvador. His research interests include semiotics, discourses on “endangered languages,” subjectivity and subjectivation, and language policies.

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Javier Domingo a Ph.D. Candidate in anthropology with a comparative project on “last speakers” of indigenous languages. He has conducted fieldwork and linguistic documentation in Mexico and South America. His research interests include non-referential uses of language, linguistic documentation, collaboration issues, linguistic ideologies, representation, and discourses on “endangered languages.” Nicki Greninger Director of Lifelong Learning. A rabbi, Jewish Educator, and Leader in making change in synagogue-based education. Her article “Believing, Behaving, Belonging: Tefillah Education in the 21st Century” is widely taught in Jewish education classes. Recipient of the Covenant Foundation’s Pomegranate Prize, Wexner Field Fellow, and co-founder of #OnwardHebrew. Jesse Harasta Associate Professor of Social Science and International Studies at Cazenovia College. Researches the politics of European language revival, especially Kernewek in Cornwall, and studies the use of text and signage to convey ideology. He also researches the factors contributing to disparities in childhood lead poisoning in Syracuse, NY. Sandra Keller Instructional Assistant Professor of French at Illinois State University. A sociolinguist interested in language ideologies, discourse analysis, and verbal art, she studies the practices of advocates, artists, teachers, and learners of the Gallo language in Brittany, France. Her article on the semiotics of Gallo dictionaries appeared in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology in 2019. Wesley Y. Leonard Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside and citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. Supported by his training in linguistics and experience in community-based language work, his research interests include decolonizing linguistic science and the sociopolitical factors that underlie Native American language shift and reclamation.

Notes on Contributors

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Jessica López-Espino Completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology in May 2021 at New York University. Her research interests include the racialization of Latinx communities in the United States, issues in language interpreting, the role of legal institutions legitimizing personhood. In July 2021 she began a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the UC Irvine. Jessica Fae Nelson Assistant Professor of Native American & Indigenous Studies and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. A linguistic anthropologist by training, her research focuses on collaborative language reclamation work as well as race, racism, and Indigeneity in both Brazil and the United States. Alexander Nikolaou Adjunct Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Athens campus of Hellenic American University, Nashua, NH. His research interests include L2 motivation, linguistic landscapes, the discursive construction of identity focusing on narratives of return migration and corpus-based discourse analysis. Sabina M. Perrino Associate Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics. Fieldsites: Senegal, Northern Italy, United States. Research interests include: racialized language; offline/online narratives; intimacy in interaction; migration; language revitalization; transnationalism; ethnomedical encounters; political discourse; research methods in linguistic anthropology. Author of Narrating Migration: Intimacies of Exclusion in Northern Italy and of numerous journal publications. Anne Ambler Schluter Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication. Her research examines intersections between society, ethnicity, multilingualism, semiotics, and mobility, especially with respect to Kurdish populations in Istanbul and near Tokyo. Together with Nathan Albury, she recently co-edited a special issue of Lingua titled Language and the Diaspora. Jennifer Sclafani is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches and conducts research on the intersections of language, identity, migration, education, and politics. She is Author of Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity (Routledge, 2017).

List of Figures

Contested Hebrew: Metalinguistic Communities and Ethnolinguistic Infusion in U.S. Jewish Complementary Schools Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Students mentioned learning Hebrew as one of several reasons they are proud to be Jewish Posters displaying Hebrew letters and blessings over foods at a Reform school in New York Light switch label in Hebrew, transliterated Hebrew, and English Bookshelf with large labels in Hebrew, transliterated Hebrew, and English and small topic labels only in English

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Intimate Politics and Language Revitalization in Veneto, Northern Italy Fig. 1

Three-sided poster at the station of Padova (Padua), Veneto (photograph taken by Sabina M. Perrino in August 2012 [see also Perrino, 2013, 2020])

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Fig. 2

List of Figures

Three-sided poster at the station of Padova (Padua), Veneto (photograph taken by Sabina M. Perrino in August 2012 [see also Perrino, 2013, 2020])

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Where the Language Appears, We also Appear: Tehuelche Language Reclamation in Patagonia Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Tehuelche “linguistic souvenir” with Dora Manchado’s picture and the script “I am not ashamed to speak in Tehuelche” (kkamshkn [kkomshkn] e wine awkkoi ‘a’ien) The exhibition of Tehuelche linguistic objects, Mashen (traditional Tehuelche celebration), Río Gallegos, 20 November 2017) Susana Hidalgo, Adela Brunel, Claudia Flores and Lucía Hidalgo wearing T-shirts with Tehuelche scripts and signes, behind the exhibition of linguistic objects at a fair in Río Gallegos, Argentina, December 2017 A “homemade” (thus, blurred) welcome sign: Paulo Hidalgo, Adela Brunel, Susana Hidalgo, Emilce Coñuécar, August 2019, El Calafate, Argentina

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Utilization of Ethnolinguistic Infusion in the Construction of a Trifurcated Metalinguistic Community: An Example from the Kernewek (Cornish) Language of Britain Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5

House name signs in Kernewek Business names in Kernewek Stock holiday greetings in Kernewek First Kernewek-English Bilingual Road sign Ethnolinguistic infusion and varying populations

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List of Figures

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Retaking Hãhãhãe: Revitalization and Reindigenization in a Context of Indigenous Erasure Fig. 1

Fig. 2

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A grass skirt hangs to the right of a list of greetings in Brazilian Portuguese and Patxohã on a wall of the main classroom of the reservation school at Bahetá Village. To the left is a state-sponsored poster promoting habits related to health and nutrition; in the upper right is a poster describing social values and featuring various signs of indigeneity including geometric designs, a man in a feathered headdress, and Bahetá herself. Photo by author 2015 Bow, arrow, carved portrait and Kayapó style headdress decorate the interior of a home on Caramuru-Paraguaçu. Photo by author 2015 A young girl’s doll has been indigenized by her older cousins using ball point pen to represent the face painting commonly done in semi-permanent jenipapo fruit juice. Western style eyeliner seems to be another feature. Photo by author 2015 A popular Pataxó Hãhãhãe Toré song composed by teacher, activist, and poet Bawaí Pataxó Hãhãhãe (Kariri-Xocó et al., 2013, p. 35). Words in BP are in bold

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“I Didn’t Know It Was a Language Back Then”: The Ideological Value of Recognition Among Gallo Advocates in Brittany Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Promotional texts asking “What is Gallo?” (my translations) The cover of Le galo: Qhi q’c’ét don ?, with my translation A scene from Pouchée de Beluettes: “Qu’est-ce que c’est ?” A scene from Pouchée de Beluettes: “I caozent come mai”

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The Historical Tie that Binds: Deploying Kurdish to Index Ownership, Authenticity, Collective Memory, and Distinction within Kawaguchi’s Kurdish Metalinguistic Community Fig. 1

The Kurdish Flag

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Introduction: Exploring Agency, Ideology, and Semiotics of Language Across Communities Netta Avineri and Jesse Harasta

On the side of Route 81 in Central New York, when driving south of the city of Syracuse, one passes a sign that reads: “Onondaga Nation: Onoñda’gegá’ Ganakdagweniyo’khe’”. The Onondaga language text translates as “Onondaga the Capital”, referring to the fact that the territory one is entering at high speed (and about to leave a few minutes later) is the seat of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the league of indigenous nations whose territory includes all of Upstate New York.1This sign, erected in 2015 is one of many erected in recent years not only by the Onondaga, but by hundreds 1

https://www.onondaganation.org/blog/2015/new-sign/.

N. Avineri (B) Middlebury Institute of International Studies At Monterey, Monterey, CA, USA J. Harasta Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_1

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of indigenous, ethnic and regional authorities around the world to promote minoritized languages that have few, if any, fluent speakers. These signs are but the tip of the iceberg of a wide universe of phrases, decorative objects, business logos, flags, and other icons that proudly employ languages for a range of individual and communal reasons. This edited volume explores how and why members of these communities display and deploy languages that carry deep symbolic meanings in the past, the present, and for the future.

Language, Semiotics, and Community How and why do individuals and communities use languages in symbolic ways? Through in-depth ethnographic engagement that includes participant-observation, interviews, content and discourse analysis, and ongoing relationship-building, this volume explores diverse conceptualizations of agency (see Ahearn, 2001; Duranti, 2004), ideology, semiotics, and community in metalinguistic communities. The authors present a range of case studies that explore the multitude of relationships among individuals, communities, and languages within heritage, minoritized, lesser-used, local, and endangered language contexts. The chapters allow the reader to consider how discourses, interactions, ideologies, and practices connect with the symbolic roles of minoritized languages in diverse communities and contexts. In addition to exploring the particular dynamics of these metalinguistic communities, these case studies provide us with unique insights into semiotics and language that are applicable beyond these specific communities. At the heart of this work is the observation that language is often used for purposes other than the communication of meaning through the content of utterances. We highlight that in language contexts of preservation, revival, and reclamation these other uses have particular significance and relevance for individuals, organizations, and communities. Our focus is on metalinguistic communities, “positioned social actors shaped by practices that view language as an object” (Avineri, 2012). This approach is in contrast to traditional sociolinguistics conceptualizations of speech communities that are bound together by shared communication and norms.

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Hence, this work foregrounds the role of language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2004) in both discursive and practical consciousness (Giddens, 1984) rather than a primary focus on formal features of language without ethnographic nuance. In these contexts, the fact that an utterance within a particular language is made at all is often more important than the content of the utterance or even the ability of either speaker or listener to understand it (see Shandler, 2005). What holds these communities together is that language use is symbolic and points towards broader communities of belonging and it is these symbolic uses that serve as a guiding light for both users and scholars in terms of contemplation and contestation. The chapters emphasize how the choice to use the language is itself a political act. In this way, language deployment carries messages about ethnicity, belonging, class, authenticity, identity, religious affiliation, or fidelity to particular language ideologies. Language therefore becomes words and names, promotional materials, plays, and songs but also affect, nostalgia socialization, intergenerational connection and relationships to the past, and ritual. These papers highlight how “heritage narratives” (Avineri, 2019) (meaning-making devices that connect one’s life story to a heritage language) allow individuals to make sense of language in relation to phenomenological experience at individual and interpersonal levels. We recognize in many cases that the linguistic situation—the dynamics of power and use—that we see ethnographically are the direct products of colonization, oppression, marginalization, ethnocide, linguicide and, at times, genocide. Language ideologies that decenter use and instead prioritize metalinguistic communities are tools that are both products of, and weapons against, the politics of oblivion. In parallel, language ideologies that insist upon unattainable standards for fluency can, intentionally or unintentionally, serve as handmaids of annihilation. Each chapter presents in-depth ethnographic context (see Shulist & Rice, 2019), key examples, connections to other chapters in the volume, and broader theoretical questions for consideration—examining the relationships among the micro, meso, and macro levels (e.g., public, private, institutions, structures) as they relate to agency, ideology, and symbolic uses of language. Collectively, they provide rich perspectives on lived experiences to explore how participants in diverse linguistic contexts are

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agents in building meaningful communicative repertoires. We envision that the individual chapters and the volume as a whole push the fields of applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology to consider how conceptualizations of language and community are constantly negotiated and remade by diverse individuals and groups. By foregrounding the range of language practices and ideologies that are present within diverse contexts and communities, this volume can move us to build a more robust vision of the “linguistic” in applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology.

Creation of the Volume The genesis of this volume was at a panel discussion for the 2018 American Anthropological Association conference in San Jose, California entitled “Language Use without Proficiency: Language Ideology, Metalinguistic Community and Ethnolinguistic Infusion”. Jesse was the panel organizer and Netta served as the discussant. In the participants’ brunch afterwards, the possibility of an edited volume was raised and enthusiastically supported by the panelists—those papers are the germ of this project. To expand further, we then sent out an open call to Linguistic Anthropology listservs and added a number of other chapters to the collective volume. We were pleased by the response and the enthusiasm for this democratic technique for recruiting participants. While the spark of this particular project may be that 2018 Panel, its roots run deeper and are also worth noting. Netta and Jesse first connected around these topics after Jesse attended a panel that Netta co-organized with Sarah Bunin Benor at the 2018 Third International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages at UCLA. The panel focused on semiotic uses of language across contexts, with participants including Wesley Leonard and Jocelyn Ahlers discussing in-depth case studies foregrounding these themes. The National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA provided a forum for these fruitful discussions, and has served as a catalyst for this (and many other) important dialogues—and for that we are grateful.

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Ethos of the Volume Throughout the process of conceptualizing the volume, soliciting contributions, and working with authors through the editorial process, we have prioritized particular guiding principles. These include the recognition of positionalities, collaboration, and ongoing dialogue in the pursuit of deep learning about cases and contexts. With the volume’s focus on the role of interactions and relationships, we felt it was important for each author to recognize their own positionalities in relation to their research contexts. This foregrounding of subjectivity in qualitative inquiry is central to an understanding of minoritized language contexts, based on ethnographic engagement and long-term, ongoing relationship-building. It is essential to recognize the role of the researcher(s) in shaping our findings. The field of anthropology has long been focused on the impacts of the anthropologists’ positionality upon the outcomes of their work. This basic lesson has an additional layer of complexity when engaging with lesser-used, sleeping (Leonard, 2008), or heritage languages, because the very use of these languages is often tied to identity, belonging, and authenticity (as the volume will explore). Anthropologists can, at times, find themselves as bearers of particular forms of authenticity through their linguistic achievements that are typically available only to community members; these complex relationships are best aired and discussed, rather than avoided. We therefore asked each of the authors to create a positionality statement, to provide readers with an understanding of the authors’ identities in relation to the communities with whom they worked. The process of writing the positionality statements also allowed the authors to reflect upon their roles and relationships (see Avineri, 2017) with their communities of inquiry. The goal of these statements, which are idiosyncratic in style, is to allow authors to reveal their own affective relationships to both the languages they write about and the communities with whom they work. Our hope is not only to provide transparency and accountability for authors, but also to “pull back the curtain”, so to speak, to demystify ethnography and make it more legible to students and non-scholars in the process.

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An additional set of goals for this project has been to provide a platform for emerging scholars in our field, in the process aiming to democratize knowledge. By posting open calls for participants for both the original panel and the edited volume, we have attracted a diverse group of authors with a range of novel perspectives. Our peer review process also involved each chapter author providing comments to another chapter author, providing opportunities for ongoing, generous, and honest dialogue as well as coherence in the volume as a whole. This iterative, mutually constructive approach was both fruitful and enriching. Our focus on respecting the particular perspectives of each author and the communities with whom they work is also reflected in the terminological choices the reader will see throughout the volume. The discourses we use to discuss these languages and communities are integral to how we perceive them (see Leonard’s afterword in this volume, Duchene & Heller, 2008). Depending on the case/context, the reader will encounter terms including minoritized, heritage, endangered, indigenous, immigrant, ancestral, and sacred to refer to languages and communities. We have been intentional in respecting each author’s choices with regards to the terminology they use to describe the language/community with whom they work, as the particulars of these conceptualizations are specific to each context.

Reconceptualizing Language and Use Linguistic anthropologists and applied linguists have long been interested in the complex relationships among language uses/practices, beliefs/ideologies, and communities/cultures (cf. Bloomfield, 1933; Del Valle, 2008; Duranti, 1997; Friedman, 2009; Grenoble & Whaley, 2006; Gumperz, 1968; Jaffe, 2007; Labov, 1972; Morgan, 2004, 2014; Silverstein, 1998; Watts, 1999). In endangered, heritage, lesser-used, local, and minority language contexts, there can be a range of approaches to language practices and ideologies that do not necessarily involve proficient use of the language (cf. Jaffe, 2007; Kroskrity, 2009; KushnerBishop, 2004; Leonard, 2008; McEwans-Fujita, 2010; Nevins, 2004).

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Instead, language may be used primarily as a symbol or emblem (cf. Ahlers, 2006, 2017; Bunin Benor, 2018; Canagarajah, 2013; Leonard, 2011; Makihara, 2005), to build community (cf. Avineri, 2019), to forge ethnic or religious identities, and/or to achieve political and social recognition. Linguistic anthropology has a long history of considering concepts of language & community, including speech community (Bloomfield, 1933; Gumperz, 1968; Labov, 1972; Duranti, 1997; Morgan, 2006, 2014), linguistic community (Friedman, 2009; Silverstein, 1998), discourse community (Del Valle, 2008; Watts, 1999), local community (Grenoble & Whaley, 2006), and endangered speech communities (Jaffe, 2007). In a 2014 special issue co-edited by Netta Avineri and Paul Kroskrity, authors Jocelyn Ahlers, Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, Barbra Meek, and Angela Nonaka explored the roles of social boundaries and temporal borders within endangered speech communities. Over time, conceptualizations of community in linguistic anthropology have highlighted the variable nature and complexity of communities (cf. Dorian, 1982), as well as the “semiotic processes, linguistic phenomena, and discursive practices” (Irvine, 1996, p. 124) that are central to notions of community. Rampton (2009) highlights the fact that late modernist and post-modernist forces have reshaped notions of speech community into the late 20th and early twenty-first centuries. As Avineri and Kroskrity (2014) note in relation to “community of practice” (Bucholtz et al., 1992; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and language ideological approaches as they relate to conceptualizations of community: “From ‘community of practice’ approaches come an ability to better deploy analytic devices emphasizing complementary interactional practices, the social distribution of knowledge, the creation of group identities through activities, and an interest in evolving cultural reproduction. From language ideological approaches springs the opening of such considerations as the role of a local metasemiotics and other language beliefs and feelings that underlay the very construction of community and one’s place in it” (2014, p. 2).

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Metalinguistic Community This volume focuses on global case studies of metalinguistic communities, “positioned social actors shaped by practices that view language as an object” (Avineri, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2017, 2018, 2019). Within these contexts, language is frequently mobilized as a symbol of identity, history, and ideology—when used or even when talked about in another (usually dominant) language. Metalinguistic communities are imagined communities (Anderson, 2006) cultivated by individuals and groups who experience a connection to a language, whether or not they have proficiency in it. The model of metalinguistic community provides a meaningful framework for “diverse participants who experience both distance from and closeness to a heritage language and its user due to historical, personal, and/or communal circumstances”. Avineri (2012) conceptualized the model based on a three-year ethnographic study of heritage language socialization in secular Yiddish educational contexts. In secular Yiddish metalinguistic communities, one might see or wear a Yiddish T-shirt that states “I Love Yiddish”, demonstrating an affective relationship to the language whether or not one can use the language itself. Nostalgia socialization, “a public attention to and affective appreciation of the past to understand one’s place in the present” (Avineri, 2018), is a central component of metalinguistic communities as well. As Avineri (2012) notes, “At the forefront of these efforts is building the identities of its members as those who publicly honor the language, even if they do not necessarily have full competence in it. Through its incorporation of numerous means of participating in the language, a metalinguistic community is highly inclusive. By expanding the notion of what ties language with community, the metalinguistic community model represents the genuine and diverse uses to which a language can be put as social groups are transformed over time” (p. 236). The five features of metalinguistic community are (1) Socialization into language ideologies over language competence and use, (2) Conflation of language and culture, (3) Age and corresponding knowledge as salient features, (4) Use of code in pedagogical ways, and (5) Use of code in specific interactional contexts. Throughout the volume, authors describe

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contexts that include metalinguistic community features, analyzing the symbolic and affective roles the language plays in their individual and collective lives. In addition, some chapter authors highlight novel variations of the metalinguistic community model that add new layers to it. For example, Harasta describes a “trifurcated metalinguistic community” that foregrounds the role of audience in ethnolinguistic infusion. Domingo analyzes a “fragile metalinguistic community”, emphasizing the delicate nature of interactions among those interested in the language. And López-Espino describes a professional metalinguistic community made up of lawyers that share language ideologies about Spanish speakers. We hope that these examples at the edges of Avineri’s original definition help to spark further discussion about the symbolic use of language in everyday life rather than debates about the definition of the concept disconnected from the ethnographic context.

Chapter Themes Our work comes from many backgrounds: indigenous languages from across the Americas, lesser used/regional languages from the Herderian nation-states of Europe and southwest Asia, and the global Jewish community. While some have small communities of support, tied to tightly knit ethnic communities and at times vanishingly small numbers of speakers, others count millions of monolinguals. The 10 chapters have been organized around three cross-cutting themes: Language Defining Belonging; Language Combating Erasure; and Language Negotiating Hegemony. Theme 1: Language Defining Belonging The idea that the use of a lesser used language defines authentic belonging has been widely studied (see Jaffe, 1999) and these chapters build upon that tradition. Where these works distinguish themselves is by demonstrating how this sense of belonging can exist without proficient language use, the Jaffean tradition instead emphasizing the ways that activists bolster claims to authenticity via proficient use and the ability to deploy prestige variants like standardized forms. Instead, we see in Avineri, Bunin

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Benor, and Greninger’s chapter, how the ethnolinguistic infusion of Hebrew in Jewish complementary schools aims to build belonging in a Diasporic Jewish metalinguistic community through the insertion of individual words, largely outside of grammatical structures. Reversing the Diasporic dynamic, Sclafani and Nikolaou’s chapter explores the ways that ethnic Greek “returnees” to Greece use the language to navigate and mediate their belonging to a Greek nation-state. Boitel and Perrino’s contributions explore languages in active revival and the ways that in these cases proficiency is not always necessary for authenticity through language. Theme 2: Language Combating Erasure Whether evident or not in the chapters themselves, ethnocide, linguicide and genocide haunt many of the metalinguistic communities appearing in them, from the continuing echoes of the Holocaust upon Yiddish, to the ongoing violence against Kurdish communities by the Turkish state to the continental campaigns against the Indigenous peoples and languages of the Americas. In these contexts, language revival and preservation is both a conscious and unconscious tool to fight these erasures. Within the chapters included in this section of the text, this crosscutting theme comes to the fore as a prominent use of the language. In Domingo’s chapter, the Tehuelche people of Patagonia chose to revive their language as part of a broader strategy of reclaiming their public identity. This is echoed in Nelson’s chapter on Pataxo Hãhãhãe in northern Brazil, where the language is clearly part of a broader symbolic repertoire deployed to assert indigenousness against centuries of erasure. Finally, Harasta describes a European context of the Kernewek language, where the language is deployed towards varying audiences, but in each case, the goal is to use it to promote public recognition of ethnic, cultural, and social autonomy. Theme 3: Language Negotiating Hegemony Modernity has seen the State taking an unprecedented role in regulating and shaping language use for the creation of hegemonic systems of dominance. Within these contexts, the users of minoritized languages often employ their tongues as tools for negotiating new positions within that hegemonic order. Keller notes how Gallo users have negotiated the dominant French ideologies of language and patois, as well as the successes of the

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nearby Breton language community, to assert a new position for themselves and their language on the national stage through the demand for its recognition as a language. Through examining the communities of language use created among legal professionals in California family courts, López-Espino demonstrates the complexities that hegemonic ethno-racial hierarchies are reinforced and created through the creation of the category “Spanish speaker”. Finally, Schluter examines how the novel context of Tokyo has allowed Kurdish speakers to assert new relationships between their language and its imagined homelands, as well as to the hegemonic Turkish state.

Overarching Themes In the fields of linguistic anthropology, education, and applied linguistics, there has been a recent push to counteract deficit perspectives of minority languages and languages of minorities through foci including building on strengths, funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2006), word wealth (vs. word gap) (Orellana, 2016, Avineri et al., 2016), and broad vs. narrow definitions of “heritage” (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007). These challenges to dominant language ideologies about proficiency, codes, and instrumentalities are a means towards centering the experiences and perspectives of marginalized populations. In the same vein, all of the chapters in this volume have focused on the various forms of agency that individuals and community members exhibit through their symbolic use and acknowledgement of a language, its users, and its histories. Agency within the realm of linguistic anthropology has been defined as “the capacity for meaningful social action…an indexical process whereby people recognize actors and their identities through the interpretation of locally salient actions” (Parish & Hall, 2020). This also involves a reconceptualization of key terms associated with language acquisition and socialization, including proficiency, speaker, community, language, and even knowing. For example, Nelson’s paper highlights the ways that language reclamation at the micro level can help to counteract macro-level histories of colonization and oppression. Avineri, Bunin Benor, and Greninger demonstrate the range of ways that the Hebrew

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language is used as a symbol and community builder within Jewish educational settings. These examples can move us from deficit perspectives to “linguistic abundance”, in which minority language practices and ideologies are acknowledged, valued, and legitimated by community members themselves. As Leonard’s afterword highlights, the identification of terms including sleeping languages, language reclamation, and futurities emphasize the agentive roles of individuals and groups across these contexts. Many of these papers also highlight the role of diverse positionalities within these communities, in many cases foregrounding their inherent internal and external contrasts. They push us to reconceptualize what is center and what is periphery. For example, Sandra Keller demonstrates how the roles of Gallo recognizer and Gallo non-recognizer are negotiated and can allow for affective relationships to be built across generations. Here she highlights how discursive consciousness (vs. practical consciousness) is central to the construction of the Gallo metalinguistic community. These positionalities are associated with multiple language ideologies, as is the case as well for the Kernewek (Cornish) language revival movement and the Náhuat language revitalization movement. Moving away from goals and success being measured through objective (etic) metrics, these papers foreground (emic) lived experiences of community members themselves. This juxtaposition also highlights practices of linguistic abundance. As noted above, we chose to have each author decide how they prefer to refer to the communities and languages they work with. From an ideological perspective, whether the language users view themselves as being in the place/on the territory where the language “belongs” impacts their own sense of belonging and authenticity. Some community members engage with languages that are perceived as Diasporic while others may see the languages (or themselves) as Indigenous. We use these terms here not as external categories of analysis but instead as ideological positions that users themselves may take towards their languages. These positions are always contextual to the speakers themselves. For example, Hebrew use in American Jewish complementary schools (Avineri, Bunin Benor, and Greninger’s chapter) may be viewed as diasporic within this ethnographic context of use but may be viewed differently by speakers

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within the borders of Israel. These categories can be complex, as seen in the chapter on “Grenglish” use by Sclafani and Nikolaou, where ethnic Greek returnees to Greece used the language to mediate their own complex relationships between indigeneity and diaspora. Similarly, Schluter’s chapter on Kurdish use in Japan, explores a metalinguistic community that is deeply invested in the concept of indigeneity and the rights that emerge thereof, and examines it in a clearly diasporic Japanese context. Here the language once again mediates belonging and attachment to place (though not to nation-state). There are other contrasts, tensions, and contestations across the volume chapters. As described in Avineri (2018) and Avineri (2019), individuals’ relationships with heritage languages may involve closeness and distance, in which one may experience attachment to a language but also not feel like an “authentic” user of it. There may also be tensions in terms of one’s relationship to the past/history of a language/community (see “nostalgia socialization” described above), its present, and hopes for its future. Some of the chapters also highlight tensions between how an individual views their proficiency/affiliation in a language versus the perceptions of others. Overall, the role of contestation can be seen in a number of cases throughout the volume, in relation to belonging, combating erasure, and negotiating hegemony.

Chapter Descriptions Here we provide short descriptions of the main contributions of each chapter, to provide a collective perspective on the volume’s contributions.

Section 1: Language Defining Belonging Chapter 2: Contested Hebrew: Ethnolinguistic Infusion and Metalinguistic Communities in U.S. Jewish Complementary Schools by Netta Avineri, Sarah Bunin Benor & Nicki Greninger This chapter opens the book with introductions to metalinguistic community and ethnolinguistic infusion, concepts that are central

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to many of the cases in the book. Through multiple methodologies, the authors explore the contestation of ideologies among stakeholders across U.S. Jewish complementary school contexts. By exploring Hebrew signage and insertion of Hebrew terms into English phrases, the schools build affective community, though the authors explore how different stakeholders view this community and the use of Hebrew differently. Chapter 3: “Anyone who speaks just a little bit of Náhuat knows she’s only babbling…”: Metapragmatic discourses on proficiency in the Náhuat language revitalization (El Salvador) by Quentin Boitel Boitel’s chapter focuses on the ideologically constructed term “proficiency” within the Náhuat language revitalization movement, foregrounding the role of “metapragmatic discourse” in creating these conceptualizations of language ability. Through in-depth analysis of statements in relation to historical, micro, meso, and macro-level perspectives, Boitel demonstrates the role of colonialism and indigeneity in present-day language community dynamics. Chapter 4: Intimate Politics and Language Revitalization in Veneto, Northern Italy by Sabina Perrino In this chapter, Perrino highlights how intimacy is connected with language revitalization and building of collective identities. In particular, she discusses the tensions between anti-immigrant stances alongside intimacy in Veneto communities. The chapter analyzes a range of data including public signs, individual narratives, and texts, she demonstrates how histories, politics, and ideologies coalesce to build a Venetan metalinguistic community. Chapter 5: Metalinguistic discourse and “Grenglish” in narratives of return migration by Jennifer Sclafani and Alexander Nikolaou Sclafani and Nikolaou’s chapter examines the impact of transmigration on language ideology and metalinguistic community through the examination of the use of Greek by ethnic Greek “returnees” and contrasting them to other immigrants to Greece. The chapter ties together a number of key ideas, including the importance that class plays in addition to ethnicity and place of origin. These authors demonstrate the complex language fluctuations that occur with power and the creation of novel hierarchies within the context of global

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markets. By contrasting their own backgrounds and comparing their own conversations, the authors also demonstrate the key role of researchers’ polycentric positionalities.

Section 2: Language as a Tool Against Erasure Chapter 6: Where the Language Appears, We Also Appear: Tehuelche Language Reclamation in Patagonia by Javier Domingo In his chapter, Domingo describes the ongoing negotiation involved among individuals and communities in relation to Tehuelche language reclamation efforts. His focus is on the iconization of “last speaker” of the language and how this relates to language activist efforts. Through an analysis of linguistic objects and other linguistic tokens, he demonstrates processes of “coming out” in relation to the metalinguistic community. He therefore analyzes the roles of ideologies and histories in shaping present-day language reclamation interactions. Chapter 7: Utilization of Ethnolinguistic Infusion in the Construction of a Trifurcated Metalinguistic Community: An Example from the Kernewek (Cornish) language of Britain by Jesse Harasta Harasta’s paper focuses on the symbolic use of Kernewek (e.g., in radio, linguistic landscapes) as an embodiment of widespread language ideologies in a language revival movement. Kernewek presents a paradox in language revitalization (“potentially tremendous successes in building the infrastructure of a standardized language and maintaining a movement across decades yet disappointing in the stated primary goal of viable speech communities”) Unspoken goals of Kernewek revitalization are the promotion of Cornish distinctiveness and political, cultural, and economic autonomy (not language shift). He describes a “trifurcated metalinguistic community”, in which the targeted audiences of Kernewek revitalization are language enthusiasts, ethnic Cornish individuals, and non-Cornish (English) individuals who are perceived as having political/economic power over Cornwall. Chapter 8: Retaking Hãhãhãe: Revitalization and Reindigenization in a Context of Indigenous Erasure by Jessica Fae Nelson

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In this chapter, Nelson explores the reemergence of Hãhãhãe, an indigenous language of northern Brazil. Jessica Fae Nelson discusses the semiotic use and ideologies of authenticity of Hãhãhãe in Brazil, highlighting the retaking/revitalizing/reclamation of the indigenous language across contexts. She demonstrates how this metalinguistic community is tied in complex ways to visual symbols such as home decor, clothing and adornment and children’s toys, showing the creativity of these communities and how they are willing to blend into their displays of identity objects that would not be considered part of their cultural tradition from a purist perspective. The use of Hãhãhãe names and words are therefore used to both mark indigeneity and affirm ethnic identity/authenticity.

Section 3: Language Mediating Relations with the State Chapter 9: “I didn’t know it was a language back then”: The ideological value of recognition among Gallo advocates in Brittany by Sandra Keller Drawing on nostalgia socialization, metalinguistic community, and stance theory, Keller notes how community members negotiate what defines a language through interaction, promotional materials, and plays, moving beyond the linguistic features of morphology, phonology, and syntax to affect and epistemology as a means towards language recognition & legitimation in advocacy. Gallo activism has the goals of defining Gallo as a language and “imbuing it with positive effect” (not as “deformed French”). She notes that recognizing a language is at least as important to advocacy as knowing how to use it. Imbuing a positive affect to Gallo (especially in younger generations) and metalinguistic confidence are more important than linguistic confidence and proficiency; it is more relevant in this case to create a community and connection to a local/familial past. Chapter 10: Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Spanish Speakers in a California Child Welfare Court by Jessica López-Espino.

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López-Espino approaches the question of relationship between language ideology and the state from a different direction in this chapter by exploring the ideologies of California welfare court officials and legal professionals towards “Spanish Speakers”. Here the metalinguistic community is a professional community, but the language ideology is thoroughly, but subtly, racialized. The author studies the importance of the role of the body—through Rhematization: “a social and semiotic process by which a sign, such as language or phenotypic features, can become naturalized as iconic of social type”. In the process, legal professionals come to project onto Spanish Speakers concepts such as “sophistication”, “vulnerability”, “passivity”, and “deficiency”. In the process, the continued domination of English and English-speakers in the legal system is reified and naturalized. Chapter 11: The historical tie that binds: Deploying Kurdish to index ownership, authenticity, collective memory, and distinction within Kawaguchi’s Kurdish metalinguistic community by Anne Schluter. Schluter’s chapter complicates the dichotomy of indigenous versus diasporic language by examining the construction of metalinguistic community by Kurdish speakers in diaspora in Japan. These Kurdish speakers construct a complex set of symbols for both in-group and out-group consumption, one which is fundamentally connected to oppression by the now-distant Turkish state.

Section 4: Afterword Chapter 12: Afterword: Reclamation and Metalinguistic Communities by Wesley Y. Leonard. Written by myaamia linguist Wesley Leonard, the afterword connects language reclamation with metalinguistic communities. Beginning with a reflection on the importance of positionality—including his own—Leonard explores the ways that these chapters conceptualize “success” in reclamation contexts that focus on language ideologies apart from fluency and proficiency. He identifies three recurring themes across the book: the ways that the chapters expand upon the concept of language reclamation (Leonard, 2012), their implicit

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and explicit critiques of widespread assumptions within the literature on language revival and their emphasis on futurities—the forwardlooking imagining present in many of the ethnographic contexts.

Concluding Remarks Our hope is that bringing together these diverse stories and experiences sheds light on the role of language to counteract legacies of erasure, oppression, colonization, and hegemony. Ethnographers have shared these narratives (see Goodwin, 2015), emerging from their time alongside these communities (Bucholtz et al., 2016). More than simply an exercise in storytelling, this approach has the potential for wider relevance and power (see Avineri et al., 2019). The ten case studies demonstrate the range of forms of agency available to raise awareness and bring about change within metalinguistic communities. These communities, the researchers, and the readers of this volume (Avineri & Perley, 2019) can therefore help us move collectively towards a more just world.

Reflection Questions for the Volume 1. What are the range of ways that language is mobilized as an object in particular contexts? 2. What is the relationship between the individual & the community in metalinguistic communities? How are distancing and closeness to a language constructed? 3. How do we acknowledge diversity and complexity within these communities? 4. How can macro-, meso-, and micro-level processes be acknowledged in our considerations of what is a metalinguistic community? 5. How do metalinguistic community members themselves conceptualize their relationships to the language?

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6. Is “metalinguistic community” a descriptive model and/or could it be considered as a set of recommended practices? 7. How can a focus on metalinguistic communities contribute to social justice?

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Kushner Bishop, J. (2004). From shame to nostalgia: Shifting language ideologies in the Judeo-Spanish maintenance movement. In H. Pomeroy & M. Alpert (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth british conference on JudeoSpanish Studies, 24–26 June, 2001: Sephardic language, literature, and history (pp. 23–32). Brill. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. University of Pennsylvania Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Leonard, W. Y. (2008). When is an “extinct language” not extinct. In K. A. King, N. Schilling-Estes, J. J. Lou, L. Fogle, & B. Soukup (Eds.), Sustaining linguistic diversity: Endangered and minority languages and language varieties (pp. 23–33). Georgetown University Press. Leonard, W. Y. (2011). Challenging “extinction” through modern Miami language practices. American Indian Culture and Research Journal , 35 (2), 135–160. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.2.f3r173r46m261844. Leonard, W. Y. (2012). Framing language reclamation programmes for everybody’s empowerment. Gender & Language, 6 (2), 339–367. Makihara, M. (2005). Rapa Nui ways of speaking Spanish: Language shift and socialization on Easter Island. Language in Society, 34 (5), 727–762. McEwan-Fujita, E. (2010). Ideology, affect, and socialization in language shift and revitalization: The experiences of adults learning Gaelic in the Western Isles of Scotland. Language in Society 39 (1), 27–64. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/20622703. Morgan, M. (2004). Speech community. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 3–22). Blackwell Publishing. Morgan, M. H. (2014). Speech communities. Cambridge University Press. Nevins, M. E. (2004). Learning to listen: Confronting two meanings of language loss in the contemporary white mountain Apache speech community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14 (2), 269–288. Orellana, M. F. (2016, May 19). A different kind of word gap. Huffpost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-different-kind-of-word_b_10030876. Parish, A., & Hall, K. (2020). Agency. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 1–9. Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368–395. Rampton, B. (2009). Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization. Language in Society, 38, 149–176.

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Shandler, J. (2005). Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular language and culture. University of California Press. Shulist, S., & Rice, F. (2019). Towards an interdisciplinary bridge between documentation and revitalization: Bringing ethnographic methods into endangered-language projects and programming. Silverstein, M. (1998). Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 27 (1), 401–426. Watts, R. J. (1999). The ideology of dialect in Switzerland. In J. Blommaert (Ed.), Language ideological debates (pp. 67–103). Mouton de Gruyter.

Language Defining Belonging

Contested Hebrew: Metalinguistic Communities and Ethnolinguistic Infusion in U.S. Jewish Complementary Schools Netta Avineri, Sarah Bunin Benor, and Nicki Greninger

Positionality Statement: Netta Avineri I was born in Beer Sheva, Israel. My parents, siblings, and I moved to the United States when I was two years old, and I have not been back to Israel since. My parents spoke Hebrew with one another in the home, and English was the language of our family/household. I therefore grew up with receptive knowledge of Hebrew and a simultaneous feeling of distance from both Israel and Hebrew. Growing up, N. Avineri (B) Middlebury Institute of International Studies At Monterey, Monterey, CA, USA S. B. Benor Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles, CA, USA N. Greninger Temple Isaiah, Lafayette, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_2

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my siblings and I attended the local synagogue (where my stepfather was the rabbi) on high holidays and a few other times each year, and we celebrated Jewish holidays throughout the year—especially Pesach [Passover] and Hanukkah. We did not attend Hebrew school. We grew up eating Middle Eastern/Israeli food including tahini, hummus, grilled eggplant, falafel, and shawarma. In college—UCLA—I studied Hebrew formally. I feel relatively comfortable understanding Hebrew (especially when listening to family members), but it is difficult for me to speak (especially with non-family members). After my undergraduate studies, I taught for a year at a local “Torah school.” I enjoyed working with the children and being in a Jewish educational environment. However, there were constraints to what I could teach comfortably. For example, I remember either writing letters/words in cursive on the board or depending on the cardboard letters, as I don’t feel comfortable writing in block Hebrew letters. Shortly thereafter, I went to UCLA for my MA in Applied Linguistics. For my thesis I returned to that Torah school and collected data with the students I had taught the year before. I enjoyed returning to that environment in a researcher/ethnographer role. For my PhD I focused on Yiddish language socialization (and developed the “metalinguistic community” model) and continued exploring my interests in minority/heritage language socialization (including Hebrew). I continue to be fascinated by Jewish educational contexts as examples of both broad and narrow definitions of heritage language learning. In 2017, I wrote a book about research methods for language practitioners. This research collaboration has therefore merged my personal and professional interests in meaningful ways. Positionality Statement: Sarah Bunin Benor Hebrew has always been important to me, but mostly not as a language of communication. As a child, I recited Hebrew blessings every Friday night and on Pesach and Chanukah. I hunted for chametz [leavened foods forbidden on Passover] and made charoset [sweet paste] the night before the Passover seder [ceremony]. At my Jewish Community Center preschool and summer camp, we sang Hebrew songs and used Hebrew names for divisions, like Chaverim [friends] and Atid [future—a computer camp]. At my bat mitzvah I led prayers and chanted Torah—all in Hebrew.

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Although I did gain the skills to communicate in spoken/written Modern Hebrew in my Jewish day school and when I spent a year in Israel, I continue to relate to Hebrew primarily as the special language of the Jewish people that has enriched our spoken languages. My ancestors spoke Yiddish and before that perhaps Judeo-French, Judeo-Greek, and Judeo-Aramaic, but they always used Hebrew for ritual observance and borrowed Hebrew words in their spoken languages. As a speaker of Jewish English, I continue these longstanding traditions. Conducting research on Hebrew use in American Jewish summer camps (Benor et al., 2020b), I heard many Hebrew words: “Chanichim [campers], go to your tzrifim [bunks], get your bigdei yam [swimsuits], and meet at the brecha [pool].” I found this Hebrew infusion delightful, but some Jewish leaders criticized it as “incorrect” or “impure.” They felt campers should be learning full Hebrew sentences, not English peppered with Hebrew nouns. In other Jewish educational settings, I encountered leaders who feel they are failing by not teaching Hebrew communication skills. In an essay (Benor & Avineri, 2019), Netta and I argued that Hebrew proficiency is impossible in just a few hours per week, and leaders should focus on more realistic goals: fostering students’ connection to a Hebrew-oriented metalinguistic community and developing competence in Jewish English. When Nicki invited me to collaborate on this project, I agreed, seeing it as a continuation of a lifelong interest in what I have come to see as Hebrew infusion. Positionality Statement: Nicki Greninger I grew up in Colorado in a Reform Jewish family in which I was exposed to very little Hebrew. My grandparents were all born in the United States, so unlike many Jewish children of my generation, I did not have Yiddishspeaking grandparents, nor do I have any close relatives who are Israeli and/or speak Hebrew. Although I belonged to a synagogue and attended Sunday School, I did not learn much Hebrew in that setting, apart from greetings like Shanah tovah [happy new year] and a handful of Hebrew songs and prayers. In order to become bat mitzvah, I studied with a tutor to learn the Hebrew alphabet, how to decode Hebrew words, and how to chant prayers and Torah. From ages 8–20, I attended Jewish summer camps, where we used Hebrew words in reference to places, times of day,

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activities, and more, although some of the Hebrew words were inaccurate (marp for infirmary, even though the correct Hebrew word is mirpa’ah). In college and rabbinical school (including a year of living in Israel), I took Modern Hebrew classes, in which I grew to love Hebrew and enjoyed the development of conversational skills to add to my knowledge of Hebrew prayers and songs. As Rabbi and Director of Lifelong Learning at Temple Isaiah (a large Reform synagogue in the suburbs of the Bay Area, CA), I have spent over a decade trying to improve the way Hebrew is taught to children. Working with Jewish educators from across the United States, I cofounded #OnwardHebrew—a movement to accelerate change in Hebrew education in complementary schools. Throughout my years in Jewish education, I have been frustrated by the lack of data available to drive decisions, especially regarding Hebrew. Therefore I have engaged in practitioner research in my own congregation and I jumped at the opportunity to work with Netta and Sarah to conduct research on a national scale, focusing on Hebrew education in Jewish complementary schools.

Introduction This chapter discusses an in-depth study of Hebrew language socialization in Jewish complementary schools in the United States, highlighting the diverse ways that educators, clergy, parents, and children orient to Hebrew as a symbol of identity, history, religiosity, and community. This emblematic approach to language can at times be a site of ideological contestation (Avineri, 2017; Benor, 2018), which manifests in different rationales, goals, and practices for Hebrew education. This mixed-methods study (interviews, surveys, and observations) focused on afternoon and weekend sessions of 3–5 hours per week, where students learn about Jewish values, holidays, lifecycle events, biblical texts, prayers, Israel, and what is commonly called “Hebrew.” In many complementary schools (Li, 2006) in other groups, one of the goals is language proficiency (along with ideological and affective socialization). In Jewish complementary schools, Hebrew proficiency is rarely a goal. Instead, we found that Hebrew is seen as a means for Jews to participate in

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religious and communal life. School directors’ Hebrew-related goals include decoding (sounding out Hebrew letters to form words), chanting Hebrew with minimal comprehension, and strengthening ideological affiliation with a worldwide metalinguistic community (Avineri, 2012, 2019) that values Hebrew as a sacred diasporic language. These goals are accomplished through a constellation of practices known as ethnolinguistic infusion (Benor, 2019). Some educators believe schools are failing because students cannot have a basic Hebrew conversation after years of Hebrew study. Others see affective affiliation with Hebrew as a meaningful goal. In this way, Jewish complementary schools demonstrate how an emblematic approach to heritage language socialization can create sites of both conflict and opportunity.

Historical Background Hebrew education in the United States has been influenced by over a century of diverse ideologies and pedagogical approaches. In the early twentieth century, Hebraists—Jews ideologically committed to the revival of spoken Hebrew—dominated American Jewish complementary schools such that they came to be called “Hebrew schools.” The focus on Hebrew conversation skills was possible because of the large number of contact hours at these schools. Over the decades, contact hours decreased as Jews made Jewish education less of a priority in relation to other activities. In addition, the primary venue for Hebrew learning moved from dedicated schools to synagogues, and the emphasis shifted from general Jewish education to bar/bat mitzvah preparation (Schoenfeld, 1987). The focus of Hebrew instruction transitioned from both productive and receptive Modern Hebrew language skills to receptive skills in Textual Hebrew and, eventually, to primarily decoding and recitation. These historical changes have contributed to the tensions schools experience today, as constituents have diverse perspectives on Hebrew-related rationales, goals, and practices. This diversity can even be seen in the names of Jewish complementary schools—including “religious school,” “Torah school,” “Jewish learning community,” and “Hebrew school”—which highlight the variety of socialization goals.

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Due to the many historical phases of Hebrew, especially the revernacularization of Hebrew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Spolsky, 2013), Hebrew is not one unified linguistic entity (Zuckermann, 2006). Our research therefore distinguishes among different types of Hebrew, recognizing the great overlap among Textual (including Biblical and Liturgical) and Modern (Pomson & Wertheimer, 2017). Hebrew serves as a flexible signifier (Benor et al., 2020b). Hebrew can symbolize Jewish identity, Jewish religiosity, Israel, or the particular Jewish communal setting or subgroup in which it is heard or seen. Different people might ascribe different symbolic value to the same Hebrew word, or an individual might have different associations in different contexts. Because of this range of symbolic meanings, Jewish educational institutions (and individuals) have diverse rationales, goals, and practices surrounding Hebrew (Avni, 2014; Spolsky, 1986) and use different amounts and types of Hebrew. A few studies have referenced trends in Hebrew education in complementary schools (Avni, 2014; Shohamy, 1999; Winer et al., 2017) or investigated Hebrew education in a particular school (Feuer, 2006; Walters, 2017). Several practitioners have offered recommendations for how Hebrew education in these schools might be improved (Greninger, 2019; Schachter, 2010). However, as Avni, Kattan, and Zakai (2012) point out, there had not yet been a landscape study of Hebrew education in supplementary schools nationwide, nor had there been a comparison among various stakeholders’ approaches and perceptions. To fill this gap, we conducted the study this chapter draws from (Benor et al., 2020a).

Metalinguistic Communities and Ethnolinguistic Infusion This study draws on literature in the fields of heritage languages (Brinton et al., 2017; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007), language socialization (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984), and language ideologies (Kroskrity, Schieffelin, & Woolard, 1998) to highlight how various stakeholders affiliate with the Hebrew language within educational contexts. The notions of metalinguistic community and ethnolinguistic infusion are also useful in

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analyzing how Jewish complementary schools approach Hebrew education within the context of the dominant language of English. Our hope is that this research will be helpful to scholars and communal leaders interested in heritage language education in immigrant, indigenous, and religious communities. Metalinguistic communities are communities of “positioned social actors shaped by practices that view language as an object” (Avineri, 2012, 2017, pp. 174–175). Community members value and have a connection to the language, building an imagined community (Anderson, 2006) through a collective orientation to the language (frequently expressed in a different, dominant language). In many cases, metalinguistic communities become sites of contestation surrounding language ideologies, versions of the language, and pedagogical goals. Individuals’ simultaneous feelings of closeness to and distance from a heritage language (Avineri, 2019) can result in contestation, highlighting the inherent diversity within a metalinguistic community. Building on this notion, ethnolinguistic infusion is when group leaders incorporate elements of the group’s heritage language—such as songs, loanwords, and visual displays—in the context of another primary language of communication (Benor, 2018, 2019). These practices are intended not to foster proficiency in the language, but to strengthen individuals’ ideological connections between the language and the group, between the individual and the language, and between the individual and the group. Some community members may be critical of ethnolinguistic infusion, especially of the hybrid language practices and lack of focus on linguistic proficiency (Canagarajah, 2013). We see such critiques in Jewish communal leaders’ discourse on American Hebrew education. Although many summer camps focus primarily on ethnolinguistic infusion, some feel they should also teach productive Hebrew conversation skills (Benor et al., 2020b). Jewish complementary schools can be seen as Hebrew metalinguistic communities, as one of their goals is to teach Jewish children to engage and affiliate with Hebrew as an important aspect of their Jewish identities. In many of these contexts, individuals and groups engage in ethnolinguistic infusion. Contestation around both ideologies and practices within these settings is the focus of this chapter.

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Research Questions This study focused on the following research question: How is Hebrew taught and perceived at American Jewish complementary schools? Subquestions included: How do educators, students, parents, and clergy perceive the rationales and goals for Hebrew education? Which types of Hebrew (Liturgical, Biblical, Modern) and which skills (e.g., decoding, recitation, conversation) are emphasized?

Methodology Our multiphase research design was influenced by previous scholarship on Hebrew education in Jewish day schools and summer camps (Pomson & Wertheimer, 2017; Benor et al., 2020b). The study took a QUANTqual approach (Ivankova & Greer, 2015), in that the primary focus was on quantitative data collection and statistical analysis, with qualitative data and interpretive analysis serving to complement, inform, and illustrate quantitative patterns. This chapter focuses primarily on the qualitative data collected through observations and survey write-in responses. The study began with 20 interviews with experts in Jewish education and a review of educational materials. We then conducted a survey of 519 school directors. This sample represented diversity in denomination (Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Chabad, and independent1 ), region (43 of the 50 states + Washington DC), Jewish density of school location, and school size. We then curated a sample of eight schools that reflected some of this diversity and collected survey data from stakeholders at those schools. We received 376 responses: 133 students, 163 parents, 63 teachers, and 16 clergy members. We also collected observational data from twelve schools (these same eight schools, two additional schools, and two schools we observed during the pilot phase). At each school we observed at least one Hebrew 1 Orthodox schools were not part of the sample, as most Orthodox children attend Jewish day schools, not complementary schools.

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class and one other class (kindergarten through sixth grade). Brief interviews with school directors, teachers, and clergy occurred during these observational sessions. We analyzed quantitative data using SPSS and analyzed qualitative and mixed methods data using Dedoose.

Fostering Metalinguistic Communities The surveys found little interest in spoken and written Hebrew proficiency in part-time Jewish schools. Instead, the primary goals are decoding Hebrew words and reciting Hebrew in a ritual context. In addition, affective goals were the most important among all groups— a hallmark of metalinguistic communities (Benor et al., 2020a). In this section, we analyze the ideologies and practices we encountered in our observations, demonstrating four of the five features of metalinguistic communities.

Socialization into Language Ideologies, Language Use is Primarily Pedagogical In the complementary schools where we observed, students and teachers engaged in a socialization process focused on ideologies about Hebrew, emphasizing its inherent value as well as particular varieties of Hebrew. When the language is used or discussed, this engagement is primarily pedagogical, meaning the students are learning about the language, learning to use elements of the language, and learning to value the language. Teachers spent a great deal of time explaining how to pronounce certain Hebrew letters and vowel markings and correcting students’ mistakes. The pervasiveness of interactions like these demonstrates language ideologies around “correct” and “standardized” pronunciations of Hebrew for ritual participation and public performance. In addition, when students recited Hebrew from memory or using transliterations,

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teachers often instructed them to read the Hebrew instead. These practices convey that reciting Textual Hebrew while reading is an important part of socialization into Jewish religious life. We also observed some interactions that implicitly imparted positive ideologies about Hebrew. When a student asked, “What time does the Hebrew part end?” the teacher replied, “It doesn’t—you’re gonna be learning Hebrew for the rest of your life.” Several teachers indicated that certain words—in certain contexts—should be spoken in Hebrew, rather than English. In some cases, this was connected to Israel or Israelis. An Israeli teacher named Sigal2 led a session of Hebrew Through Movement—a Hebrew version of an approach to language learning called Total Physical Response (Asher, 1969)—with first graders at a Reform school. At the end, an American teacher asked the students, “Did you guys say thank you to Morah [teacher] Sigal? Kids, say thank you.” Another American teacher inserted, “No! What do you say? Todah [thank you], Morah Sigal.” Teachers also encouraged students to use Hebrew in religious contexts, emphasizing the relationships between the language and religion. At a Reconstructionist school, students were working on the Amidah prayer, which mentions the three forefathers and four foremothers. The teacher primarily used their Hebrew names, and she sometimes offered explicit corrections or more implicit corrective recasts (Jefferson, 1987) of students’ English versions. Below are some excerpts of this interaction: Girl: Teacher: Girl: Boy: Teacher: Boy:

Abraham? Avraham—excellent. Who is the second one? Yitzchak. … Sara [pronounced in English—sera] Excellent. Do you know how to say that in Hebrew? Sara [pronounced in Hebrew—sara].

Similarly, a teacher at a Conservative school asked the students, “What’s your favorite song for Pesach?” When students began to volunteer

2

Names are pseudonyms.

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answers in English, she said, “Aval [but], but, the name has to be in Ivrit [Hebrew].” Some classroom discourse highlighted the ideology that Israeli Hebrew is the most authentic, a source of contestation in the American diasporic context. Israeli teachers sometimes made comments like, “I’m gonna have you talking like Israelis. That’s a good thing.” At a Reform school, as students were reading nonsense words in a decoding drill— xa, xe, xu, etc.—the Israeli teacher said, “You guys do a good [x]. I’m impressed.” This comment emphasized the value of the [x] sound for these Jewish students and acknowledged that English speakers who do not speak Hebrew natively sometimes struggle to produce it. This example is similar to interactions in Yiddish metalinguistic communities, in which one variant/phoneme is indexical of a relationship to a particular group/place (e.g., kugl vs. kigl ). In the case of Yiddish, participants are socialized into valuing a past Eastern European variant. In the case of Hebrew, participants are socialized into valuing present Israeli language use, an example of a diasporic language ideology (Avineri, 2017). In both cases, individuals are socialized into feeling both close to and distant from the language and its users (Avineri, 2019). Some American teachers deferred to Israelis because of their more “authentic” Hebrew pronunciation. One teacher, who grew up in America and lived in Israel briefly, felt insecure about his American accent (cf. Kattan, 2009). He told the students that an Israeli-born teacher, Tamar, would be helping him teach ritual terms for the seder, since “her pronunciation is so much better.” Later, when trying to pronounce the word zroa [shankbone], he said, “I can’t say it with my terrible American accent. [Tamar], can you say it?” At one independent school, none of the teachers are native Hebrew speakers. But the director—an American who has spent time in Israel—speaks a lot about the importance of Hebrew. One day she told her students that she worked hard to perfect her Israeli accent. Through such comments, students are socialized into viewing Israel as the primary site of Hebrew language use. On the one hand, this may foster a connection to Israel and a worldwide metalinguistic community; on the other hand, it may create a sense of distance from authentic Hebrew for students in the American context.

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Students were also exposed to non-metalinguistic interactions that likely coded the most fluent Hebrew as connected to Israel and Israelis. Often when Israeli teachers spoke to each other and to Israeli American students, they spoke in Hebrew. Hebrew can be associated with religiosity in some contexts and with Israel in others, but often those symbolic realms intersect. In many cases, students associate Hebrew with Judaism and Israel, both of which are central aspects of American Jewish identity. However, highlighting that authentic Hebrew is Israeli Hebrew may also underline the notion that access to “real” Hebrew feels distant— and therefore access through a metalinguistic community may seem like the best way to connect with the language. A metalinguistic practice we often encountered in the observations was teachers highlighting Hebrew grammatical roots and making connections among diverse words with the same roots. In many cases, Hebrew roots allowed students to learn about and form a connection to the language even if they were not becoming fully proficient. In this way, recognizing the roots became a symbolic form of Hebrew knowledge (see Benstein, 2019). Since many of our observations occurred around Passover, we observed interactions involving the root S-D-R at three separate schools. At one school, a teacher said, “What is the word related to seder ? Siddur is the prayer book because it’s arranged. And in Israel if everything is okay, we say hakol beseder! ” At another, the teacher taught the word barech from the Passover seder and asked, “What word do we know that has that exact same root?” He gave a hint: “How do we say a blessing?” Some students answered correctly, Baruch [blessed]. The teacher responded, “That’s right. That’s why these roots are important.” Explicit lessons about Hebrew vocabulary, grammar, and roots also occurred in prayer services led by rabbis and cantors. While going over the Kedusha [holiness] part of the Amida, the rabbi at a Reform school began with a discussion of words that relate to holiness. He said, “If I say kedusha or kadosh [holy], what other words do you think about?” He (tactfully) rejected some students’ answers, like keshet [rainbow] and “cod the fish,” and he praised appropriate answers, like kiddush [a blessing]. “How many times do you see the word kadosh or something that looks like kadosh? Let’s read it together. Count the number of kadosh words.” Whenever related words came up that day, he highlighted them: “Oh

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there’s that kadosh word again.” From metalinguistic interactions like these, we see that some schools are teaching students more than simply rote recitation of Hebrew. Even if students cannot translate the prayers word for word, they are taught some key words that have been central to Jewish life for millennia—and the ideology that Hebrew is central to Judaism.

Conflation of Language and Culture We found evidence of the conflation of language and culture in students’ survey responses about why they are interested in learning Hebrew. Many reported an interest in broader Jewish religious and cultural orientations. Several described Hebrew as the language of their ancestors, their people, their culture, or their heritage, generally using the pronoun “my.” For example, one student wrote, “Because being Jewish is in my blood and I would like to know all I can about being Jewish,” and another wrote, “I am interested because it is very important to me to learn my culture and be able to pass on the same traditions to my family.” Many students also reported valuing the Hebrew language as it relates to public performance for their families and their Jewish community (e.g., “So I can do my bar mitzvah and make my grandparents proud” and “All of my cousins are having their bar and bat mitzvahs. So I want to have mine too.”). Hebrew performance is seen as a symbol of membership in a Jewish community, based on intergenerational motivation (Avineri, 2012). Israel was also a common motif in response to this question; several students wrote that they want to have Hebrew conversations with Israeli friends and relatives or on trips to Israel. Although we did not observe any teachers explicitly discussing why Hebrew is important for Jews, a few students demonstrated that they had absorbed that message. In a Reform school, students made posters listing reasons why they are “proud to be Jewish.” One of the groups listed “You get to learn Hebrew” as the first of their nine reasons (Fig. 1), highlighting that learning the language is connected with positive affect. At the same school, in an activity about hachnasat orchim [hospitality], one student answered the question, “How do you invite God into your life?”

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Fig. 1 Students mentioned learning Hebrew as one of several reasons they are proud to be Jewish

with “by praying, by doing Hebrew, and by kissing the mezuza [encased scroll affixed to doorposts].” For this student, “doing Hebrew” was associated with theological connection. As these two examples demonstrate, Hebrew is seen as intimately connected with other aspects of Jewish life (prayer, ritual, community).

Use of Code in Specific Interactional Contexts / Ethnolinguistic Infusion During our observations, Hebrew language was taught alongside and intertwined with prayers, holidays, values, theology, and Biblical and

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rabbinic literature. In most of the observed schools, Hebrew education focused primarily on ritual competence: recognizing Hebrew letters, decoding Hebrew words, and reciting prayers. Aside from Hebrew Through Movement and a few other instances of Modern Hebrew conversation, most of the Hebrew instruction we observed could be classified as ethnolinguistic infusion. Through routinized Hebrew performance, including recitation and singing, students were engaging with the language without learning to converse in it. In addition, schools infused Hebrew into the primarily English environment using loanwords and schoolscapes (visual representations of language within schools). This infusion was intended to further affective goals that are important to school directors, clergy, teachers, parents, and students: associating Hebrew with Jewishness and feeling personally connected to Hebrew.

Hebrew Loanwords / Jewish Life Vocabulary The most common loanwords we heard in our observations referred to Jewish ritual observance, texts, and values, such as tzedakah [charity] and hachnasat orchim [hospitality]. Loanwords like these are common in Jewish communities beyond the school, words that the #OnwardHebrew approach calls “Jewish life vocabulary.” We also heard some Jewish life vocabulary originating in Yiddish, such as shul [synagogue] and grogger [Purim noisemaker]. Some loanwords related to Israel education, such as Hatikvah (Israeli national anthem, lit. the hope) and Yom Haatzmaut [Israeli Independence Day]. We also heard many Hebrew loanwords beyond Jewish life vocabulary. These included words referring to the structure of the school, such as roles like teaching assistants (madrichim, lit. “guides, counselors”), children [yeladim], and teachers [morim]; class or period names (e.g., kitah daled [fourth grade], rikud [Israeli dance]); and items used during school (e.g., machberet [notebook]). Like in Jewish summer camps, educators in complementary schools intentionally infused these words into the institutional environment to emphasize the value of Hebrew and teach some additional words.

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In addition to Jewish life vocabulary and school-specific words, we heard several other Hebrew phrases used in routinized contexts, such as prayer choreography (kulam lashevet [everyone sit down], lakum b’vakasha [stand please]), greetings and closings (boker tov [good morning], l’hitraot [goodbye]), and requests for students to quiet down (sheket b’vakasha [quiet please]). Teachers, school directors, and clergy also used Hebrew words for evaluations. Sometimes these were routinized as group utterances, such as at the end of a Reform service, when the rabbi requested, “Everyone please say ‘yasher koach’ [good job],” and the students responded in unison. Teachers also used loanwords in less formalized ways, such as yala [come on], and “Who’s holding the delet [door]?” Several teachers also incorporated routinized Hebrew when taking roll: the teacher said students’ names and the students replied “Ani po [I’m here]” or, if a child was absent, classmates replied “[Name] lo po [not here].” At most schools, school leaders and teachers recognize that they do not have enough contact hours with the students to achieve even beginning levels of Hebrew proficiency. By exposing students to some routinized fragments of Hebrew within the context of a language they already understand, they make it easier for students to figure out the meaning of the words and remember them. And they highlight the importance of Hebrew in this setting, emphasizing the ideological links among the language, the individual, and the group (smaller collectivities like the synagogue or school and the larger imagined community of the Jewish people). In some cases, we encountered contestation surrounding the use of Hebrew words. Official documents or signs used Hebrew, but participants tended to use the English equivalent, such as “Hebrew” instead of Ivrit or “fifth grade” instead of kitah hey. In one Modern Hebrew class in an independent school—an outlier in having more contact hours and more emphasis on conversational skills than most Jewish complementary schools—the teacher repeatedly reminded the students to respond to her questions in Hebrew: “B’ivrit, b’ivrit, zeh shiur ivrit [in Hebrew, in Hebrew, this is a Hebrew lesson].” These reminders were necessary because students were using English, but they also served to highlight the importance of Hebrew in this setting. Anecdotes like these demonstrate

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the contestated stance practices (Avineri, 2017) of teachers and students in diasporic Jewish educational settings.

Schoolscapes: Hebrew Writing on Whiteboards, Worksheets, and Walls Another building block of infusion is signage. Research on linguistic landscapes—the use of (multiple) language(s) on signs in public space, like storefronts and street signs—sheds light on ideologies and power dynamics regarding particular languages (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009). The visual representations of language within schools—known as schoolscapes (Gorter, 2018)—are also interesting to analyze, especially when they use minority languages. Schools are intentionally designed spaces over which directors and teachers have some autonomy, and many use those spaces to infuse written fragments of their group’s language, serving symbolic and pedagogical purposes. In the schools we observed, the walls were decorated with signs in a combination of English, Hebrew in Hebrew letters, and transliterated Hebrew (and in one synagogue in South Florida, Spanish: Feliz Pesaj [Happy Passover]). Hebrew was incorporated into welcome signs and flyers for synagogue events, but most of the written Hebrew posted in schools was pedagogical materials, such as posters displaying Hebrew letters, words, roots, conjugations, blessings (Fig. 2), body parts, months, and maps of Israel. Another type of writing we noticed in schools was Hebrew labels, which generally also included English and transliterated Hebrew. Some schools had a few of these, but a Reconstructionist school had dozens, labeling items as diverse as sinks, clocks, light switches (Fig. 3) and bookshelves (Fig. 4): Those entering the school wing do not need these signs to understand that they are looking at a light switch or a bookshelf, and there is generally no instruction surrounding these particular words. The more functional labels are only in English, such as the topics within the bookshelf. The Hebrew labels primarily serve a symbolic purpose,

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Fig. 2 Posters displaying Hebrew letters and blessings over foods at a Reform school in New York

emphasizing the importance of Hebrew in this institution and creating a Hebrew-rich space (Benor et al., 2020b). This aspect of ethnolinguistic infusion serves both symbolic and pedagogical purposes. By surrounding students with Hebrew visuals, educators intentionally create spaces that emphasize the importance of the language in the institution. And, in the case of labels, some students might learn some Hebrew words after seeing them week after week. The diversity of the schoolscapes—involving various amounts of Hebrew and English—points to the different values each institution places on Hebrew as part of the American Jewish educational experience. Leaders in each institution must make decisions about how much Hebrew to post on the

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Fig. 3 Light switch label in Hebrew, transliterated Hebrew, and English

walls, being mindful that too much Hebrew could alienate some families. Thus we see the possibility of contestation within each Jewish institution.

Conclusion As we have demonstrated, Jewish complementary schools socialize young students to become part of Hebrew metalinguistic communities, through socialization into language ideologies, pedagogical exposure to Hebrew, conflation of culture and language, and ethnolinguistic infusion. This

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Fig. 4 Bookshelf with large labels in Hebrew, transliterated Hebrew, and English and small topic labels only in English

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socialization emphasizes the ideological links among the individual student, the Hebrew language, and the group—Jews in their institution, in Israel, and around the world. By age 13 (when the bar/bat mitzvah occurs), Jews who participate in Jewish complementary schools generally recite prayers and scripture while following along with Hebrew letters. And they do generally associate Hebrew with Jewishness (Benor et al., 2020a)—one of the affective goals highly ranked among all constituencies. Students may learn the meanings of select Hebrew words, especially those used in their particular institution and in Jewish English more broadly, but they generally do not attain communicative competence in Hebrew. This emblematic approach to Hebrew education leads to multiple streams of contestation. First, while all stakeholders want to socialize students to be part of a worldwide Hebrew metalinguistic community, they have divergent rationales and goals for students’ Hebrew skills. Most are interested only in ritual participation, while some are also concerned with Hebrew as a spoken language of Israel. School directors, teachers, clergy, and parents generally recognize that students cannot attain high levels of communicative competence in the few hours their schools meet each week. But some—especially parents—see the schools’ lack of spoken Hebrew instruction as a failure. Second, in classroom interactions, teachers and students demonstrate conflicting ideologies about whether Hebrew or English words should be used, which varieties of Hebrew should be emphasized, and which phonological variants are more authentic or desirable. Such ideological contestation is a hallmark of emblematic language use. In any metalinguistic community, participants are likely to have diverse preferences for how much and how the group language should be infused. We see similar contestation in language ideologies in Sri Lankan Tamil communities (Canagarajah, 2013) and British complementary schools of various immigrant groups (Creese & Blackledge, 2011), as well as in several other chapters in this book. While some might bemoan this contestation, we see it as productive, as it encourages participants to think in metalinguistic ways about their group’s special language and their personal relationship to that language and to the group.

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Acknowledgements The authors would like to sincerely thank the Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE) for their generous support of this research.

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“Anyone Who Speaks Just a Little Bit of Náhuat Knows She’s Only Babbling…”: Metapragmatic Discourses on Proficiency in the Náhuat Language Revitalization (El Salvador) Quentin Boitel

Positionality Statement My interest in language endangerement began in 2013 when I was an undergraduate student in Linguistics. My further interest in the Náhuat revitalization is inseparable from my personal life: I met my wife Carolina the same year, at that time a Salvadoran undergraduate in Foreign Languages teaching Spanish in France during an exchange program. I eventually travelled for the first time to El Salvador in 2014, and after I integrated a Master’s degree in Sociolinguistics, I spent more time in the country, understanding that my investigation would inevitably be a longterm, reflexive one. The heated debates about the Náhuat were never only about language, but always involved colonial history, education and Q. Boitel (B) Université de Paris—CERLIS, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_3

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health policies, social justice, language ideologies, and power relations. As a European working in Central America, I couldn’t avoid the political issues of engaging in ethnography in such a context. I encountered many friends in the course of this work, to whom I am very grateful for all the support and discussions we have had together. I also took seriously the call made by some of my interlocutors: in many occasions and public events, I heard people complaining about living in a situation of great poverty and being instrumentalized, receiving nothing from students of Náhuat who visited them, sometimes accused of “stealing” their language. I understood that in this context, being just a “language lover” was definitely not an option. As I stand today, I advocate for political commitment, not as an “expert of language”, nor a “defensor of Náhuat”, rather as a contributor to the public discussion with sociolinguistic tools for understanding social problems such as inequalities, exclusion and violence as they are related to semiotic activities and language. As I now turn to the study of proficiency in this context, I will also advocate for a critical reconceptualization of this concept.1

Introduction This chapter offers a critical perspective on proficiency, assuming that this notion is not merely about language, but entangles a series of semiotic, historical, and political processes. Of course, achieving proficiency is a central matter in studies of language teaching and learning, language acquisition and education policies (Jessner, 2017; Powers, 1985; Powers et al., 1986; Rivera, 1984a, b; Steel & Alderson, 1994), but the basic assumption which underlies this achievement is that “one language” already exists that can be “taught/learned” to a certain extent (obtaining in it a certain degree of competence). Rather, I will argue that proficiency and linguistic competence are key components of the reflexive construction of linguistic ideologies and imagined identities, such as Indigeneity. 1 I wish to express my gratitude to the persons who provided me helpful comments during the writing of this chapter: Netta Avineri and Jennifer Sclafani. I also warmly thank Carolina Ramos, Félix Danos, the Tzunhejekat and Wolfgang Effenberger for their support and enriching discussions.

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Statements about proficiency are never only about “knowing how to speak one language”, rather, they evidence the metasemiotic activity by which humans evaluate and negotiate speech activity, and insert it into broader cultural models of behavior. In other words, discourses on proficiency are metapragmatic discourses (Silverstein, 1976, 1993, 2003), part of larger processes of differenciation (Gal & Irvine, 2019) and enregisterment (Agha, 2005, 2007) which give them their political importance in social life. In this chapter, I rely on the multi-sited ethnography of the Náhuat language initiatives I conducted in El Salvador and Europe between 2014 and 2019, to show how the metapragmatic discourses on proficiency articulate to the field of language revitalization. The Náhuat language (or “Pipil”) is considered by linguists and official statistics as an almost extinct language, spoken by a few hundred elderly Indigenous people living in Western El Salvador (Campbell, 1985; Lemus, 2015). Due to colonial history, capitalist violence, and agressive religious conversion, the Indigenous in the country have been historically subject to marginalization, shame and erasure (Gould & Lauria-Santiago, 2008; Tilley, 2005). Revival organizations have emerged during the 1990s but those explicitly aimed at recognizing and revitalizing the Náhuat language were created in the 2010s. During this period, few scholars have shown an interest in the language revitalization (King 2004; Lemus, 2015) but the recognition of Náhuat has been rising in El Salvador and beyond its borders, shared by a range of new actors: students from the capital city (San Salvador); associations (like the Colectivo Tzunhejekat and the Iniciativa Portadores del Náhuat (IPN), both created at the beginning of the 2010s), private universities (like the Universidad Tecnológica (UTEC), which is developping since 2016 a “Chair in Náhuat”, and the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), which launched at the same time a Náhuat course) and, more recently, the government of the former president Salvador Sanchez Cerén, who launched in 2017 a national educational program in Náhuat. The culmination of this process of recognition was the nomination of a founding member of the Colectivo Tzunhejekat , at the end of 2019, at the head of the Dirección de Pueblos Indígenas by the recently elected president Nayib Bukele, the highest position concerning Indigenous affairs in the country.

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Such a trajectory brought the question of proficiency at the center of many political debates, because the very small number of estimated Náhuat speakers makes the language a scarce ressource, which has strong implications. For example, various charity campaigns have been explicitly aimed at supporting the “nahuablantes” (or “nahua-hablantes”: “Náhuat speakers”), but this has generated tensions around the self-identification as a “speaker” (Boitel, 2017). Most activists affiliated with the Indigenous organizations of the country (like the CCNIS, Consejo Coordinador Nacional Indígena Salvadoreño) claim to be able to “speak Náhuat”, but usually don’t perform it as a communication medium in public events, so they are frequently considered as “charlatans” by the language activists. The apparently neat border between the “fluent speakers” and those who are not is in fact constantly negociated, debated among the Náhuat stakeholders, a phenomenon already discussed in other contexts (Ahlers, 2006; Doerr, 2009). To explore these questions, this chapter will be divided into three sections. In Part I, I present the theoretical framework of metapragmatics that underly the reconceptualization of proficiency I propose here. In Part II, I show that the question of “proficiency in Náhuat” is as ancient as the “invention” (Makoni & Pennycook, 2006) of the language’s name itself: studying the colonial documents where the “Pipil” was brought to existence as “one language” reveals how proficiency has been inscribed in language ideologies and colonial history. Statements on proficiency were made by friars and croniclers to justify the Spanish presence and the subordination of the Indigenous population. In Part III, I analyze how the different stakeholders in Náhuat revitalization efforts define and evaluate proficiency, in a context of language revitalization where “performing the language” is frequently associated with evaluations about the speaker’s “ability” (be it positive or negative ones), articulated with contrasting conceptions about Indigenous identities. I rely on a variety of sources to support my argument: I have used historical written sources on the Náhuat language such as colonial documents and contemporary publications in Linguistics, and because the Náhuat revitalization activists are very present on the Internet and social media, I have decided

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to include online publications on Facebook and Youtube as an integral part of the ethnography, to be added to my personal notes and recordings.

Metapragmatic Typifications of Proficiency Most contemporary texts written about the Náhuat language are generally introduced by reflexive commentaries glossing the very act of naming the language (see Sandra Keller’s chapter, this volume), such as in these examples, from two different linguists: The native language of western El Salvador, the subject of this book, is known in the linguistic literature as Pipil, although its speakers call it na:wat in the language itself and Nahuate in Spanish, Here it is called Pipil because this usage is so strongly entrenched in the scientific literature that it could not easily be changed. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that Na:wat (Nahuate) may gain more general acceptance in honor of and in deference to its speakers (Campbell, 1985:1. Emphasis in the original) (...) Aunque llamada lengua ‘pipil’ por algunos, en el propio idioma su nombre es Nawat, y en la actualidad la misma designación en ortografía castellana – náhuat – es la que predomina dentro de El Salvador.” (“Even if called ’Pipil’ language by some, in the language itself its name is Nawat, and in present day the same designation in castillan orthography – Náhuat – is the predominating one in El Salvador. (King 2011: 13, translation is mine)

Many other examples could be provided. Why such a discomfort with the “Pipil” label, and what does it have to do with proficiency? The perspective I adopt on proficiency relies on the idea that “the organization of social life is shaped by reflexive models of social life, models that are made through human activities and inhabited through them” (Agha, 2007: 2). Statements about proficiency, as they take speech and language as their object, belong to the reflexive realm of semiotic activity Michael Silverstein called metapragmatic discourse (Silverstein, 1976, 1993). Relying on Charles S. Peirce’s theory of signs, Silverstein has given special attention to the phenomenon of indexicality, defined

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as a relation of contiguity between signs. When linguistic signs occur, they enter in relation to other contiguous signs, defined as their “cotext”, but they also index (point to) non-linguistic aspects of the occasion in which they occur (time, place, participants, etc.), defined as their “context”. The relation between semiosis and context is therefore one of co-presence, where the indexical sign presupposes as well as creates its context of occurrence (Silverstein, 1993: 36). Proficiency statements are indexical because they rely on (presuppose) some linguistic material about which they constitute a commentary—interpreted in situation by participants as appropriate or not; but they are also indexical as they construe this linguistic material as “fluent” (or not), “good language”, etc. by virtue of their effectiveness. But this indexical process can reflexively be taken, at another level of indexicality, as object of typification, dubbed metapragmatic: Metapragmatic function serves to regiment [typify] linguistic indexicals into interpretable event(s) of such-and-such type that the use of language in interaction constitutes (consists of ). (Silverstein, 1993: 37)

Proficiency statements are metapragmatic ones because they typify their sign-object (language use) as a category, a generalization about the pragmatics of speech behavior. Such reflexive statements are never only about speech activity, as they link together the typified behavior with social personae for some population of language users, able to recognize it as such a category. Through such statements, the enunciator generates a reflexive model of the pragmatic effects of the speaker’s speech behavior which indexes, via this category, some stereotypical image of this speaker. These models have an existence at all only when recognized as such by some population, a reason that explains the transformation of registers through time. The emergence and transformation of such cultural models of speech behavior, named enregisterment (Silverstein, 2003), have been extensively studied by Asif Agha (2005, 2007). So, why such a discomfort in using the label “Pipil” in the two examples quoted above? Answering this question will help us understand why

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proficiency is central to the debates on language revitalization. To do so, it is necessary to recall how “Pipil” emerged during the colonization process.

Colonialism, Metalinguistic Labeling, and Proficiency Proficiency has been historically inscribed in the very act of labeling language practices at the beginning of the colonial period. Travelling from Mexico to Central America, the Spanish conquistadores were accompanied by thousands of Tlaxcaltecan warriors when they conquered and subjugated the Nahua populations of Cuscatlán, a kingdom situated in the actual Salvadoran territory (see Asselbergs, 2004; Matthew & Oudijk, 2007). These Nahuas are known to have emigrated from Central Mexico to Central America centuries before, so their language practices at the time of Conquest have been iconically perceived by Tlaxcaltecans as resembling theirs, but also different. The indigenous conquerors imagined the Cuscatlán people’s as a distinct linguistic community, and their speech distant from their own (see Avineri, 2017), previously coined by the spanish term “lengua mexicana”. Seeking to create hierarchies between the populations so to establish a colonial domination under the Spanish rule, the conquerors took advantage of this perceived difference and labeled patronizingly the language practices of the Central American Nahuas: they used the Nahua term pipil (“child”) to “invent” the language of the conquered (Makoni & Pennycook, 2006), inscribing it within the realm of colonial subordination as a backward, childish manner of speaking the lengua mexicana (Fowler, 1981: 469). Other labels, constructed on patterns of moral judgement, included lengua mexicana corrupta (“corrupted mexican language”), and Pipil corrupto (“corrupted Pipil”), among others.2 This use of distinction for hierarchizing the indigenous realities is to be understood as part of the broader

2 For a more extensive discussion of these categories, see: Matthew & Romero (2012), Madajczak & Hansen (2016).

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construction of a radical Other, achieved through a variety of semiotic processes (see Irvine & Gal, 2000), and present in diverse contexts of colonialism and imperial domination (see Errington, 2008; Fabian, 1986; Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Said, 1978). Colonial domination was partly achieved through the ideological transformation of the population and its speech practices, which relied in great part on religious conversion (Hanks, 2010; Rafael, 1993). In this picture, labels pointing to a lack of proficiency, incompleteness, or corruption of speech behavior like “Pipil” are to be interpreted as part of the colonial and religious efforts aimed at reshaping the indigenous world on the ground of cultural models brought by the friars from the Christian world (Hanks, 2010: 7), which included the experience of shame and humiliation, guided by the possibility of redemption (Solodkow, 2014). In such a total project, statements about language competence were entextualized on the basis of ideological frameworks of colonial differenciation (Gal & Irvine, 2019), in the form of textual artifacts such as letters, chronicles, grammars, religious texts and so on. As an example, in his Historia general de las Indias occidentales, the seventeenth century colonial chronicler Antonio de Remesal wrote in various occasions about the spanish friars’ ability in mastering indigenous languages in laudatory terms, such as: (...) Iuan de Samaniego, que auia trabajado mucho en esta Provincia, y supo tan bien la lengua Mexicana, que escriuio el Arte por donde aora se deprende en la prouincia de San Salvador.” (“Juan de Samaniego, who had worked much in this province, [and] knew so well the Mexican language, that he wrote the grammar of the language that is now spoken in the province of San Salvador . (Remesal, 1619: 699, my translation)

Such a eulogy points, in contrast, to the way indigenous populations were imagined as linguistically faulty. Their lack of proficiency in the lengua mexicana has been emphasized by Remesal and in other colonial documents (Fuentes y Guzmán, 1882–1883: 71), one of the clearest examples being the religious sermon known as Teotamachilizti (Anonymous, ca., 1700), where the anonymous author (probably a Spanish friar) wrote:

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la lengua mexicana se divide en tres partes (à imitacion de la castellana, como despues te dire) en vulgar, reverencial y pipil. (...) La tercera parte o modo de hablar la lengua mexicana, es pipil, que quiere dezir muchachos, y assi comunmente a este modo de hablar llaman lengua pipil, lengua de muchachos, que ussa de pedazos de vocablos mexicanos (...). Dixe, que la lengua mexicana imitaba a la castellana, y no ay duda pues vemos, que en los Reynos, y ciudades entre los cavalleros y cortesanos se habla la castellana politica, y en las Aldeas, y Pueblos se habla humilde, y con corto estilo. Los niños la hablan tambien, pero balbuciente, y apedacitos, que apenas se les entiende. Patente tienes la semejansa que la castellana tiene con la mexicana” (“the Mexican language is divided in three parts (imitating Castillan, as I will tell you after) in vulgar, honorific and pipil. (...) The third part or manner of speaking the Mexican language, is Pipil, which means children, children’s language, which uses small parts of Mexican vocables (...). I said, that the mexican language imitates the castillan, and there is no doubt [of this] as we see, that in Kingdoms, and cities between knights and courtiers the political castillan is spoken, and in the towns and villages, humble speech, and with a short style. Children speak it too, but babbling, and in tiny bits one barely understands. Here you have the obvious resemblance between the Castillan and the Mexican. (Anonymous & ca., 1700, translation is mine. See Madajczak & Hansen, 2016 for a discussion)

“Pipil” as a metalinguistic label was then not just “a language name”, rather a reflexive category, nexus between semiotic and colonial processes, encompassing the evaluation of a lack of proficiency. When the anonymous author of Teotamachilizti glossed “pipil” as “children’s language”, he relied on a particular sign-relation, an indexical icon, that linked the first one to the second by virtue of their supposed similarity (iconicity). But if “pipil” was iconically imagined as resembling to “mexican child speech” at the beginning of the Conquest, two centuries later the author of Teotamachilizti reelaborated this iconic relation, inserting it in a framework that connected Mexican to Castillan by virtue of a diagrammatic icon (an “imitation”, the author says, an analogy in logic terms): “pipil” related to “vulgar” and “honorific” registers in Mexican language the same way “child speech” related to “humble speech” and “political speech” registers in Castillan.

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When the conquerors picked up a single term (the common noun “pipil”) to label the whole linguistic repertoire of the conquered, they intertwined in one metapragmatic label a metalinguistic category, a characterological figure and a moral evaluation about the supposed effects of the “Pipil speaker’s” speech behavior, imagined as a non-fluent speaker of lengua mexicana, using a faulty, childish, backward language. This operation of naming pointed, by contrast, to the stereotypical figure of the “lengua mexicana speaker” as standard, fluent, but also to the spanish friars able to master various languages, including Indigenous ones. Operating as a semiotic interface linking the conquerors and the conquered, the cultural category “pipil” authorized, then, a particular model of social relations, based on hierarchy and humiliation through speech activity, in a broader historical framework of settler colonial violence. In the light of this colonial invention of the “Pipil” language, we understand better why commentators today are very careful when using this term. However, the question of proficiency remains very much debated today, so let us turn now to the analysis of how this notion is experienced in contemporary processes of enregisterment in the field of Náhuat revitalization.

“She’s only babbling…”: Náhuat revitalization and enregisterment The “Pipil language”, now widely labeled “Náhuat” in El Salvador, is perceived as an “almost extinct”, “endangered language”. The category of “nahuablante” now designates the population of approximately 400 elders living in the western coffee zone of the country, considered by most language activists as the last generation of “native speakers”. Today, two organizations are explicitly dedicated at the revitalization of Náhuat. The Colectivo Tzunhejekat was created in 2011 by urban students and young employees living in the capital city San Salvador, united by an interest in a grammatical approach and a strong commitment with the community, especially in the village of Santo Domingo de Guzmán (Nóchez, 2015). The Iniciativa Portadores del Náhuat (IPN) was created

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in Santa Ana3 shortly after by Alexandro Tepas Lapa, a former Christian reconverted to Indigenous spirituality. Both organizations lead teaching activities in several public or private institutions. To understand the political context in which these organizations were created, it is necessary to recall how they also emerged as a challenge to the previous Indigenous movement. As Virginia Tilley has shown in her study of Salvadoran ethnopolitics, the post-civil war debates over Indigeneity in El Salvador put at stake competing definitions of what “being Indian” meant for a variety of institutions and social actors, involving a broad range of (ancient and new) images and stereotypes of Indianness (Tilley, 2005). Indigenous identity was thought to have faded away into the class category of “campesino” (peasant). As a consequence, revival ideologies emerging in the 1990s, in search of alternative indigeneities, created the breeding ground for a harsh competition towards the production of “authenticity”, to the extent that sorting out how to select among multiple threads of being Indian [has become] a complicated and deeply personal project for Indian individuals because it is so loaded politically. Each person’s choices about dress, hair, ornament, spiritual practice, home, profession, and myriad of other behaviors are informed by how those choices function socially as a kind of graphic text –that is, visual signals, seen and read by others. (Tilley, 2005: 49; see also Jessica Fae Nelson’s chapter, this volume)

Looking for political recognition, international fundraising, and ethnic tourism, the Salvadoran Indigenous movement sought in existing cultural models solid emblems of Indigeneity as a ground for political action. Guatemalan (Mayan) Indigeneity provided two emblems to Indigenous organizations: dress and Indigenous languages, despite the fact that they were considered as having almost disappeared in El Salvador. The success of the Mayan model among the Salvadoran Indigenous movement is to be attributed, Tilley suggests, to its high visibility and recognition, at both national and international levels. 3

The second biggest city in the country after the capital.

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It is in this particular context that Alan R. King, a British independent linguist, arrived in El Salvador at the beginning of the 2000s to get involved actively in the revitalization of Náhuat. His conceptualization of Salvadoran Indigeneity was based on the idea of a homogeneous linguistic community (an idea he shared with his colleague Jorge Lemus: see Lemus, 2015), and on the existence of “fluent”, “native speakers” of Náhuat. Despite the impossible task of defining what a “native speaker” is (see Davies, 2003, 2013; Singh, 1998), finding such speakers was an especially arduous task because the few elders he met were ashamed of speaking Náhuat or showing any sign of Indigeneity at all. Instead of performing Náhuat, most people talked about it. They did not constitute, then, a linguistic community, rather a metalinguistic community (Avineri & al., this volume; see also Avineri, 2018, 2019), producing discourses about their reasons for not speaking the language anymore. Alan King got employed by the Salvadoran linguist Jorge Lemus at the Universidad Don Bosco, to document the Náhuat language. His presence in El Salvador caused much controversy: he criticized bluntly the existing indigenous organizations, calling them “charlatans”, and accusing them of making money by receiving funds and not redistributing it to the Indigenous communities. He defended the idea that to claim the Náhuat culture one must be a fluent “Náhuat speaker”. He dismissed most Indigenous activists, who in turn perceived him as an incarnation of Anglo-Saxon arrogance and imperialism, and his work as cultural appropriation. His positions led him to criticize also his colleague Jorge Lemus, who fired him. He left El Salvador shortly after their dispute in 2005, but continued to organize Náhuat revitalization initiatives as a web activist. He published a manual online for adult beginners (King 2011), and collaborated with an evangelical fundamentalist who funded his translation of the New Testament in Náhuat as well as a Náhuat grammar based on examples from the biblical text (King 2014). As a consequence of his failure in building up a national revitalization strategy alongside his colleague, King took advantage of the emergence of social media to fight relentlessly those he considered “farsantes” and “charlatanes” (impostors and charlatans), participating regularly to the most important Facebook public group dedicated to the revitalization of the Náhuat, ¡Salvemos el

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idioma Nahuat de El Salvador! 4 Through his intense presence on the social media, King reinforced emerging, contrasting registers, in which “proficiency in Náhuat” is one of the main criteria on the axis of differenciation. But the widespreading of the cultural model of proficiency he offered was made possible thanks to the members of the Colectivo Tzunhejekat , who relayed his ideas in El Salvador. During my ethnography, I spent much time with the members of the Colectivo. Most of them see their commitment, like King, as disinterested social activism, going far beyond language documentation. Various of them have studied Languages or Anthropology at the University, and consider themselves as “new speakers” by virtue of their permanent contact with the “Náhuat community”. Among their principal actions, they raised in 2014 a $200.000 funding from the government of president Mauricio Funes, distributed in the form of 197 individual $1.015 coupons of financial support. As a criteria for choosing who would benefit from it, they evaluated if the recipients were “fluent speakers of Náhuat” (as well as not “too young”, under 60 years old). Frequently, the members of the association organize the distribution of baskets of food to the community. These actions, committed to social justice and grounded in a strong bond with the community, lead to the paradox of selectively sorting out who can benefit from it, a situation that has perverse effects on the community: those who do not prove to be “proficient” enough in Náhuat remain outside the process (Boitel, 2017). In fact, we understand better this choice made by the Colectivo when acknowledging that the “linguistic” criteria is mainly used to bring help to vulnerable elder people, and to exclude Indigenous activists who already know how to obtain funding. Consequently, most of the work of the Colectivo is strongly organized around the production of metapragmatic statements and stereotypes of “Náhuat speakers”, making any act of recognition as such, a work of differenciation with contrastive figures of “charlatans” associated with speech behavior. In other terms, a process of enregisterment (Agha, 2007). I will provide two examples of how this semiotic activity is deployed in interaction.

4

With about 8.000 members in june 2020.

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During an 8-weeks Náhuat course I was taking in 2017 in a private university of San Salvador, I mentioned to my professor the name of a renowned Indigenous activist. He started to talk about the Indigenous milieu with much detail, starting with a statement about this activist: el viejo este: (.5) es muy- a mí me me sorprende porque él es el único (.) dentro de todo el espectro\ (.) de: o n g de farsantes indígenas/ (.) él es el único que: (.) habla náhuat/ así de verdad que lo habla/ (.) no lo habla muy bien/ pero lo habla\” (“this old o:ne (.5) it’s very- I- I am surprised because he is the only one (.) among all the spectrum\ (.) of NGOs of indigenous impostors/ (.) he is the only one who: (.) speaks Náhuat/ who speaks it for real/ (.) he doesn’t speak it very well/ but he speaks it. (Teacher in a Náhuat teaching lesson, San Salvador, 2017/08/07)

In the commentary of my teacher, proficiency is the touchstone in establishing one of the most common and widely shared characterological traits of “charlatans” among people aligned with the position of the Colectivo. Not speaking Náhuat is perceived as a stereotypical trait of most Salvadoran Indigenous activists, treated here as “farsantes” (impostors). This alleged lack of proficiency in Náhuat is not a sufficient criteria to be qualified as “farsante”, and must be associated with the claim to present oneself as “fluent speakers of Náhuat”, or even “Náhuat teacher”. A moment later, my teacher remembered another woman who came at the National University to give Náhuat lessons few years before: ... antes cuando- (.) no había (.) mayor: (1) h- trabajo con el idioma/ cualquiera venía y le daba paja a quien fuera\ ahí en la Nacional llegó una maitrita a dar clases y se timaba a la gente horrible\ (.) ella sabia que para decir palma/ (.) como- palma de palmera se decia suyat\ (.) suyat (.5) suyat porque palma es palma\ (.5) palma/ palma\ (.) suyat\ (1) ......” (“... before when- (.) there wasn’t (.) a lot o:f (1) h- work with the language/ anyone came and blown hot air to anybody\ there in the National [university] came an old woman for teaching and she cheated people terrible\ (.) she knew that for telling palm/ (.) like- palm tree one says suyat\ (.) suyat (.5) suyat because palm is palm\ (.5) palm/ palm\ (.) suyat\ (1).... (Ibid.)

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In this example, the female teacher lacked the Náhuat term expected by the student, so she constructed one on the model of a similar association linguistic form/denotational sense between Spanish and Náhuat. This “failure” in providing the “correct” translation is interpreted reflexively by my teacher as a fraud. Alongside non-linguistic signs such as “prehispanic dress”, necklaces, Náhuat pseudonyms, the lack of proficiency is interpreted as a sign of defective Indigeneity. We can observe this process in another example. In a video published on Youtube in 2014 titled “Nahuat hablantes de El Salvador..!!!!”,5 an interviewer is asking a woman wearing traditional dress and member of a famous organization to present herself “in Náhuat”, during what seems to be a public event about Indigenous Peoples in El Salvador. After saying random words in Náhuat to satisfy the request and therefore perform Indigeneity (see Ahlers, 2006), the intervewee quickly shifts in Spanish, and starts talking about the historical marginalization of Salvadoran Indigenous, criticizing the folklorization of indigenous culture in the country. Under the video, the only commentary, published in 2015, says: “pero si no dice nada. cualquiera que hable un poquitito de náhuat se da cuenta de que solo está balbuceando ininteligiblemente, no es náhuat defectuoso o con errores, solo no es nada, una amalgama de palabras sin ninguna relación entre sí >:( ” (“but she’s saying nothing. anyone who speaks just a little bit of Náhuat knows she’s only babbling unintelligibly, it is not defective Náhuat or with some errors, it’s just nothing, an amalgam of words without any relation between them >:( ” )

This rough commentary, published by a member of the Colectivo, may give one the strange feeling of a reminiscence of old colonial statements about the “Pipil speakers” we studied before. But the actualization of the “babbling” speech behavior is reconfigured here, in the light of the actual political context of occurrence: this member of the Colectivo, considering himself a “neohablante” (a “new speaker”) of Náhuat with a commitment to social justice (see Boitel, 2017), sees the woman mainly as an impostor who pretends to speak in order to receive mediatic (and possibly financial) 5

“Nahuat speakers of El Salvador..!!!!” . Visible at@@@: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 9EET-Fr5J7I.

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support, so he feels legitimate to publicly report the “fraud”. This work of unveiling “charlatan practices” did not stop here, however: this comment was followed some weeks later by an official publication about the video on the Colectivo’s official Facebook page.6 In this post, the members translated the words of the lady into Spanish (showing the randomness of the words picked up by her), and took position against what they perceived as a show-off attitude. In front of the “dishonest” woman, they opposed a contrasting figure of the “nahuablante”, construed as “gente modesta y sencilla. Gente devota que van a sus iglesias. No tan vistosos de ropas pero expertos en el uso de su idioma y sobre todo… honestos” (“humble, simple people. Devout people who go to their churches. Not so much colorful in their dress but expert in the use of their language and above all... honest ”)

The biographic identification, as we see, is taken as a semiotic ground for elaborating contrastive stereotypes of speakers associated with stereotypical activities (such as going to the church vs making prehispanic rituals and dances, dressing with “colorful” dress vs dressing “like everyone else” etc.) and characterological traits (honesty vs deception, etc.). “Proficiency” appears to be a central criteria in delineating these figures, constituting a major axis of differenciation in the political process of contrastive enregisterment (see Jessica Fae Nelson’s chapter, this volume).

Conclusion Contemporary efforts aimed at revitalizing the Náhuat language put proficiency as a central issue, as a component of larger cultural formations in competition over the (re)definition of Indigeneity. In the light of research on metapragmatics, differenciation and enregisterment, a reconceptualization of proficiency is necessary to understand how people reflexively comment on their own, and others’ semiotic practices, insofar as a great part of evaluative judgements on speech behaviors imply 6 Visible at: https://www.facebook.com/Tzunhejekat/photos/a.671352989649175/808200969 297709?type=3.

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metapragmatic statements about fluency and competing images of the “speaker”. At the end of our analysis, “proficiency” appears less like a positive competence that someone possesses in one language than like a knot that ties together semiotic activities, historical processes, and political antagonisms around what “being a speaker” means for each other. Considering the statements on proficiency as reflexive evaluations inserted into broader cultural formations has strong consequences for linguistic research. “Proficiency” can no longer be seen as a term that would designate some transparent process of language “acquisition”. Rather, it should be studied as a reflexive, politically loaded term, used to draw borders of belonging, legitimacy, and power to include the “proficient ones” and to exclude the others. Studying a situation of language revitalization with such a perspective allowed me to show that statements on proficiency serve as a strategic tool to elaborate apparently straight borders between authentic and fraudulent indigeneities. Rather than asking how can proficiency be achieved, I propose that we ask why, and how proficiency statements are mobilized by social actors, with which political effects. Such questions should allow us to think more critically on the various interests underlying the construction of “proficiency” in the globalized neoliberal economy.

References Agha, A. (2005). Voice, Footing, Enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15, 38–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38. Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618284. Ahlers, J. C. (2006). Framing Discourse: Creating community through native language use. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 16 , 58–75. https://doi.org/ 10.1525/jlin.2006.16.1.058. Anonymous. (ca. 1700). Teotamachilizti in yiuliliz auh in ymiquiliz Tutemaquizticatzim Iesu Christo quenami in quimpua teotacuiloque itech teomauxti [A divine instruction on the life and death of our redeemer Jesus Christ, according to how the divine scribes relate it in the holy Bible].

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Intimate Politics and Language Revitalization in Veneto, Northern Italy Sabina M. Perrino

Positionality Statement In this chapter, I focus on the Veneto region, which has been one of my research field sites in Northern Italy. In the stories that I have collected there, issues of belonging and a strong sense of affiliation as connected to this region’s historical, literary, and artistic background have emerged. I was born and raised in Veneto, before moving to other Italian regions and then migrating to the United States in 1998. Since 2003, I have been collecting various kinds of data including oral narratives in interview settings and in ordinary conversations in Venetan communities. Whenever possible and ethically acceptable, I have audio- and/or videorecorded these stories. I have also taken photographs, with permission, in S. M. Perrino (B) Binghamton University (SUNY), Binghamton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_4

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public and private spaces. My longstanding relationships with Venetan communities have been multifaceted going from being considered an “insider,” because I was born and raised there and because I am fluent in Venetan, the local language of this region, to being perceived as an “outsider,” because I migrated to the United States where I have been living and working for more than twenty years now. In my research, I have always reflected upon the way participants have positioned me given my background as a Venetan, Italian, and American individual.

Introduction When [I] use dialect [I] feel as if I were part of another world, a world that only a few of us can understand and fully share. So [I] use dialect only when there are certain people around me who can understand it. and [I] also use it so that not everyone can understand me, [you] know, when [I] want to say some things. hoping that not everybody understands me—does it make sense?1 , 2 (Giacomo,3 Veneto region, Northern Italy, July 2014)

In the summer of 2014, while I was conducting interviews and playback experiments (McGregor, 2000) on the use of code-switching in joke-telling practices in the Veneto region, in Northern Italy, I noted that speech participants were metapragmatically aware of their frequent shifting from standardized Italian to Venetan4 —their local language, or 1 Original Italian version: “Quando uso il dialetto mi sento parte di un altro mondo, un mondo che solo in pochi possiamo capire e condividere appieno. Quindi uso il dialetto solo quando ci sono certe persone intorno a me che lo possano capire e lo uso anche per non farmi capire da tutti, sai, quando voglio dire delle cose sperando che non tutti capiscano, mi sono spiegato?” (Giacomo, Veneto region, Northern Italy, July 2014). 2 All translations from standardized Italian or Venetan to English are mine unless otherwise stated. 3 In this chapter, I use pseudonyms for all my research participants to protect their identity and privacy. 4 In this chapter, I refer to Venetan (Coluzzi, 2008, 2009) as the language spoken in the Veneto region and among transnational communities of practice of Venetans. I opt not to use the term

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dialetto (“dialect”),5 as many Italians refer to it. In his short narrative, Giacomo, one of my interviewees, claims that when he speaks his local language he feels as if he were transported into “another world” where he can find speakers of the same language who share a similar historical, sociocultural, and linguistic background. He also emphasizes that he uses Venetan when he needs to communicate directly to his co-regional speakers, hoping that they will be the only ones who understand what he has to say about others or about some private matters. The idea of feeling affiliated with certain speakers of this local language immediately emerges in Giacomo’s story. His observations are very similar to many claims that my research participants have made during the interviews that I have collected in this region. As Italian communities of practice become increasingly diverse, codeswitching and other similar discursive practices have been part of individuals’ everyday lives. By shifting from one language to another, unconsciously or not, speakers go beyond the content of their stories and engage in explicit or veiled interactional moves while their stories unfold (Perrino, 2020). In this chapter, after providing a brief historical background on the rise of the Lega Nord (“Northern League”), which has been one of the most successful political parties in Italy and which has become one of the most intense far-right movements across the European Union, I show how language revitalization initiatives are not only politicized, but also connected to varying degrees and senses of intimacy and affiliation among speech participants. As Giacomo argues in the opening quote, speaking his local language, Venetan, a language that has been in tension with the official, standardized Italian, can make him feel as part of another world. This imagined reality moreover is inhabited only “dialect” to refer to this or other local languages given the language ideologies existing around this definition—with dialects being considered as not full-fledged languages as the standardized language(s) with which they co-exist. Similarly, I refer to Venetans as the inhabitants of the Veneto region or the people who migrated from this region elsewhere, and as the speakers of Venetan. This language, which is commonly referred to Veneto “dialect” by many Italians (De Mauro, 1969, 1979), is spoken by 3 million and 400 thousand people in Italy alone, without counting many other millions of Venetans spread out around the world and who still use this language as their mother tongue. 5 Although many scholars and speakers use the term dialetti (“dialects”) (De Mauro, 1969) to refer to the regional languages spoken across Italy together with the standardized language, commonly referred to as Italian, I opt to refer to these languages as languages, or codes.

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by speakers of the same language, with whom Giacomo shares a historical, artistic, and literary past. Focusing on the Veneto region does not mean, however, that affiliative stances such as Giacomo’s are examples of what has been happening in other Italian regions. There has been a great variety of revitalization initiatives of regional languages across Italy. Yet, the Veneto region holds a special position in this investigation since it has been considered one of the northern Italian regions where the original “dialectal” varieties have been most preserved and are still spoken in addition to the regional variant of standardized Italian. Although it is difficult to determine the precise number of Venetans speaking Venetan in this region, and transnationally as well, recent statistics show that almost 70% of Venetans speak this language. As this chapter demonstrates, the Lega Nord ’s strong anti-immigrant politics together with several language revitalization initiatives can create intimate connections among co-nationals, while also excluding other individuals such as speakers who are not fluent in the local language or migrant groups, as many of my northern Italian research consultants emphasized (Perrino, 2020). I show how politics, history, art, and language become part of a complex spatiotemporal configuration in which intimate identities and senses of language affiliation are enacted in speech participants’ everyday lives and how they are closely connected to language revitalization practices in Veneto. More specifically, I examine how Venetans’ intimate connections and identities emerge through three important interconnected aspects: (1) how new exclusionary restrictions on migrants are connected, in complex ways, to some important language revitalization initiatives in Veneto; (2) how intimacies of exclusion (Perrino, 2020) are variously enacted in northern Italians’ everyday lives through the display of signs such as posters, textual artifacts, and children’s educational tools; and, finally, (3) how racializing ideologies on (non)belonging are solidified as a result of the creation of participants’ intimate identities. After describing the theoretical framework that has inspired this chapter, I briefly sketch the Italian political landscape and some of the language revitalization initiatives that have happened in Northern Italy at a particular historical moment before turning to my case studies.

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Intimacy, Intimate Identities, and Language Affiliation Although intimacy is a difficult concept to capture and describe, humans naturally engage in various kinds of intimate relations and feelings of affiliation and belonging. Intimacy is thus part of humans’ everyday life, involving various kinds of emotional stances (Pritzker et al., 2020; Wilce, 2009). While grasping intimacy, intimate relations and intimate identities might be challenging, Pritzker and I have recently proposed to define intimacy as: an emergent feeling of closeness in combination with significant levels of vulnerability, trust, and/or shared identities, that can vary across cultures as well as in time and space. Intimacy, from this vantage point, is contingent and often precarious in that it must be constantly made and remade in specific contexts and interactional moments. (Perrino & Pritzker, 2019)

In this perspective, intimacy is a fluid and ever-changing concept, which can be positive at times and negatives at other times. Intimacy is often an invisible, yet ongoing, social process that connects or disconnects people and that continuously influences their emotional stances (Garcia, 2010; Mattingly, 2014). Being part of our everyday lives, intimacy thus “permeates everyday interaction, creating the collaborative foundation for romantic and sexual, but also political, economic, and material relationships” (Perrino & Pritzker, 2019). Intimate relations, as I see them, are thus co-constructed among participants in their daily lives by displaying particular signs, by revitalizing their language, and by recounting and remembering their historical past. Intimate identities thus develop through the various stances that Venetans enact while they deliver their narratives but also in the way they feel affiliated with certain symbols, historical facts, or textual artifacts. As I show in this chapter, participants’ intimate, yet collective, identities can foster both solidarity and hegemonic ideologies in certain sociocultural and political situations (Perrino, 2018). Intimacy, however, has been rarely examined from a linguistic anthropological perspective, and yet this concept is key in the formation of

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intimate identities and feelings of belonging in migration communities (Rottmann, 2019) and elsewhere. Sociocultural anthropologists and sociologists have explored the ways in which the style of intimate, romantic relationships is part of the sociocultural and political fabric of people’s everyday lives (Friedman, 2005; Giddens, 1992; Illouz, 2012; Keller & Kim, 2017). More specifically, they have examined intimacy in many aspects of people’s lives, including political affiliations and sentiments. In his famous research on “cultural intimacy,” for example, Herzfeld (2005) states that this type of intimacy, while being collective, greatly influences people’s individual identities. In his view, cultural intimacy, as a way to feel culturally affiliated, can thus fossilize a national identity for insiders, and can transform into a dangerous rhetoric. By aggressively appearing in public life, as Herzfeld reminds us, a shared cultural intimacy can become stronger and more rooted in individual identities, which can become collective and thus intimate identities. Collective identification has also been studied by Van De Mieroop (2015) who was inspired by Tajfel’s (1982) classic work on social identity. In particular, Van De Mieroop examines collective identities as they emerge in ingroup and outgroup relationships in migrant communities in Antwerp, Belgium, where she conducted her fieldwork. In her analysis, collective identities are fluid, since individuals can shift in and out of diverse memberships in many social groups to which they belong. In this way, they can enact, and thus be part of, several collective identities while also performing their individual identities in their everyday life. Similarly, in the data that I analyze in this chapter, Venetans not only enact a collective identity by sharing their language, history, traditions, and political views, but they also seem to feel that these identities need to be cherished and protected. In this sense, Venetans’ identities are not only collective, but they are also intimate. A strong, underlying sense of affiliation has developed in these communities of practice. Linguistic anthropologists, moreover, have studied intimacy in interaction by focusing on the co-construction of romantic intimacy (Ahearn, 2001; Gershon, 2010; Manning, 2015); on distance and closeness through the use of certain codes (Avineri, 2017; Gumperz, 1982; Hymes, 1967; Keshavarz, 2001; Tannen, 1993, 1994), and on non-romantic settings as well. In my previous research that I conducted in Senegal,

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West Africa, I examined intimacy in healer-patient interactions and argued that this notion is believed to be one of the main therapeutic ingredients in Senegalese healing practices (Perrino, 2002, 2006). Intimacy thus plays a key role in shaping people’s sociocultural identities and can act both at an individual level and at a more collective level, when speakers of a particular language, for example, codeswitch in order to create a felt sense of solidarity between them (Bucholtz, 2009; Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Kohler & Perrino, 2017; Perrino & Kohler, 2020; Woolard, 2006, 2016). In this respect, cross-culturally, people might experience intimacy, and engage in intimate relations, in different ways (Giddens, 1992; Illouz, 2007). Intimacy and intimate identities are thus central to our understanding of language revitalization initiatives and practices (Avineri, 2012). I now turn to the Italian political landscape and to some of the language revitalization initiatives that have been happening in the Veneto region.

The Lega Nord and Its Anti-immigrant Politics The Lega Nord (“Northern League”), officially renamed just Lega (“League”), has been one of the most xenophobic and anti-immigrant political parties in the European Union. It has become very popular especially for its strong, anti-immigration efforts, which have attracted an unprecedented number of the Lega’s followers not only from Northern Italy, but also, ironically, from Central and Southern Italy, especially after they proposed, and later issued, several aggressive anti-immigrant laws. Besides the laws that were officially approved by the Italian Government (with the Lega being part of it), their ongoing anti-immigrant agenda has been key in recruiting many of their members and followers across Italy. What is typical of some Italian regions, however, like the Veneto region, is that together with these strong anti-immigrant stances, the Lega and its various sub leagues have also engaged in language revitalization efforts in order to revalorize their local languages as a way to protect themselves even more from newcomers, as my research participants recounted. As I mention later, language revitalization initiatives

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are not just about language. Rather, they often involve other sociocultural and political aspirations, such as creating feelings of affiliation and belonging among the speakers of the language that is being revitalized while creating senses of exclusion vis-à-vis “the Other,” such as migrant groups living in the same areas (Perrino, 2020). The Liga Veneta Repubblica (“Veneto League Republic”), an important sub-league of the Lega (Cavallin, 2010a), for example, has been promoting not only the use of Venetan, but also the recognition of the Veneto region as an autonomous “state,” in which its own recognized language is spoken, at the European level. While language revitalization initiatives have occurred in many Italian regions, such as Lombardy (Cavanaugh, 2004, 2009), in this chapter I focus on the Veneto region, in which various varieties of Venetan have been spoken for centuries.

Intimate Language, Culture, and History in Veneto Over the last fifteen years, Veneto, one of the twenty regions of Italy, has become an embattled region trying to obtain regional political and linguistic autonomy (Perrino, 2013). The arrival of migrants in Italy has created new demographic realities and has pushed certain language promoters to be more active in re-establishing their historical and artistic traditions. In this way, they have also emphasized who is more affiliated with Venetan while also trying to officially recognize its use at the European level. While revitalizing their language, promoters might indeed have other goals in mind, such as re-asserting their weakened political power or reinforcing their anti-government stances. In this respect, language revitalization efforts are fluid processes in which power and economic dynamics, political aspirations, and language ideologies play pivotal roles. Jaffe’s work on language revitalization in Corsica, for example, has added important layers to the study of minority language contexts “where discourses of language politics and revitalization have historically been centered around pride and cultural rights” (Jaffe, 2019, p. 10), illustrating how language revitalization practices are vital, heterogenous, highly variable, contextualized, and

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unpredictable processes. Research such as Jaffe’s (1999, 2013, 2019) has unveiled evidence of such processes as having underlying, and frequently widespread, economic and sociopolitical objectives. Thus, not only the incentives for revitalizing a language are varied and ungeneralizable, but also the desired effects of such initiatives have different, sometimes, unknown, configurations and consequences. Many of the Venetans I interviewed repeatedly pointed out that their local language is part of their history as being Venetans. Crucially, many of my research consultants are affiliated with the Lega and often shared their anti-immigrant stances. Venetan has significant literary traditions, as many writers and poets have been writing in this language since the thirteenth century (Coluzzi, 2009; De Mauro, 1969) such as Angelo Beolco, called Ruzante (1500–1542), Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793), and Biagio Marin (1891–1985). In this respect, revitalizing this language often means to recall not only these literary works and the history of the Italian linguistic landscape, but also the well-known history of the Republic of Venice (la Repubblica di Venezia). Venetan has been promoted also through the publication of several dictionaries and grammars, folktale- and proverb-themed books, and short stories and poems in Venetan (Cibotto, 1979; Massari, 1990; Turato & Durante, 1995; Belloni, 2009; Cévese, 2001; Cavallin 2010a, to mention just a few). This language has been recently revitalized not just linguistically, however, but also through politicized signage such as emblems in flags, websites, and posters. The name of one of the most important sub-sections of the Lega, Liga Veneta Repubblica, for example, was itself created as a blend of standardized Italian and Venetan, Liga (“League”) being in Venetan (the standardized Italian being Lega) and Veneta Repubblica being in standardized Italian. The addition of the noun Repubblica (“Republic”) to their original name, Liga Veneta (Cavallin, 2010b), in the 1980s, can be seen as an effort to recall the history and great power of the Republic of Venice and to make it available in the present through intimate connections, and senses of affiliation and nostalgia (Avineri, 2012), with its “prestigious” past. As Avineri (2012) keenly argues, in “metalinguistic communities” speakers of a language also build a larger sense of community based on shared heritage, historical past, and religious beliefs.

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The data that I present in this chapter were collected following the insights of linguistic anthropological research methods and analytical tools (Perrino & Pritzker, In Press). These materials are part of a larger ethnographic project that I have conducted in Northern Italy since the early 2000s (Perrino, 2020). Since 2003, I have collected approximately 600 h of data materials related to narratives in Northern Italy. Many of the stories that I collected come from qualitative interviews and from naturally occurring discourse that I audio- and video-recorded during various types of events such as conversations during meals and meal preparation, coffee hours in Cafés, walks in town, or during long afternoon and evening hours. When it was ethically appropriate, I also took photographs and collected archival materials on language revitalization initiatives.

Language Revitalization and Intimate Identities in Educational Settings As it happens in many language revitalization initiatives across the globe (Meek, 2012, 2014), Venetan has been promoted in many educational settings (Jaffe, 1999, 2013). It is now officially taught at various levels: elementary and middle schools and at the university level as well. In many elementary schools, for example, educators use books in Venetan to socialize children with important historical facts and notions, such as “LEPANTO: la Gran Bataja” (“LEPANTO: The Big Battle”) (Morello & Nardo, 2010). Following Avineri (2012), this is an example of early socialization into language ideologies through the creation of a metalinguistic community. This comic book, which is written almost entirely in Venetan, with some bivalent forms as well (Woolard, 1998), indeed dramatizes the historical battle of Lepanto, by sensationalizing the victory of Venice over the Ottomans. Thus, metalinguistically, this book has the scope of teaching children not only about this historical battle but to also have them read in, and thus practice, the language that they wish to revitalize in the process. While for Venetans the battle of Lepanto is an important historical event that children are supposed to learn, this book is not required in Venetan schools. Instructors can select this book

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as a supplementary text together with other required history textbooks. Similar instructional comics in Venetan exist for other historical events as well. On the very first page of the book the President of the Cultural Association called Veneto Nostro—Raixe 6 Venete (“Our Veneto – Veneto Roots”) writes: Original Standardized Italian and Venetan 1. Al Popolo Veneto 2. parché, vardando alfuturo 3. el sàpie riscovèrxareprima posibile 4. el valór dela soIdentità e la fòrsa 5. de laStoria che lo gavisto pa secoli 6. e secoli grando inte’lmondo

English Translation To the Veneto People because, by looking at thefuture they know how to rediscoveras soon as possible the value of theirIdentity and the power of History which hasseen it [i.e., Venetans] powerful in theworld for centuries and centuries

(Morello & Nardo, 2010)

The six lines of this text are almost entirely in Venetan (with some bivalent forms as well). While code-switching has been recently studied as a strategy in discursive practices in various settings (Gumperz, 1982; Perrino, 2015, 2018), it is important to note its use in written texts as well, as this example shows. By using mostly Venetan over standardized Italian, this book is dedicated to speakers of this language who are thus strongly affiliated with their history, traditions and language and whose identity is felt as Venetan. This is a clear example of socialization into language ideologies (Avineri, 2012). In lines 2–6, the author wishes that Venetans rediscover their identity and the power of their historical background as soon as possible. Only through a close reading of their history, he argues, Venetans could appreciate the power that the Republic of Venice had for over one thousand years. This identity is believed to be just for Venetans; it is thus a collective and intimate identity that cannot be shared with other Italians, nor can it be shared with migrant groups. 6

In this chapter, I use Bold and Italic to indicate the use of Venetan and Italic and Underline to indicate the use bivalent forms (see also the section entitled “Transcription Conventions” at the end of this chapter).

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In this light, this is not only a collective identity, but it is also intimate, because only speakers of Venetan can fully inhabit it by sharing not only their language, Venetan, but also their historical past and artistic patrimony (Perrino, 2020, pp. 106–109). This is a significant affiliation that unifies Venetans even more since they are the ones who can fully appreciate and understand this language. Thus, while this book is intended to revitalize the local language, it also promotes a strong revalorization of Venetan history and traditions, without which Venetans would not be able to create an intimate space that can be shared only among them. There has also been a strong desire of political autonomy that is reflected in these revitalizing efforts. In the many stories I have collected since 2003 in Veneto, for example, the history of this region has always emerged. In their narratives, Venetans usually go back to the Republic of Venice to claim the desired autonomy of the Veneto region which, in their eyes, should be a state separate from the rest of Italy. More evidence of the aspirations of this region’s independence from Italy is shown by the various referendums that have been organized in recent years, the last one being in September 2017, which was very well attended by Venetan voters. On their website there are also emblems which have been used to advertise these referendums in which they define themselves as Veneti d’Europa (“Venetans of Europe”), emphasizing their belonging to the European Union and their wish to separate from the Italian State, which has denied them their autonomy and the official recognition of their Veneto identity and language (Perrino, 2020, pp. 60–62). This separatist politics also manifests itself at times in the way this local, minority language is used with respect to the hegemonic standardized Italian. As Meek and Messing (2007) demonstrate for the Kaska and Nahuatl indigenous languages, a variety of roles and relationships can be constructed between minority languages undergoing revitalization and their dominant languages (English and Spanish, respectively), and the relationship between Venetan and standardized Italian shows similar dialogic tensions. By claiming their own language, land, traditions, and history through many revitalizing initiatives, members of the Venetan community of practice enact and solidify their regional, collective, and intimate identity. In comparing these revitalization efforts with other similar initiatives in the European Union, it becomes apparent that the

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Veneto region has followed a different path. While France, Germany, and Spain have turned to some European structures to seek policy advice, support, and advocacy beyond the individual nation-state in an effort to follow the main European integration trends (Trenz, 2007), Venetan promoters have not relied on these macro-social factors for their support. Rather, it has been Italy-internal political and economic forces that best explain these revitalization efforts.

Intimate Revitalization in Public Signage Across the Veneto region, people have been using public signs displaying the use of Venetan or of a combination of Venetan and bivalent forms. In August 2012, for example, two large bright orange posters at the train station of Padua (Padova) caught my attention (see Figs. 1 and 2). They were placed right at the center of the main hall of the train station. On their three sides, they advertised the alcoholic aperitif called Spritz, which is believed to originate from this region. One side of one poster read (Fig. 1): “Par bevar un Spritz no ghe vol un privé, serve na piassa” (“to drink a Spritz [one] doesn’t need a private place, [one] needs a piazza [i.e., a big square in downtown areas in Italian towns]”). Another side of the same poster read (Fig. 2), “bevitelo anca a casa” (“[you should] drink it at home as well ”), where “anca” is in Venetan and means “drink it at home as well ” (Perrino, 2013, 2020, pp. 58– 59). At the bottom of every side, moreover, the posters read (Figs. 1 and 2), “Aperol, la vita xe piùSpritz ” (“Aperol, life is more Spritz”), where “xe” is in Venetan, Aperol being the main brand producing Spritz in this region. The location and message of these posters index the fact that Venetans have their own traditions, foods, wines, and art. By displaying these signs, Venetans show a strong affiliation with the aperitif Spritz, for example, which is one of their regional beverages. Similarly, there are certain foods that are believed to be Venetan. Thus, by using Venetan as their main code, these various signs have a powerful metasemiotic message: Venetans can drink Spritz intimately in their homes, or in public piazzas, where intimate connections might be felt on a larger scale. Still, it is a ritual that affiliates Venetans in significant ways. They

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Fig. 1 Three-sided poster at the station of Padova (Padua), Veneto (photograph taken by Sabina M. Perrino in August 2012 [see also Perrino, 2013, 2020])

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Fig. 2 Three-sided poster at the station of Padova (Padua), Veneto (photograph taken by Sabina M. Perrino in August 2012 [see also Perrino, 2013, 2020])

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thus co-construct their intimate identities with their families or with other Venetans who can share and appreciate these rituals. Thus, as I mentioned earlier, these revitalization signs transform Venetan into an emblem of regional group affiliation. Language revitalization initiatives are also connected with aspirations to become autonomous from the other Italian regions (Perrino, 2013), as I described earlier. Importantly, in Venetans’ view, history, art, and language have been part of their identity for thousands of years. In this way, their collective and intimate identities are reinforced by these circulating separatist ideologies as well. The politicization of Venetan immediately emerges in the Liga Veneta Repubblica’s signage that metadiscursively links this language variety to their political agenda. On their website, for example, one of their mottos says: Original Standard Italian and Venetan

English Translation

1. paroni a casa nostra 2. cresciamo grazie ai veneti

[we are] owners of our own home [we] grow thanks to Venetans

This emblem is addressed to all Venetans who are invited to take ownership of their own land (against the Italian state and migrants) and thereby exert local control over it. The second line, written in standardized Italian, “cresciamo grazie ai veneti” (“we grow thanks to Venetans”) suggests that this region can be easily autonomous from the rest of Italy since it grows thanks to its own people, Venetans (Perrino, 2018). The use of the first-person plural pronoun, we, which is optional in standardized Italian, but is included in the conjugation of the main verb, “cresciamo” (“we grow”), is another strong sign of this affiliative desire advocated by Venetans (Perrino, 2020; see also Avineri, 2012).

Concluding Remarks Promoting language revitalization as another affiliating endeavor among speakers of Venetan is more common than one would expect. There are indeed many variables that need to be considered in language revitalization processes, which are, clearly, not just about language (Jaffe,

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2019). In all the cases examined in this chapter, as diverse as they are, history, art, politico-sociocultural realities, and senses of strong affiliation have played a key role in promoting Venetan. Members of the Liga Veneta Repubblica have been promoting Venetan with political value. They do so by revitalizing not only their local language, but also their past and present traditions and their historical background, and thus engage in nostalgia socialization practices, in Avineri’s (2012) terms (see also Cavanaugh, 2004). Venetans might create intimacies of exclusion (Perrino, 2020) vis-à-vis non-speakers of this language and people who don’t share their past and history. In this way, Venetans can became “faithful” and strongly affiliated members of the Veneto region and of the Liga Veneta Repubblica, and they can thus share a collective intimate identity by just inhabiting these roles. Senses of being affiliated and/or intimate can emerge for various pragmatic ends, such as forms of solidarity among migrant communities (Van De Mieroop, 2015), sharing common market values in defense of a national image and reputation (Kohler & Perrino, 2017), or, as in the cases explored in this chapter, revalorizing their own regional language, culture, and history and, at the same time, elevating imaginary boundaries so that speakers can protect their historical and artistic patrimony from other Italians and from migrant groups as well (Perrino, 2020). It thus becomes clear that revitalizing a language is not an isolated effort; rather, the language being revalorized is just one side of the overall story. There are multiple factors that influence revitalization processes, which are thus not unidirectional. As I have shown in this chapter, language revitalization initiatives in Veneto are intrinsically connected with the enactment of Venetans’ collective and intimate identities. The strong sense of affiliation to, and nostalgia (Avineri, 2012) of, their historical past and artistic patrimony thus emerges not only in their daily stories, but also in Venetan textual artifacts, such as historical books for children, emblems, posters, and on the Lega’s website as well. By reading certain lines in standardized Italian with frequent code-switches into Venetan, as I suggested, Venetans reinforce their collective identity, which becomes intimate and not sharable. In these social identification practices, however, Venetans also develop the idea that their identity

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needs to be protected and defended from “the Other” (Perrino, 2020), an unfortunate rhetoric that has become more common across the globe.

Transcription Conventions Bold and Italic: Venetan (the local language of the Veneto region). Italic and Underline: Bivalent forms. Regular Font: Standardized Italian. Acknowledgements My deepest thanks go to the many individuals in Northern Italy who agreed to be video- and audio-recorded for this project. Some of the data used in this chapter were collected during twenty-two months of fieldwork in Senegal and Italy (1999–2004) and research in Northern Italy during summer trips and continuous contacts with research consultants and ordinary speakers (2005–2018). I acknowledge support from a WennerGren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (Grant Number 6957) and the University of Pennsylvania’s Penfield Scholarship in Diplomacy, International Affairs, and Belles Lettres. I am deeply thankful to the Editors of this Volume, Jesse Harasta and Netta Avineri for their advice and guidance during the publication process. I am also very thankful to late Alexandra (Misty) Jaffe, Gregory Kohler, and Stanton Wortham for their incisive comments on portions of this chapter that were presented at various American Anthropological Association Meetings these past years. I am the only one responsible for any remaining mistakes and infelicities.

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Van De Mieroop, D. (2015). Social identity theory and the discursive analysis of collective identities in narratives. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis (pp. 408–428). Wiley-Blackwell. Wilce, J. M. (2009). Language and emotion. Cambridge University Press. Woolard, K. (2006). Codeswitching. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 72–93). Wiley-Blackwell. Woolard, K. A. (1998). Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 8(1), 3–29. Woolard, K. A. (2016). Singular and plural: Ideologies of linguistic authority in 21st century Catalonia. Oxford University Press.

Metalinguistic Discourse and “Grenglish” in Narratives of Return Migration Jennifer Sclafani and Alexander Nikolaou

Positionality Statement Jennifer and Alexander became interested in studying the linguistic and cultural experiences of Anglophone expatriates in Athens through their experiences working at an American university in Greece, in which many faculty, staff, and students hail from the English-speaking Greek diaspora. When Jennifer, a non-ethnically Greek American, first moved to Athens, many of her colleagues and students would code-switch between English and Greek in conversation with her because they believed she was J. Sclafani (B) University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Nikolaou Hellenic American University, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_5

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also Greek American. Upon discovering that she was neither Greek nor proficient in the language, they recounted stories of their own cultural and linguistic difficulties upon their arrival in Greece, even though they were native speakers. Alexander, a native of Athens who had lived in England for several years, has many friends and family members in the diaspora and is familiar with the way diasporic Greeks are perceived by nonmigrants in the homeland of their heritage language. He has ethnographic background knowledge about language attitudes toward Greek language varieties, as well as social attitudes toward and stereotypes of returnees. As we began working together on this project, we noticed that our mutual acquaintances would position themselves culturally and talk about their language competencies quite differently when interacting with each of us. We wanted to learn more about how diasporic Greeks conceptualize their heritage language background, and understand why they problematize their competence in Greek and evaluate their native varieties vis-a-vis a contemporary Athenian Greek “standard”.

Introduction Recent research on language and globalization has documented the ways in which twenty-first century changes in communication technologies, national and ethnopolitical boundaries, and the global economy have resulted in increasingly complex flows of social actors and semiotic resources across space, time, and constantly fluctuating boundaries (e.g., Blommaert, 2010; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010). These new global flows have had profound effects on linguistic diversity, not just in terms of the emergence and disappearance of particular varieties, but on the ideological regimentation of languages in global markets (Blommaert, 2010; Duchêne & Heller, 2012). From these perspectives, migration is no longer assumed to be a unidirectional journey with fixed start and endpoints in space and time. Instead, the concepts of immigration and emigration have given way to transmigration, which emphasizes how migrants’ material and symbolic resources are drawn from and affect both home and host cultures (Schiller et al., 1995), which results in new semiotic potentials for language. Increased mobility not only results in new

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forms and uses of language (often referred to as “repertoires”), but it also creates new hierarchies among these varieties, which are in flux as they are negotiated by transnationally mobile social actors with respect to their “sending” and “receiving” societies. Speakers that find themselves at these intersections are asking the same questions that have long been at the heart of sociolinguistic inquiry: What does it mean to be multilingual in these hybrid spaces? How do people and languages move together through time and space, and what happens at their intersections? And how does this alter the ways transmigrants define their communities and identities? Indeed, for the migrants in our study, simple questions like “Where are you from?” can unearth complicated narratives of physical, emotional, and linguistic trajectories that at times seem more like a three-dimensional spiral in contrast to the linear expectations of the inquirer. The current study situates itself at the nexus of research on language and migration on one hand, and the study of metalinguistic discourse and language ideologies on the other, by investigating how return migrants1 to Greece talk about their own linguistic repertoires as they relate to the expectations of the nonmigrants they socialize with in their diasporic and homeland communities. Through an examination of narratives that emerge in ethnographic interviews with return migrants to Athens from the English-speaking diaspora (including the US, Great Britain, and Australia), we seek to uncover how returnees orient to their own multilingual repertoires, how they view themselves as heritage Greek speakers, and how they use these repertoires in their narratives of return to position and justify themselves as both certain types of Greeks and certain types of migrants in conversational interaction with two researchers: one nonmigrant Greek and one (not ethnically Greek) American. The analysis examines several stories of returnees’ realizations that their native Greek is in some way different from the variety spoken in contemporary Athens. Through this analysis, we demonstrate the complex ways in which returnees use metalinguistic discourse— simply defined, talk about language—to construct complex identities 1 We use the term “return migrants” to describe our participants, all of whom were born in the Greek diaspora and moved to Greece as adults, because our participants describe this journey as a “return” to their ancestral homeland (see also Christou, 2006).

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and affiliations, to enact and contest cultural and linguistic authorities, to negotiate ethnic authenticity, and to display their heightened metalinguistic awareness as a result of their journeys.

Polycentric Positioning and Identity The analytic approach taken in this study is informed by social constructionist approaches to discourse and identity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Ochs, 1993). Bucholtz and Hall’s tactics of intersubjectivity, and particularly the tactics of authentication/denaturalization and authorization/illegitimation, serve as a guiding concept to schematize the positions that subjects take up in the ethnographic interviews that we conducted. Authentication refers to the ways in which identities are “discursively verified,” while denaturalization refers to the ways in which “assumptions about the seamlessness of identity can be disrupted” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 601). Authorization and illegitimation refer to the ways in which identity claims are either upheld by or dismissed by institutional structures or hegemonic ideologies. By examining returnees’ talk about their returns to Greece, we find that they orient to multiple “evaluating centers” (Blommaert, 2010) as they reflect on their linguistic repertoires. These evaluating centers include not only their diasporic communities of origin and their communities of other migrants and nonmigrants in Greece, but also their immediate audience—the researchers conducting the interview. It is important to underscore the identities and roles of the interviewers—one nonmigrant Greek (Alexander, referred to as “Alex” in the excerpts) and one non-Greek American (Jennifer, referred to as “Jen” in the excerpts)—with respect to this interactional discursive positioning. While we conducted the majority of our interviews separately due to logistical reasons, participants were aware of the second nonpresent researcher during their interview as a referee (Bell, 1984), so their interactional positioning reflects a simultaneous orientation toward a complex audience in terms of migration status. Accordingly, their discussion and description of what it means to be a transmigrant can be considered a type of “polycentric” positioning, borrowing the concept of polycentricity put forth by Blommaert et al. (2005) to conceptualize

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complex layers of multilingualism in cosmopolitan “global neighborhoods.” While it is not the focus of the current analysis, it should be kept in mind that this interactional positioning also influences the positioning of characters within their narratives.

Returning to Greece While Greece has historically been a place associated with emigration and diaspora, the nation has also received a large and diverse pool of immigrants, especially since gaining accession to the European Union in 1981 and the fall of communism in the early 1990s. While the majority of immigrants in Greece hail from former Soviet bloc countries, the Middle East (including a large number of refugees from Syria over the past few years), North Africa, and Asia, it is also home to a number of ethnic Greek return migrants, many from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Although the phenomenon of emigration from Greece has historically been the result of unfavorable economic and political circumstances in the homeland, migration of ethnic Greeks in the reverse direction—from the diaspora to the homeland—has generally been for cultural or lifestyle purposes, such as retirement or a desire to reconnect with one’s cultural roots and extended family (King & Christou, 2010, 2011). The social status of ethnic Greek returnees differs greatly from other recent waves of immigrants in Greece, and return migrants often position themselves and are positioned by nonmigrants as distinct from economic migrants both ethnically and socioeconomically, especially those from post-Communist Eastern Europe (Christou, 2006). These positionings were apparent in our data: participants on occasion referred to other migrants in Greece as a ground for contrast to their own experiences. For example, Christos,2 a returnee from England who had been living in Athens for about four years, commented that he was viewed more positively than immigrants from Albania, and was considered—in large part because of his English accent—as more “trustworthy” 2

Pseudonyms are used for all participants in the study.

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and “less dodgy” than other migrants. Similarly, Christina, a return migrant from Texas, told a story of a nonmigrant’s attitude toward her faltering Greek improving greatly upon learning that she was ethnically Greek, and “not an Albanian.” The participants in our study noted that overall, they felt they were welcomed by nonmigrant Greeks upon return—after all, many were moving to be close to extended family or loved ones—but they did note certain difficulties and obstacles they encountered in assimilating to contemporary Greek culture. For example, several participants referred to the cumbersome bureaucracy they had to navigate in order to accomplish simple tasks related to establishing residency, which they noted was compounded by their lack of the appropriate registers and vocabulary to handle bureaucratic encounters. While such stories were largely presented as simple annoyances rather than deeper cross-cultural issues, one participant did allude to negative sentiments she experienced as an ethnically Greek American living in Athens. Theresa, a college student who moved to Athens from Boston to be with her boyfriend and attend university in Greece, responded to the interviewer’s question about whether she felt that being a Greek American in Greece was advantageous or a liability, by stating that it was “definitely a disadvantage.” She commented on the stereotypes of Americans as “rich and snobby,” and then recounted a story about being warned not to speak English by a nonmigrant classmate for fear that she would be considered a potential “stoxo” (target ) when they were walking down the street during a turbulent and riotous period in Athens at the height of the 2009 financial crisis. Incidents such as those described by Christos, Christina, and Theresa reveal the ambivalent feelings that lifestyle return migrants have upon arriving in Greece. On the one hand, they are welcomed as ethnic Greeks from developed countries who do not threaten to further drain the struggling Greek economy. On the other hand, during the Greek austerity and bailout crisis that was at its height during the period that these interviews were conducted, these same migrants felt some backlash by nonmigrant Greeks for flaunting their prosperity and privilege in an economically and politically struggling society. While such discourses do not surface

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tangibly in the excerpts we discuss below, they serve as yet another potential referee toward which the interviewees position themselves in the interactional context of the interview.

Data Collection Our study is based on ethnographic interviews conducted in 2014 with returnees to Athens from the English-speaking diaspora, in which participants were asked to discuss their decisions, experiences, and difficulties in moving to Greece. Participants included 9 Americans, 1 Englishman, and 1 Australian, who were either currently living in Greece, or had lived in Greece as adults, though the excerpts in this paper come only from the American participants. The first author of the paper (Jen) conducted interviews with 2 participants in the US and UK via Skype, and the second author (Alex) conducted in-person interviews with 8 participants in Athens; additionally, the authors conducted one joint hybrid interview with a Greek American in Athens (first author on Skype, second author in-person). Our participants were recruited via personal and professional networks and through friend-of-a-friend sampling. The interviews were conducted in English, as this was the norm in the institution through which the recruitment occurred, though participants often code-switched into Greek with the second interviewer, and were not discouraged from doing so, which is also an interactional norm within the institution among Greek speakers. Interview questions focused on participants’ linguistic and cultural upbringing in the diaspora, their experience moving to Greece, and their current views on Greece, but participants were free to stray from these topics. The average interview length was 34 minutes; all interviews were transcribed manually. After coding the data intuitively for recurring themes, we highlighted instances of metalinguistic discourse that emerged in the interviews, both as a result of direct questioning and in response to other questions about the participants’ experiences. Our examples focus on discussions regarding variation between the language that participants acquired as children in their homes and communities and the variety they encountered upon moving to Athens. Many

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of these examples involve so-called “Grenglish” or “Greeklish” lexical items, borrowings, and nativization patterns, with participants expressing similar stances of initial surprise at the discovery that what they had always believed was unmarked Modern Greek was actually a variety particular to their English-dominant diasporic community.

Analysis of Metalinguistic Discourse Conflating Dimensions of Linguistic Variation The first participant we discuss is Theresa, a student in her mid-twenties who grew up in a Greek community in Boston, who describes first becoming aware of variation in Greek at a young age by comparing the Greek she heard at home—a northern dialect spoken by her mother— and the language she encountered at Greek school in Boston, which she attended at her local Orthodox church: (1) Theresa:

I remember, just by picking up on little things like, I would hear my teacher say certain things and I’m like “Why is she saying that?” And it- and I’d tell my mom and she’d be like, “It’s common to say that where she’s from.” Like, in maybe sort of in that region in Greece and=

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=Oh. Things my mom would say that other people would find odd, because of where she grew up in Greece and I’m like “Okay.” I started to differentiate when I was young, I’d be like “Alright, you’re speaking different!”

In this example, Theresa describes learning about regional variation by comparing her mother’s northern variety with that of her Peloponnesian Greek teacher. Later in the interview, Theresa also discusses register variation, giving the example of formal šϕαγ αν /efagan/ versus informal ϕ αγ ´ ανε /fagane/ for the third person plural form of the verb eat. She describes having learned about which forms were “proper,” assigning whichever form she was taught in Greek school as the “proper” variant, versus the “slang” forms that she learned at home. In her discussion of variation, which includes both regional and stylistic variation in Modern Greek, she consistently evaluates her home variety as somehow peripheral to the variety she learned in school, which she considers the standard. In doing so, Theresa conflates multiple dimensions of variation into one proper-slang continuum. Within the narrative in excerpt (1), Theresa constructs the character of her mother as an authority on Greek when Theresa questions her about her teacher’s variety (“Why is she saying that?”). She also explicitly expresses her newfound awareness of Greek language variation via encounters with various others in her diasporic community through constructed dialogue when she voices her reaction: “Alright, you’re speaking different!” However, neither the language nor tone of these utterances hints at any affective stance, and throughout her interview, Theresa presents herself as affectively neutral toward varieties of Greek. Theresa is atypical among the participants we interviewed in that she reports an awareness of variation in Greek before she moved to Athens. Her descriptions are closely aligned with the sociolinguistic concepts of regional and stylistic variation and void of judgment, which is not

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surprising, given that she had some formal education in linguistics and was familiar with the descriptive orientation of the interviewer (also her former sociolinguistics professor) prior to this interview. Nonetheless, Theresa’s descriptions of variation erase the complexity of multiple axes of differentiation in the Greek language. Though she doesn’t say so explicitly, it appears through her repeated references to Greek school that she assumes the variety spoken by her teacher is the more proper form by virtue of the fact that she holds the position of a language teacher, thus delegitimating her mother’s position of authority on the Greek language. The implications of the erasure of multiple axes of variation in Theresa’s narrative are not immediately apparent, though it is possible that such conflations work their way into communal understandings about Greek variation within diasporic communities. The authorization and delegitimation of family members as language authorities, however, does prove to be a common theme across the interviews. As we will see, though, participants evaluate their family members’ linguistic knowledge in a variety of ways, sometimes even shifting within the same interview.

Demonstrations of Grenglish The other participants in this study expressed that they had no awareness of variation in Greek until they moved to Athens. This was somewhat surprising given that many of these participants had spent significant time in Greece—usually on summer vacation with family—before moving there. However, it can be assumed that during their visits as vacationers in their families’ villages, they spent little time interacting with Greeks who did not share their variety. Given the relatively recent urbanization of Greece, it is likely that any other nonmigrants they interacted with would have been in touristic encounters, and would not have commented on dialectal differences.

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Many of the narratives about language variation centered around returnees’ realizations of their own variety as “Greek English,” “Greeklish,” or “Grenglish”,3 which are names they attribute to hybrid varieties that contain cross-linguistic influence from English. An example of this discovery narrative occurs in the following excerpt from Daisy, a GreekAmerican in her 70s who first traveled to Greece when she was 60. Here, she describes some of the linguistic and culture “shocks” she experienced when first arriving in Greece: (2) Daisy:

The other thing I was shocked because I was associating with people who are professors and- and diplomats etcetera ((hh)) I’d be talking and they were going to hysterics and I would say to them, “What are you laughing about.” Because I did not know that I was speaking Greek English… How would I know that because this is part of what I learned as I was growing up?

3 For simplicity and continuity, we refer to the hybrid form as “Grenglish” in our discussion, though our participants use all these terms for the variety. Based on the data and our ethnographic knowledge, these words carry no connotation of difference in terms of the amount of English influence on Greek observed by speakers.

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And so the first time they went into hysterics was when I said to them moovare to kathisma. (Eng: move the seat) They said “Ti?” ((laughs)) (Eng: What?) So now if I do that they’ll tell me what the word is. “Metafere to kathisma,” Okay. (Eng: Move the seat) But I- how would I know that?

In this story, Daisy gives some background about her Greek friends— “professors and diplomats, etcetera”—as a preface to her narrative about unknowingly using a Grenglish form—moovare for move rather than metafere—and being laughed at by her friends. This narrative differs from Theresa’s narrative in several ways. First, Daisy did not encounter variation until she first arrived in Greece, which is commonly the case, since many diasporic communities come from the same region of Greece, or speak hybrid dialects that developed over time in the diasporic context. Furthermore, in contrast to Theresa, Daisy frames the difference between her own variety and the nonmigrants she encounters in terms of a social class distinction, namely through her reference to her interlocutors’ white-collar professions. Related to matters of class, it is important to point out the Greek equivalent she provides here—metafere—is a hypercorrect form. In the everyday language in Greece, one would be more likely to hear the form metakinisse for the imperative. Daisy’s word choice might be considered a reflection of her referees: her upperclass friends in Greece. It may also be a result of her “book learning” of Greek language and culture, which she reports having done before arriving in Athens. On the other hand, Daisy’s choice of the hypercorrect form may index a certain ideology of linguistic conservatism. In other words, as a return migrant who is learning the homeland variety later in life, Daisy might be going to extra efforts to sound “proper” and to

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differentiate herself among Greek speakers in both the diaspora and the homeland. Indeed, we encountered this ideology in the metalinguistic discourse of another participant, Beatrice, discussed in example (4). Daisy also evaluates the interaction through the rhetorical question, “How would I know that?” Not only does this question imply that her Greek cultural upbringing in New England was totally cut off from the Greek homeland, but via repetition, the expression of this particular epistemic stance gains an affective quality (Du Bois, 2007; Labov, 1972). Considering the age difference between Daisy and Theresa, which is almost 50 years, the difference in their awareness of language variation before arriving in Greece is not surprising. While Theresa grew up with access to Greek radio, television, and internet resources at home, Daisy’s upbringing in the same diasporic community was during a time when international media and communication were relatively limited.

Shifting Alignments in Narratives About Grenglish Although some of the contrasts between the perspectives of Theresa and Daisy can be attributed to generational differences, we also encountered narratives told by participants of other ages and backgrounds who construe their discoveries of Grenglish through a variety of epistemic and affective stances. The following excerpt comes from Dora, a GreekAmerican professional in her mid-thirties working in Athens. Like Daisy, Dora recounts a story of denaturalization, in which her Greek was called into question by her nonmigrant friends when she first arrived in Athens. However, Dora further reflects on hearing these terms again from her family when she returns to her hometown in New York, and shifts to take on the perspective of a nonmigrant Greek: (3)

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What would you mean by Greenglish, I mean just give me an example of Greeng[l-

Dora: Alex:

[tons of them. ((laughs))

Dora: ((hh)) u::m (1.5) ((tsk)) um mapizo, (1.4) e:: mapizo to flori (Eng: mop, u::h mop the floor) Alex:

((laughs))

Dora:

Nah, huh, huh, e:: ke ta klinoume ke kanonika, etsi, mapizo, mapizis (Eng: u::h and we decline them and normally, like, I mop, you mop) mapizi, ((hh)) e:: mapizoume, kse- kanonika:? mapizo, (Eng: he mops

u::h we mop,

y’ kno- normally:? I mop)

exei para polla kai (Eng: there are so many and) ta xo ksexasi tora giati ine polis… keros (Eng: I have forgotten now because it has been a long…time but ((hh)) mapizo::, floori, rufi… the roof (Eng: I mop, floor, roof)

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Alex:

((hh))

Dora:

E::h… ti alo?, ki otan pigeno piso t’ akouo pali kai gelao

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(Eng: what else, and when I go back I listen to them again and laugh) ‘cause now I understand it, ‘cause I, ah when I came here, Alexandré, I didn’t know that those words were not Greek words, like I didn’t get it.= Alex: Dora:

=heh ((hh)) until people were looking at me like “What’re you talking about?” ((h)) like “It’s a word, my mother uses [it.

Alex:

[heh=

Dora:

=it’s a word and she uses it And the people would say “No:::? That’s not a Greek wo::rd? That’s a mix of the two- languages.”

In excerpt (3), Dora demonstrates the Grenglish she grew up speaking for the interviewer (bold), and then describes these forms to him in standard Modern Greek (bold/underlined). While Dora, like Daisy, expresses initial surprise upon learning that her native variety diverged from Modern Greek, she expresses a defiant stance, insisting that her own variety must be Greek since it was spoken in her Greek family (“it’s a word , my mother uses it”). This statement expresses what might be labeled a “mother tongue language ideology”: Dora’s mother speaks this way, and she is Greek; therefore, Dora’s variety must be Greek. Dora then meta-evaluates this initial shock by describing that now, after having lived in Athens for several years, when she returns to New York, she “laughs” at her family who continue to use these forms. In this story, Dora presents a personal linguistic trajectory in which she

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learned “true” Modern Greek upon moving to Athens, while her family members, who represent an earlier generation of Greeks that moved to the US in the 1970s and stayed, remain in the past, metaphorically speaking, and are either unaware of or indifferent to the language variety currently used in the ancestral homeland. Dora also displays a changing attitude and orientation toward these two varieties as an effect of her cultural assimilation in Greece. Her former defiance and defense of her hybrid variety shifts as she takes on the habitus of the nonmigrant Greek. This habitus can also be seen in other code-switching throughout the interview with the Greek interviewer, and even through Dora’s pronunciation of the interviewer’s name as “Alexandré,” using Greek phonology and declining the name in the vocative construction with the final “–é”, which contrasts the pattern of some other bilingual members of this community, who pronounce proper names in English when the surrounding discourse is in English. Another narrative about language hybridity in the diaspora comes from Beatrice, a professional in her mid-thirties who moved to Athens from Boston and married a Greek man. In the following excerpt, Beatrice describes Grenglish lexical items that she once used and are still used by her parents who have remained in the US. She provides some examples for the interviewer, describing her family’s use of Grenglish in a similar way to Dora, but Beatrice’s affective stance toward her diasporic relatives’ language differs notably from the previous example. (4)

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And with family I think now my parents because they’re older, an-I see my father for example who-who came recently to visit, and so he sometimes uses, English, words or there are certain words that we learned, that don’t exist in the Greek language? This is the known Grenglish? Um I’ll give you some examples, uh, like for example I thought the word for um an air fan was fenna? but it’s anemistira, or um, for elevator, which is anelkistira is elevetora? a::h-or for example, truck instead of fortigó it was traki, you know so there are certain words like that that they never, because what happened with technology, let’s say, um they sort of made their own language there. So, th-you know I had to sort of restill, to this day I have to tell them “It’s not fenna, it’s anemistiras.” So we sort of joke about that.

Beatrice provides examples of both the Grenglish form and the standard Greek form of the word, and through this code-switching she authenticates herself as a speaker of contemporary standard Greek. However, the rationalization of these differences takes on an added dimension in Beatrice’s narrative when she describes the Grenglish words as neologisms for technological innovations: “There are certain words like that that they never, because what happened with technology, let’s say, um they sort of made their own language there.” Through this folklinguistic explanation of the diasporic lexicon, Beatrice constructs her diasporic community quite differently than in excerpts (1)–(3). In this example, the concept of “newness” takes on the sense of modernist versus

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traditionalist identities. Beatrice narratively maps out a chronological trajectory via migration between the homeland and the diaspora, where the homeland is not just the “older” space in terms of the lived experience of the generation of emigrants, but is also “older” in terms of being less industrialized—that is, without modern conveniences and innovations like fans, elevators, or trucks. It was surprising to us that Beatrice would present her family as coming from an unindustrialized background in this way, given that in other parts of her interview, she describes her parents’ social standing as an upper-middle class in Greece before they immigrated to the US in the 1970s. Given that her father worked as a ship captain, it can be assumed that they had access to—or at least familiarity with—the modernities she discusses here, like fans and trucks. However, the examples and explanation that Beatrice provides in this excerpt discursively construct the larger diasporic community, if not her own family, as not simply of a lower socioeconomic class (cf. Daisy’s reference to class in (2)), but as relatively non-modern. Beatrice’s narrative gives the impression that her diasporic community consisted of migrants from rural villages, dominated by low buildings with no elevators, and donkeys for transport rather than trucks. Elsewhere, we have argued that this type of other-positioning that Beatrice engages in here works reflexively as a self-positioning device in her identity display for the interviewers (Nikolaou & Sclafani, 2018). Furthermore, Beatrice’s examples of the standard Greek equivalents of the Grenglish forms used by her parents illuminate a purist language ideology associated with Greece’s distant past, since they are etymologically fully Greek, without influence from English or other languages. This ideology is apparent when one considers that in current-day Athens, rather than hearing anelkistiras (which is etymologically Greek) for elevator, one is more likely to hear and see the word asanser, a more recent borrowing from the French ascenseur. Ironically, Beatrice displays her alignment toward a modernized Athens by selecting an older form of the Greek language. It is also worth mentioning that Beatrice’s alignment toward her parents differs from that of Dora in the sense that she expresses an obligation to teach them the “correct” Greek forms, thus positioning herself as a

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more legitimate speaker of contemporary Modern Greek than her nativeborn parents. Underlying this positioning lies a second purist ideology of language that is distinct from the one evoked through her preference for fully etymologically Greek terms. While the former ideology was rooted in a discourse of time, this ideology is rooted in a modernist discourse of place that places higher value on the language associated with the homeland and not the diaspora. These overlapping discourses of time and place, in sometimes unexpected and contradictory ways, point to the existence of particular spacetime frames, or chronotopes (Bakhtin, 1981; Blommaert, 2015), in the discourse of return migrants that can be traced through metalinguistic discourse (see also Perrino, 2011; Woolard, 2013).

Metalinguistic Discourse and Interactional Positioning We have examined in this study how Greeks from the diaspora who have “returned” to Greece as adults describe and evaluate their own varieties vis-a-vis the Modern Greek of contemporary Athens. Returnees construct complex hybrid identities through expressions of alternating and evolving affiliations with diasporic (in these cases, American) and Greek aspects of their identities. This is accomplished by enacting voices of cultural authorities who reject their claims of linguistic competence and ethnic authenticity, and by stylizing varieties in order to display their heightened metalinguistic awareness and to denaturalize others’ identity claims. As our analysis illustrates, returnees vary in their explanations: one provides a simplified sociolinguistic explanation of dialect and register differences, while others invoke standard language ideologies, describing different varieties in terms of their purity and modernity. An analysis of metalinguistic discourse reveals that these oppositions emerge within the storyworlds of participants’ narratives, but it must also be kept in mind that these performances are reflexes of being positioned by the interviewers as return migrants, and are constructed with particular audiences and referees in mind. Finally, these narrative stances are also grounded in broader ideologies and assumptions about

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migration and about what it means to be ethnically Greek and/or culturally American. The code-switching and double-voicing strategies that return migrants employ to express affiliation and disaffiliation, belongingness and estrangement, constancy and change, and linguistic purity and hybridity support and build on earlier sociological characterizations of return migration as, in Christou’s (2006) words, “a turbulent journey of rooted nostalgia through multidimensional roots of belonging in the mixed socio-cultural fields of ‘home’ and host countries” (p. 226). The examples of metalinguistic discourse we examine here also provide crucial insight into how language is being recontextualized as an identity marker in contexts of transmigration. In this sense, the speakers in our study instantiate what Avineri (2012, 2017) has coined a “metalinguistic community,” a group of speakers who are socially positioned by practices that view language as an object and obscure the socially constructed nature of language. Similar to the secular Yiddish community examined in Avineri’s studies, diasporic Greek returnees engage in “contested stance practices” (Avineri, 2017) that emerge from their divergent personal histories of language use in their multiple communities. At the same time, hegemonic ideologies of the Greek language link these speakers together as the language is held up as an unambiguous object against which they calibrate their sociocultural affiliations, repertoires, and identities as particular types of migrants and particular types of Greeks. This study contributes to our understanding of how heritage language varieties, as well as language attitudes, fluctuate through the lived experiences of their mobile speakers, and how the study of metalinguistic discourse can shed light on contested stance practices that are central to heritage language communities.

Appendix: Transcription Conventions , (number) . ?

Mid-sentence (short) pause Long pause (>1 second, number indicates pause length in seconds) Declarative sentence-final (falling) intonation Question-final (rising) intonation

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:: text text text ((text)) [ =

False start, mid-sentence disfluency Elongated vowel Grenglish utterance Standard Modern Greek utterance Emphatic tone Paralinguistic vocalization (e.g. laughter, breath) Overlapping speech latching; no perceptible pause between speakers’ utterances (Eng: ‘text ’) English translation of Greek or Grenglish utterance above

References Avineri, N. R. (2012). Heritage language socialization practices in secular Yiddish educational contexts: The creation of a metalinguisic community (3510407) (Doctoral dissertation). University of California, Los Angeles. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Avineri, N. R. (2017). Contested stances and practices in secular Yiddish metalinguistic communities: Negotiating closeness and distance. Journal of Jewish Languages, 5, 174–199. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press. Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13, 145–204. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44, 105–116. Blommaert, J., Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S. (2005). Polycentricity and interactional regimes in “global neighborhoods”. Ethnography, 6 , 205–235. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7 , 585–614. Christou, A. (2006). Narratives of place, culture and identity: Second-generation Greek-Americans return ‘home’ . Amsterdam University Press.

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Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139–182). John Benjamins. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (Eds.). (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. Routledge. King, R., & Christou, A. (2010). Cultural geographies of counter-diasporic migration: Perspectives from the study of second-generation ‘returnees’ to Greece. Population, Space and Place, 16 , 103–119. King, R., & Christou, A. (2011). Of counter-diaspora and reverse transnationalism: Return mobilities to and from the ancestral homeland. Mobilities, 6 , 451–466. Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the inner city (pp. 354–396). University of Pennsylvania Press. Nikolaou, A., & Sclafani, J. (2018). Representations of self and other in narratives of return migration. In K. Beeching, C. Ghezzi, & P. Molinelli (Eds.), Positioning the self and others (pp. 241–262). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ochs, E. (1993). Constructing social identity: A language socialization perspective. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 26 , 287–306. Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7 , 240–254. Perrino, S. (2011). Chronotopes of story and storytelling event in interviews. Language in Society, 40, 91–103. Schiller, N. G., Basch, L. G., & Blanc, C. S. (1995). From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological Quarterly, 68, 48–63. Woolard, K. A. (2013). Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances toward Catalan language and identity. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16 , 210–224.

Language as a Tool Against Erasure

Where the Language Appears, We also Appear: Tehuelche Language Reclamation in Patagonia Javier Domingo

Positionality Statement At school in Patagonia, where I was born, I learned that there were “no Indians left” in t he country. Tehuelche had a place in the collective imaginary as the “authentic” indigenous people of the region, but they had become “extinct”. Many years later, I heard about Dora Manchado, the “last speaker of Tehuelche”, and about their language revitalization project. I have been doing ethnography on this initiative since early 2016, by invitation of the anthropologists who were officially in charge of the project. Since the anxiety of re-learning a heritage language was disguised as a mere pedagogical problem (and language itself was regarded as a structure that needed J. Domingo (B) Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_6

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to be “explained”), I was soon invested as a “teacher” who had to transform their Tehuelche language meetings into “ordinary” language lessons. While I am perfectly aware that I gained the trust of the community through that teaching role (most of them still call me “profe”), I still like to question it. I may have helped as a pedagogical facilitator, and I have shared with them the concepts and analytical tools that we anthropologists use. I also certainly played a role in their connections with academic institutions— but still: I have learnt much more than what I have taught. In the first place, their language—thanks to Dora Manchado’s infinite patience. What’s more, she and the other protagonists of this ethnographic story (I will refer to them as language activists, which they are, especially Adela Brunel, Paulo Hidalgo, Susana Hidalgo and Claudia Flores) have completely changed my ideas about language—and about many other things, too.

Tehuelche “Coming Out Through Language” Tehuelche (TEH), or Aonekko ‘a’ien is a language of the Chon family of Patagonia; no Chon language is still used in everyday communication. The region was long seen as an inhospitable land, with no significant resources, and it was never conquered by any European power. In the later nineteenth century, it was occupied by and divided between the recently created nation-states of Chile and Argentina. Indigenous people who managed to survive the military campaigns, the persecutions and the abrupt end of their social world migrated to the newly founded towns, or were employed as labor in the ranches or were marginalized in “reservations”. The new countries promoted a whitening strategy (Tilley, 2004) that favored massive European immigration. The Tehuelche were erased and dismissed as “extinguished”. Their language was erased together with them, since the building of national identity was very much structured around the strong monoglot paradigm that was reproduced by powerful state institutions like public schooling. In 2011, within the framework of the re-emergence of indigenous identities in Argentina (Gordillo & Hirsch, 2003), the anthropologists engaged with some Tehuelche communities in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz decided to promote language revitalization. The initiative

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was meant to meet the demands of the people that “the language not get lost”, and to strengthen the identity of the community, together with the re-learning of traditional leatherworking techniques, the collection of photographs and the tracing of genealogies (Rodríguez, 2010, p. 440). Language was not seen as a complex semiotic resource that can be articulated with ethnicity and history in multiple possible combinations, but rather through the Herderian equation language = culture (and even, to a certain extent, biological inheritance).1 To understand what is really at play in a community, however, “languages” may not be the best place to start (Costa, 2013, p. 337). No social contexts existed in which the language could be used, and none was being promoted. By then, Dora Manchado was regarded as the “last speaker” of the language. Today, there is a small but persistent group of people who are bringing the language forward in original ways that help them to cope with their personal histories of disruption and erasure, often tragic: “hago esto para sanar mi pasado” [I do this to heal my past], as Susana Hidalgo puts it. Due to the absence of speakers, the scarce documentation available and the virtually erased collective memory on the language, the Tehuelche community today is sustained on the basis of complex semiotic processes that reify linguistic materials and invest former speakers with emotionally loaded iconic projections. Language socialization, which occurs almost exclusively in pedagogical contexts, is tightly linked to recognition demands that can be seen as an ethnic (and, above all, personal) coming-out through language. The symbolic use of language may become coercive when linguistic competence in the indigenous code is used to disqualify or delegitimate sociopolitical claims authorized by ethnic identity. At the point at which I became involved in the reclamation project, all sort of conflicts and difficulties had brought frustration or disappointment. Most of these issues, related to ideological differences in the understanding of 1

The project, launched in 2011, was supported by the Modalidad Intercultural Bilingüe, a state educational institution in Santa Cruz, Argentina. It included the three officially recognized Tehuelche communities of that province, but it was centered around Camusu Aike (an exreservation), where Dora Manchado was born. Most of its members live today (and Dora Manchado did, too), the capital city, where language meetings were held. Participants were very few, and none of them had any proficiency in the language.

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“language”, “community” and even “speaker”, are still present to some degree. Since they do not differ much from those that have emerged in other revitalization contexts (see Hamel, 2013; Meek, 2012; Perley, 2012 among others), I would like to move away from the presentation of such controversies and to show, rather, the possibilities of exploring the way in which Tehuelche engage with their language today by regarding them as an unfolding metalinguistic community. By focusing on the people and not on the language, this model (Avineri, 2012, 2017) can be used as a powerful tool to deconstruct dominant linguistic ideologies and homogenizing visions of communities.

(Re)connecting with the Language: Tehuelche Ideological Clarification In June 2017, together with the Tehuelche language activists, we organized a weeklong workshop inspired by what Paul Kroskrity (2009) has theorized as language ideological clarification in order to establish the many community needs and interests around the language, and to minimize the struggles that we had identified. It was agreed in the first place that language standardization for pedagogical purposes would follow Dora Manchado’s idiolect. All other language variations (and materials) had actually been ideologically erased already because, as Paulo Hidalgo explained, “no conectamos con eso” [we don’t connect with that].2 This ideological stance on a linguistic issue clearly reveals the fact that participants needed to feel emotionally involved with the language. Consequently, the next important decision was the planning of a new language documentation, conceived of as a didactic tool (following Farfán & Ramallo, 2010), which was especially designed on the basis 2 Apart from some sparse word lists collected by explorers and missionaries in the late nineteenth century, a series of Tehuelche oral texts was first documented by Jorge Suárez in 1966, when language transmission had already been interrupted. Thirty years later, linguist Ana Fernández Garay published a formal description of the language, together with a dictionary, a transcription of some of Suárez’s texts and a few new dialogues. One of her informants was Dora Manchado. These former language materials have remained unknown to the Tehuelche up to the present. While this is not the ideal state of things, further work is required to “reconnect” that corpus with the needs of the community.

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of the language activists’ desire to re-learn their language for communicative purposes. Tehuelche, as spoken by Dora Manchado, can be described as a “kitchen language” (see Graber, 2017 on Buryat), which was used as a way of fostering intimacy, and that often came out spontaneously in humorous situations. It relied heavily on Spanish in calques and loanwords and involved frequent code-switching, but it was felt to be “authentic” as opposed to the language that was registered in older documentations: “esas son palabras antiguas, ¿quién habla así ahora”? [those are ancient words, who speaks like that nowadays?], she would often say. With the help of role-playing and other conversational techniques, we engaged the speaker in everyday activities like cleaning the house or going out on a car trip, thus triggering linguistic practices that are not easy to obtain in classic elicitation sessions. The result is a collection of eclectic communicative situations, often funny ones.3 The fact that Tehuelche in the documentation collection is detached from the many indexical references that linked it to its social net and to other voices could be regarded as an illegitimate way of presenting a language, but also as the process of “semiotic extraction” that permitted the entextualization and re-semiotization of linguistic segments that are now put forward in original ways. The same could be said about the fact that most of the dialogues in these recordings are the product of contextual situations that reflect the particular relationship that I established with the speaker (relationships “without precedent in their communities”, see Hill, 2006). In fact, despite the documentation being imagined as a collaborative project in which Dora Manchado would use her language with the Tehuelche, this was not the case. Apart from the many personal reasons that language activists, other Tehuelche people, and the speaker herself may have had for this, it became evident that our particular way was simply the only way to work. Beyond issues of foreigner or professional “prestige” (Wertheim, 2009) or the supposition that we professionals have a better

3 Documentation was supported by ELDP-SOAS GrantSG0547, the ELF, and is currently available in the ELAR archive: https://elar.soas.ac.uk/Collection/MPI1176905.

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learning capacity than laypeople, the language was “caught” in the semiotic alignments produced by a situation where there was a “last speaker” in a long erased and disrupted community.

The Iconization of the “last Speaker” and the Reconfiguration of Ethnolinguistic Labor “Lasting” someone that is, investing someone as the “last x ”—where “last” means one step before extinction—leads a whole category to disappearance (O’Brien, 2010). When that “last one” is said to be a speaker, there is a bizarre understanding of this class. As Shaylih Muehlmann ironically notes, “the trope of the last speaker empties out the category of the ‘speaker’ to the extent that even a parrot can meaningfully occupy [it]” (2012, p. 167). Dora Manchado, in fact, had no one with whom she could speak her language and her role in the language reclamation initiative was extremely ambiguous. Her importance in the reconstruction of an ethnical identity was based on the semiotics that indexed a linguistic continuity and heritage extending from the deep past of imagined pre-contact cultural purity. Such connections between present and past communities are established “through language-focused ideologies of ethnic differentiation centered on regimentation of space and time” (Eisenlohr, 2006, p. 6). In fact, Despite their erasure, Tehuelche have a well-established symbolic presence in the Patagonian imaginary since Magellan described them as “giants” in 1521 and Antonio Pigafetta, his chronicler wrote down a short (first) list of words of their language. The semiotics of cultural/linguistic continuity linked these words with those of Dora Manchado in the present, thus allowing the Tehuelche to demonstrate their ethnic continuity in time and space. These language ideologies legitimized their indigeneity, but also confined it, because the community was sustained in a division of ethnolinguistic work where the iconization (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of the “last speaker” exempted its members from actually speaking the language.

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The extreme polarization of the “speaker” category had important effects on language use at every level and was evident in the linguistic anxiety related to the need for authenticity. Phonological inaccuracy, for example, was inevitably salient every time that the only “authenticated” speaker did not understand (or misunderstood) someone’s utterances. Besides, the communicative needs of the new speakers often diverged from the actual uses of the language, and any attempt to expand these functions was seen as illegitimate (see Dorian, 2010 on Gaelic). As a reaction, learners simply refrained from speaking, which in turn was interpreted by Dora Manchado as an intent to hide their linguistic competence. Dora Manchado passed away in 2019. Her death has definitively interrupted the chain of associations with the past that was attached to the language and has triggered yet another shift of semiotic representations and language uses. The documentary registers that she left is now treated by activists with high respect and regard, even if this does not necessarily mean that they actually learn from them. Rather than pedagogical tools, they have come to be sites that embody (Moore, 2006, p. 297) Tehuelche. The circulation of these linguistic materials has expanded the functions of the language, which are no longer seen as exclusively private. Lexical constructions that calqued current Spanish expressions, like “happy birthday”, which Dora deemed as correct but never pronounced herself, are now frequently used. The iconic role of the “last speaker” in authentication is still evident in the peculiar way in which community members annotate their public speeches with references to her, or in the reverential display of her portrait, as shown in the “souvenir” that activists hand out after their presentations (Fig. 1). Below Dora Manchado’s picture, one may read the phrase that she suggested as the motto for the language reclamation: kkomshkn e wine awkkoi ‘a’ien [I am not ashamed to speak in Tehuelche].4 Only today, activists feel encouraged enough to say this out loud in front of others.

4

The phrase can be heard on the activists’ website, which shows a group picture with Dora Manchado sitting in the middle (https://kketoshmekot.wordpress.com/—last accessed on 1220-20).

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Fig. 1 Tehuelche “linguistic souvenir” with Dora Manchado’s picture and the script “I am not ashamed to speak in Tehuelche” (kkamshkn [kkomshkn] e wine awkkoi ‘a’ien)

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The Display of Tehuelche as an Identity Authenticator Despite the fact that our language documentation was made with the specific aim of building a linguistic repertoire for those Tehuelche who would eventually want to use their language with their families, new speakers are following other lines. It could be said that today their language is used above all to show off .

Sticking Out My Tongue: The Materialization of the Language One of the best examples of the exhibition of the language is a series of spots, produced by the activist’s group5 with the help of the local television channel, where a Nau [guanaco, the emblematic animal from Patagonia] “teaches” Tehuelche to the passers-by. As much as I insisted on not learning single words but “communicative phrases”, they chose Nau to say words, like ashkkom [pot], ppaijjen [knife] or patten [fox]. Since the performative act accomplished by means of the use of the Tehuelche in public media may be seen as indefeasible (that is, independent from discourse reference, Fleming, 2014, p. 58), one may argue that almost any linguistic sign can be adopted for the representation. While this may be true with respect to outsiders, this symbolic function of the language is seen in a different way from the insider’s point of view (Muehlmann, 2008, p. 44). The choice of words for the Nau series reveals that the propositional meaning of these linguistic performances is extremely important, because Tehuelche must understand the sense of an utterance to feel that they are legitimated to use it. These isolated words, such as the names of Patagonian animals or domestic objects, were among the little Tehuelche that the group knew when I met them. Progressing in language proficiency beyond this level proved to be extremely difficult, which may be explained if we see those 5 The videos are available in the activists’ website https://kketoshmekot.wordpress.com (last accessed, 9-15-2021).

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lexical items as linguistic tokens that express the idea of enoughness (Blommaert & Varis, 2013). When these linguistic signs are displayed in front of others, they confer a sort of Tehuelche inflection to their identity performances while they do not threaten their linguistic security. A second particular aspect in their strategical use of the language is the fact that Tehuelche is almost always used “to give out”. Greetings and other such expressions in the language are seldom used to frame (Ahlers, 2006) their speech with identity markers, but they are frequently shared with others. When children teach their schoolmates Tehuelche bad words, or their parents wish their neighbors “a nice trip”, the identity performance is based on the shared denotational meaning of those linguistic tokens. Claudia Flores once told me the following story: She attended a workshop together with her husband. In the end, everyone sat in a circle, and the teacher said that she wanted to show them how to say goodbye in an “inclusive way”, using Argentinian sign language. Claudia said that they also had “algo inclusivo” [something inclusive] to show, and they taught them how to say atanash [till tomorrow] in Tehuelche, thus revealing an identity that otherwise would have remained hidden. “Es lo que me gusta de esto” [that’s what I like about this], she finally added, “cuando aparece la lengua, aparecemos también nosotros” [when the language appears, we appear too]. This anecdote clearly shows the importance of employing the language in a current communication exchange, another of the aspects that define its new uses. The possibility of materialization may not necessarily be shown by speaking. Excerpts from the language documentation videos showing everyday situations like cooking or eating together are exhibited on the activists’ website and have been widely replicated in social media. This reification that turns language materials into cultural artifacts treated as objects of high value (Eisenlohr, 2004) may detach them from their (potential) speakers. Their strength, though, is based on the fact that they “challenge extinction”, as in the case of Miami (Leonard, 2011), by proving that Tehuelche “still” have a language that may be used. José Kopolke, Tehuelche chief of his community, told me on the phone that I no longer needed to be there, because with the work I had done,

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now he could “mostrarle la lengua a la gente” [show people the language, or: stick my tongue out at the people].

Tehuelche Linguistic Souvenirs: Literacy and Language Visibilisation Literacy has helped to model the new uses of the language in novel ways. Until very recently, Tehuelche had never been written, except in word lists that used the most varied orthographies, and in the work of scholars. None of these writing systems proved to be effective in the reclamation context, and a new one had to be created. The dynamics of language use, where the performative value and the post-vernacular (Shandler, 2006) uses of Tehuelche prevail over its communicative function, had to be taken into account in the choice of orthographic forms. Literacy was not merely a mean to encode the Tehuelche language for pedagogical purposes in a way that was easy for new learners to understand but rather, as in other examples of post-vernacularity (see Pivot & Bert, 2017) to make the language visible. The first thing ever printed using the new alphabet was a series of stickers that could be attached to kitchen provisions like “sugar” or “coffee”, which were imagined by activists as a learning tool for new speakers of the language. As far as I know, they have never since been removed. The purpose of such an initiative may have been pedagogical, but the particular display that combines lexical items with their referents became an innovative way of drawing attention to the language and—especially—to people. The labelling of objects in the indigenous language is used as a sort of branding, which is strategically mobilized together with other adjacent signs to index the ethnic identity of the group members. The display of this representation is particularly evident in the talks that the activists group give at schools, festivals and other public gatherings, where they are invited as Tehuelche. In those occasions, the traditional objects inherited by Paulo and Susana Hidalgo’s family, such as a sash or a straw comb, are shown together with their written names in the language. The particular semiotic function of Tehuelche as the authenticator (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) of their personal stories clearly

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separates it from Spanish, which remains the code in which the propositional content of the story is conveyed. Those presentations are actually structured around the exhibition of what we may call “linguistic objects” (Jaworski, 2015), like household items modeled out of papier-mâché, drawings or woodcut pieces, to which the Tehuelche labels are attached (Fig. 2). Other objects of this kind include signs with short ordinary phrases (“teek ma, ‘an tchaito ‘amel ”! [that is fucking expensive!], “kkomshkn e ta’n” [I have no money]), which have the Spanish translation on the back, and are probably a response to the insistence on the importance of (learning) longer language utterances. The circulation of those artifacts and their eventual replications in social media expand the effects of the ethnic coming-out, since most of the time people are actually not aware that there are Tehuelche “still around”. The title that activists have

Fig. 2 The exhibition of Tehuelche linguistic objects, Mashen (traditional Tehuelche celebration), Río Gallegos, 20 November 2017)

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given to their presentations is, precisely: Did you know that Tehuelche are not extinct? One may think about these practices as a stratagem by means of which activists are exempted from the linguistic anxiety of an oral performance. However, it is much richer to explore the ways in which Tehuelche are making sense of their language in their own creative way. The semiotics of those handmade objects must be understood in their multi-modality (Kress, 2001), where the accent put on the forms closely resembles Roman Jakobson’s (1960) poetic function of the language. The effectiveness of these linguistic objects does not rely exclusively either on the language or on the visual representation, but rather on the way they establish a “division of semiotic labor” (Iedema, 2003, p. 48). Since the performative effect of their exhibition can only be accomplished when there is someone claiming a Tehuelche ethnical identity behind these artifacts, we should consider them exemplary language performances (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Susana Hidalgo, Adela Brunel, Claudia Flores and Lucía Hidalgo wearing T-shirts with Tehuelche scripts and signes, behind the exhibition of linguistic objects at a fair in Río Gallegos, Argentina, December 2017

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Authentic vs. Fake Tehuelche: Linguistic Representations as Borderline Marks Tehuelche coming-out-though-language is shaping an emerging metalinguistic community that grows outwards horizontally: to the activist’s families, friends or neighbors and even outside supporters. Though these transformations have given rise to all sorts of conflicts about authenticity and legitimation, language property and rights or community membership and representation, they are slowly engaging other Tehuelche. The positive reception of Tehuelche language initiatives, I would like to suggest, is at least partly due to the wide circulation in Patagonia of semiotic signs associated with them. Archeological artifacts from their material culture (such as arrows or bolas), sculptures and pictorial representations or ancient photographs of Tehuelche groups can often be seen exposed in the public spaces of the region to index a “local” Patagonian identity. Even their language has been treated as a collectible by hobbyists, who have published lexical lists—neither accurately nor ethically—that can be found today packed for consumption throughout Patagonia and that have been projected into the linguistic landscape by the forces of the elite tourism that frequents this part of the world. As in the case of other “local” languages used as a way of increasing the symbolic “added value” of authenticity for “niche” markets (Heller et al., 2014), Tehuelche has become a valuable brand for holiday resorts, tour operators, restaurants and shops. There is an important rupture between this kind of language and the one that is being used today by Tehuelche themselves. However, the presence of these linguistic forms and other ethnic symbols has opened a space for the ethnic revival by challenging the extinction paradigm. The presence of the language in the public sphere has thus become an arena for contested stance practices (Avineri, 2017) through which activists align themselves with the “authentic” language represented by Dora Manchado’s documentation. Since most public signs usually do not mark the phonological distinctions of the language with different graphemes, inaccuracy or misunderstandings are quite common. “Lo

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tenemos documentado, ya les dije” [I already told them we have it documented], Paulo Hidalgo wrote to me after he saw the “wrong” form for e qon [my grandmother] written in a school classroom. Purist language ideologies erase their own phonological insecurity. The absence of the language may also be contested. In November 2019, I went for a presentation together with a group of activists to El Calafate, the tourist destination par excellence in the region. At their request, we stopped at a welcome sign—written in several languages, but not in Tehuelche. I took a photo, and Susana Hidalgo wrote kketoshm’ekot on top of it using her cellular phone (Fig. 4). We did not add the picture to our slides. Instead, they told the story after the talk, while making the phone circulate from hand to hand. They taught everyone how to say “welcome”, and they exchanged telephone numbers with some of the attendees. The anthropologists who have been working with the Tehuelche since their so-called re-emergence process initially insisted on the fact that the revitalization initiative was “for the Tehuelche” and hoped that the

Fig. 4 A “homemade” (thus, blurred) welcome sign: Paulo Hidalgo, Adela Brunel, Susana Hidalgo, Emilce Coñuécar, August 2019, El Calafate, Argentina

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language would be used in community contexts. This still provokes major conflicts regarding language ownership and the managing of learning and promotional materials. It is the very special way in which activists today enact their ideological stance practices, instead, that enables them to establish new alliances and to generate a positive shift on linguistic ideologies. This “homemade circulation” allows them to keep the control of the discourses about language reclamation, which is not presented as a political initiative: “no estamos acá para revolver todo eso triste que nos pasó, si no para mostrar algo lindo”. [We are not here to recall all those sad things that happened to us, but to show something nice] says Adela Brunel. In any case, measurable linguistic competence in the heritage language can hardly be a way of conferring an identity to any single individual, let alone a group. On the contrary, Tehuelche today define themselves as a group that doesn’t speak their heritage language, and most of their claims are made on this basis. This also helps to explain why linear language acquisition meets so many difficulties. The threshold level represented by the “enoughness” line may rise, but not in excess since a “fluent” linguistic competence is not seen as a marker of authenticity— at least for now. The clearest example of this fact are linguists like me who, despite our competence, could not possibly have any claim to the language. The boundary between Tehuelche and the rest is not drawn in advance, but actively constructed using “the diversity, complexity, and discursive consciousness of linguistic and semiotic resources” (Avineri & Kroskrity, 2014, p. 4) that I have tried to account for. Tehuelche are connected to the language not for its denotational content but because of the particular affective stances that they share, and because this nostalgia socialization (Avineri, 2012, 2017) helps them to make sense of their personal histories, and to project them into the future. We should listen to the way in which people who show a strong commitment to the language describe their feelings. Each time that Susana Hidalgo introduces herself in a public presentation about the language reclamation initiative, she shows the pictures of the women of her family who represent her chain of authentication (Irvine, 1989): “my greatgrandmother was Koyla, my grandmother was Amelia, and this is my

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mother - Jono”. As for herself, Adela Brunel starts her speech by saying: “I only spent a little time with my mummy” [yo a mi mamá la tuve poquito], rendering the identification between her own biography and the language so explicit that it needs no further comment.

Conclusion: Reversing Tehuelche Language Shift The engagement of the Tehuelche with their language appears creative, emotional and authentic. This process is causing a positive shift in linguistic ideologies, and that is, indeed, what is at stake in language revitalization movements (Jaffe, 2007). The socialization into these language ideologies (and not into the language itself ) is shaping this fragile Tehuelche metalinguistic community. Their example shows not only that reversing language shift does not mean reversing the causes of that displacement, but also that this ideal cannot be imagined as a planned strategy. Otherwise, we would have nothing to learn about social groups or about language, nor about their complex relation. Tehuelche reclamation, says Paulo Hidalgo, “es sobre no olvidar” [it’s about not forgetting]. Memory may be as versatile as language, and indigenous people may use theirs in creative ways to be “heard as indigenous” (Graham, 2003, p. 203). If it is about being heard, then someone has to be there to listen, just as “the last speaker of Tehuelche” needed someone to speak to. It is precisely that feeling, “la urgencia de compartirlo” [the urgency to share it], as Claudia Flores often mentions, that sets the healing recognition process in motion. The profound transformations in the language and the community do not necessarily represent a rupture with the past. In one presentation, we included the screenshot with the Google images results for the word “tehuelche”. Those ancient (and sad) pictures were supposed to be challenged by the active (and eager) presence of Tehuelche today. After the talk, Adela Brunel said that what we had done was wrong, because “es gracias a ellos que hoy podemos hablar” [we may now speak thanks to them]. Renewal, then, is rather about allowing traditions to change as a way to keep them alive.

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Language reclamation, finally, cannot be based on language, but on people, for each one of them is linked to the language in a unique and personal way. A metalinguistic community provides an “inclusive environment” (Avineri, 2012, p. 17) for its members, where they may participate in language reconstruction from their own personal perspective. The apparently simple idea that Susana Hidalgo always repeats: “yo sólo quiero aprender a decir algunas cosas y decirle a la gente que todavía estamos acá” [all I want is to learn how to say a few things and to tell people that we are still here] becomes a manifesto. Acknowledgements This research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropology (Gr. 9813), the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, and the Anthropology Department of the Université de Montréal. It holds the ethical certification CERAS-2017-18-248-D(1). I would like to thank Luke Fleming, Robbie Penman and John Leavitt for their comments and insights. A special thanks goes to Netta Avineri, for showing me another way of looking at my own work.

References Ahlers, J. C. (2006). Framing discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 16 (1), 58–75. Avineri, N. (2012). Heritage language socialization practices in secular Yiddish educational contexts: The creation of a metalinguistic community. University of California. Avineri, N. (2017). Contested stance practices in secular Yiddish metalinguistic communities: Negotiating closeness and distance. Journal of Jewish Languages, 174–199. Avineri, N., & Kroskrity, P. V. (2014). On the (re-)production and representation of endangered language communities: Social boundaries and temporal borders. Language & Communication, 38, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lan gcom.2014.05.003 Blommaert, J., & Varis, P. (2013). Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity. In J. Duarte & I. Gogolin (Eds.), Hamburg studies

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Utilization of Ethnolinguistic Infusion in the Construction of a Trifurcated Metalinguistic Community: An Example from the Kernewek (Cornish) Language of Britain Jesse Harasta

Positionality Statement I first became interested in Cornwall and Kernewek while studying abroad as an undergraduate in the Mediterranean port city of Valencia. Expecting a purely Spanish context, I was shocked to find a local language and a vibrant, youthful movement associated with it. I decided to find another numerically smaller, more geographically compact European language for my own research and eventually settled on Cornwall. I was often asked whether I had Cornish ancestry or if I was planning on moving to Cornwall—typical categories of outsiders studying the language and eventually I was settled into a relatively rare category of J. Harasta (B) Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_7

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student: “people who just really like languages” as one friend described it. My relationship to language and place has become increasingly complex as the years have passed. I love Kernewek for its earthiness and its poetry—but especially for its subjunctive mood; as I like to tell people, English is just too grounded in a certainty of reality. I am also strongly connected to the people, landscapes and foods of Cornwall. Yet, I have become more ambiguous about the Language Revival at the same time, more critical of its implicit racial politics and other forms of exclusion, and at times more frustrated with its proponents’ ideologies and assumptions. As I stand today, my positionality is that I am not Cornish, nor do I aim to become Cornish. I am an American, a lover of language and Cornwall (and not just the pretty parts), an educator and a scholar. I believe passionately in linguistic diversity and the many uses of language. I hope to be the kind of friend to the Kernewek Movement who is willing to give unlooked-for, sometimes undesired advice.

Introduction Most people arriving in the British region of Cornwall do so by crossing the Tamar Bridge, which connects the English city of Plymouth in the County Devon to Saltash on the Cornish side. Facing Devon is a simple sign that bears the same message in two languages: “Welcome to Cornwall. Kernow a’gas Dynergh”. The second phrase is written in Kernewek, a Celtic language with only a few hundred speakers—far fewer than the 3,600 cars an hour the westbound lanes were designed to handle (Peter Brett Associates, 2013). Moreover, as all Kernewek speakers are also fluent in English,1 the bilingual sign appears, at first glance, a pointless exercise in linguistic tokenism. In fact, this sign is only the first and probably most prominent of thousands of examples of ethnolinguistic

1

This is because there has not been direct intergenerational transmission for over a century therefore, all Kernewek users are second-language learners; all available language learning materials are in English and so proficiency in English is necessary to learn Kernewek.

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infusion (Benor, 2020) scattered across Cornwall, the successful outcome of decades of campaigning aimed at building a metalinguistic community not of Kernewek speakers, but instead of cultural and ethno-political belonging. By fostering particular language ideologies, this project has the ultimate goal of convincing both insiders and (like the targeted audience of the Tamar Bridge sign) outsiders to Cornwall of the region’s need for cultural, political and economic autonomy. The Kernewek Language Revival2 in southwestern Britain has had a number of remarkable successes over the course of the twentieth century: it established institutions, published textbooks, grammars and dictionaries and a modest but important selection of literature, most notably poetry. The language has become increasingly present in the public sphere over that time, especially in bilingual signage in private businesses. In 2003, for example, the language was recognized and supported by the UK government and the Cornwall Council has supported it in a number of ways. Despite these victories, however, this language movement has still not achieved what its proponents have often considered the most important goal: the re-creation of a “speech community” (Gumperz, 2006) of widespread everyday use including inter-generational transmission. At the heart of this conceptualization is the idea that authenticity of a group’s claim to possessing a language comes out of the use by group members of linguistic forms that are marked as distinctive from the dominant language. In the case of Kernewek, much of this is manifested in a desire to develop an orthography that is visually distinctive from the dominant language, English. This goal remains elusive. Kernewek remains a “second language” (in the widespread terminology of the users), typically picked up in one’s retirement years, and the majority of students never achieve anything approaching fluency, however that is defined.3 This perceived failure was

2 “The Revival” is the widely used emic terminology to refer to the cluster of individuals and organizations promoting Kernewek since the early Twentieth Century. 3 Even within the Kernewek Revival, there are fierce debates about what qualifies as “fluency”, most dramatically summarized in a pair of rival systems of written and oral examination developed by competing language promotion organizations.

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widely recognized by participants in the Revival and was discussed during my fieldwork in Cornwall in the early 2010s. In this chapter, I dispute the assumption that the lack of a speech community equals a failure on the part of the Revival, and instead assert that the actions of the movement have been primarily aimed towards other, often unspoken goals, namely, the promotion of particular language ideologies that endeavor to promote Cornish distinctiveness and eliminate ethnic and national ambiguities through the presence of a unequivocally non-English local language. The hegemony of the concept of a reestablished speech community as a “gold standard”, an often-implicit goal made explicit by scholars like Fishman (1991) and Reyhner et al. (1999), obscures the fact that informally, the participants in the Kernewek Revival have largely come to understand, appreciate and promote their language for other political and cultural purposes. In 2014, I attended the annual conference of the Cornish Language Partnership (referred to by its Kernewek name “maga”, the verb “to grow” or “to nurture”), the state-sponsored Kernewek language regulator where there was an internal debate in the Kernewek Revival institutions about this apparent failure to achieve progress towards the ultimate goal of a speech community—the Gumperzian concept of a distinctive social group with shared, and presumably unique, language variety—while simultaneously achieving success in official recognition and widespread presence in the public space. It appears that the Kernewek using community is not unique in this regards: Sallabank (2013, p. xii) notes that the proponents of linguistic revitalization often pursue “high stakes” goals like “official recognition and formal education”, at the expense of what many linguists believe is the key to the development of stable speech communities, which is intergenerational transfer within the institution of the family. Kernewek regulators and promoters had been aware of this situation for years but seemed unable to reverse it. Kernewek therefore presents a case study of an apparent paradox at the heart of many language revivals: potentially tremendous successes in building the infrastructure of a standardized language and maintaining a movement across decades, yet disappointing in the stated primary goal of viable speech communities.

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To understand this situation, I will draw primarily upon three concepts: ethnolinguistic infusion, metalinguistic community and the more encompassing concept of language ideology. I will begin by introducing Cornwall and the Kernewek language movement, moving on to discuss the three theoretical concepts. I will then demonstrate how the case of Kernewek language shows the complex relationships between these phenomena. Then, I will examine the trifurcated nature of Kernewek activism, showing how it is directed simultaneously at an internal audience of Kernewek users; a liminal audience of ethnically Cornish individuals who may adopt the Revival’s language ideologies without utilizing the language and at an outer, ethnically English one. This emphasis on a trifurcated audience for revival work is a new development in the understanding of language revival and can become an important tool for understanding the sometimes-paradoxical actions of language enthusiasts in other contexts. By adding the dimension of audience into the discussions of ethnolinguistic infusion, I will demonstrate the complex, nested goals which this strategy allows revival movements to simultaneously pursue.

Cornwall and Kernewek Kernewek, often called “Cornish” in English, is a Celtic language with significant ties to Welsh and Breton. It is often considered by its users to be the indigenous language of Cornwall, a region with a contested political status comprising an approximately 100 mile by 40 mile peninsula extending from the southwestern corner of Great Britain and a small nearby archipelago. The language ceased intergenerational transmission in the late nineteenth century under the pressures of religious and political movements for modernization and Anglification (Deacon, 2007). However, around the same time, it was picked up by an enthusiastic group of antiquarians who sought to reconstruct and revive it as a language of spoken and written use. The 1905 publication of a Handbook of the Cornish Language has been traditionally seen as the public “coming out” of this movement, but it certainly existed in the final decades of the nineteenth

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century, making Kernewek—alongside Modern Hebrew—as one of the first revived languages in modern history (for a more recent, parallel case, see Domingo in this volume). Since that time, there has always been a community of Kernewek enthusiasts and a growing acceptance of the legitimacy and place of the language by Cornish people and, especially, Cornish nationalists (Beresford-Ellis, 1998). This movement has long been organized into formal institutions, including early organizations like the Old Cornwall Society and the Gorseth an Kernow—a ritual institution based around nineteenth century Romantic revivals of druidic ritual which provides recognition for accomplishments in the language and other cultural pursuits. The Bards of the Gorseth, for example, have an annual gathering called the Open Gorseth when students who have passed advanced language classes as well as those who have notable accomplishments in the promotion of Cornish culture are inducted as members and others are awarded prizes in poetry. Its creation was the first occasion in modern Cornwall where spoken Kernewek was heard in public and remains one of the most prominent public uses of the spoken language (Lyon, 2008). By the 1960s, the Language Movement developed more of its own institutions: organizations running language classes, music festivals, a radio station and a nursery school. Yet, oral histories collected during my fieldwork in the early 2010s revealed that despite these successes between the 1960s and the early 2000s, the movement towards a body of fluent speakers seemed to falter: the number of Kernewek speakers able to carry on a conversation comfortably in everyday topics continued to hover around 500 (Burley, 2008). Moreover, the population remained concentrated among pensioners who had learned the language after retirement, a phenomenon that was also noted in ethnographic visits to classrooms across Cornwall. Simultaneously to this stagnation, Kernewek exploded out of a narrow interest group and became widely accepted as a symbol of Cornishness. To understand this curious situation, we need the theoretical tools of linguistic anthropology.

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Theoretical Tools for Exploring Ideology, Community and Ethnicity This apparent paradox since the 1960s in the status and use of Kernewek can be best understood using three theoretical concepts: language ideology, metalinguistic community and ethnolinguistic infusion. I envision these concepts as akin to Russian nesting dolls: each subsequent subsumed within the previous, refining and focusing the analysis to the particular needs of the Kernewek context. The broadest concept of the three, language ideology is the hinge articulating the relationship between speech and belief. Along with Woolard and Schieffelin, I define language ideologies as systems of belief which “envision and enact links of language to group and personal identity, to aesthetics, to morality and epistemology… not only in linguistic forms but social institutions such as the nation-state, schooling, gender, dispute settlement and law hinge on the ideologization of language use” (1994, pp. 55–56). Language ideologies are “suffused with the political and moral issues pervading the particular socio-linguistic field, and because they are subject to the interests of their bearers’ social position” (Gal & Irvine, 1995, p. 968; see also Gal & Irvine, 2019). While language ideologies are pervasive, not all language ideologies are linked to the processes of metalinguistic community and explicit identity-making. For instance, in her ethnography of Catalan language ideologies, Woolard (2016) notes that Catalanist nationalist language ideologies exist in tension and dialogue with hegemonic Spanish language ideologies whose presence is often unrecognized—what she refers to as “explicit” versus “implicit” language ideologies. The Kernewek Revival’s strategy of ethnolinguistic infusion relies upon both explicit ideologies—the nationalist ideas of Cornish distinctiveness carried alongside the grammar in language lessons—and implicit ideologies—the assumption of Herderian ideology among all three of the trifurcated audiences. Building upon the foundation of language ideology, metalinguistic community is a concept that describes “a community of position social actors shaped by practices that view language as an object” (Avineri, 2017, pp. 174–175) often without the ability to converse in it, instead

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“engaged primarily in discourse about language and cultural symbols tied to language” rather than in it (Avineri, 2012, p. 2, emphasis in original). In these communities, enthusiasm for the language tends to outstrip competence in its use, but this is not an inherent problem as the goal of participants is the construction of a sense of belonging to a larger ethnic or religious community through the strategic employment of and affective attachment to a language rather than the creation of a community of everyday use; this concept is also echoed in Perrino’s concept of “intimate identities” (in this volume). This concept was grounded in study of the Myaamia language and community, where fluency explicitly took a back seat to group identity in the revival (Leonard, 2011). The concept of metalinguistic community stands in contrast to the concept of speech community. For sociolinguists in the field like Gumperz and Hymes, speech communities are identifiable communicative groups tied together by “frequency of social interaction patterns and set off from the surrounding areas by weaknesses in the lines of communication” (1972, p. 462) and, for Labov, their shared use of linguistic norms (1972, p. 120). The assumption being that a speech community is held together in distinctive, repeating communicative patterns that set it aside from others. In essence, the defining aspect of the speech community is ways that they share language norms and maintain a focus on performative proficiency, while metalinguistic communities are defined by a broader and more inclusive set of connections to the language. Metalinguistic Community members may, in fact, not have the ability to speak directly at all and are affective communities of feeling who share ideologies, not norms. Ethnolinguistic Infusion, at least in how it applies to the Kernewek Revival, is a tool for understanding one of the key the mechanisms by which Metalinguistic Communities transmit their Ideologies—it is one of the “specific language practices” that builds community (Avineri, 2017, p. 175). It applies to “members of a group incorporating fragments of their special language, in which most members have little or no competence. [With the aim that] group members to strengthen their connection to the language and/or to the group, in contrast to the primary goal of traditional language instruction, which is linguistic

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proficiency (Benor, 2020, p. 1). Ethnolinguistic Infusion bolsters identification with the community associated with the language; “the fact that something is said in Yiddish is more significant than what is said” (Benor, 2020, p. 2), a sentiment Kernewek promoters and Cornish Nationalists would completely understand. Ultimately, in the context of language revival, all three concepts are tools to an end, which is the fostering of desired relationships between language users and larger ethnic, religious or political communities. Even the proponents of speech community construction as the goal of language revitalization recognize this larger picture; in the introduction to the classic Revitalizing Indigenous Languages (1999) editor Reyhner notes “indigenous language revitalization is part of a larger attempt by indigenous peoples to retain their cultural strengths in the face of the demoralizing assaults of an all-pervasive modern individualistic, materialistic and hedonistic technological culture”. What proponents of many language revitalization projects are currently doing is achieving the end goal of ideological change without the intermediate step of speech community construction. In this vein, the unstated outcome of much Kernewek use has not been the aspirational goal of creating a community of use, but instead a vibrant community of belonging which could present three faces of unity: one two fellow language enthusiasts, one to bolster the ethnic belonging of what was perceived as a fragile identity and the other to powerful outsiders in order to assert the need for cultural, economic and political autonomy for Cornwall.

The Case of Kernewek Unlike previously described examples of metalinguistic infusion, which are focused upon constructed spaces of ethnic or ethno-religious belonging—such as children’s summer camps and language festivals— this chapter examines a movement with the goal to infuse the entire territory of Cornwall with the Kernewek language. This region includes many people who view themselves as members of an ethnicity, the Cornish, distinctive from the English, though this concept is contested

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(Deacon, 2019). There is a range of perspectives from those who view Cornishness as a regional English identity to those who understand Cornwall to be one of the “Six4 Celtic Nations”. Those who view Cornwall and Cornishness as tied to Celtic nationhood have a powerful symbolic tool on their side: the Kernewek language. Throughout Europe, a potent, widespread language ideology is the Herderian concept of the national language. Within this ideology, there is a one-to-one association between language, culture and the nation, with the underlying idea that a language community without its own state is either oppressed or not a language; in the converse, a nation without a distinctive language (such as Belgium) is seen as fundamentally weak (Anderson, 2016). This ideology, while originating the upper classes, has disseminated widely primarily through educational institutions to become a “banal” (Billig, 1995) assumption across social classes (Joseph, 2004, pp. 115–125). Within this ideology, there is an association of each language with a discrete culture and associated population and each population with a particular territory. There is an idea that a language embodies a unique mindset and that the possession of a language entitles a group to a measure of political autonomy in which they may express that mindset (Jaffe, 1999; Thomas, 2007). Ultimately the goal of the Kernewek Language Movement is the promotion of not the language, per say, but instead the ideology of Cornish cultural, social and political distinctiveness. While this ideology, rooted in indigeneity rather than diaspora, differs from those promoted in US Yiddish (Avineri, 2015) or Sephardicspeaking (Kirschen, 2019) communities, it is in line with the premise that. Participants are socialized to have certain beliefs and values about the language, and this is more of a priority than participants becoming competent speakers of the language. (Avineri, 2018, p. 3)

The first step in this process was the standardization of the language and the creation of the basic tools of the Movement, namely the texts 4

Along with Ireland/Eire, Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Mann and Brittany.

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that feature so prominently in many language revivals. Throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century, the Movement became more prominent in the public spaces. As recently as the early 1970s, language teacher and standardizer Richard Gendall noted that there were only two places in the entirety of Cornwall where one could see the language written in public—both being privately owned, carved stone monuments (1975, p. 14).

Infusing Space Through Placenames The Movement began to assert the presence of the language first in spaces within their private control. For example, in Britain, one is allowed to name one’s house and register it with the Royal Mail. Figure 1 is an image of a selection of the hundreds of homes with Kernewek names: Trelyn (Beautiful Home), Carn-Dhu (Black Rock), Chy an Kara (Lovely

Fig. 1 House name signs in Kernewek

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Home) and Chy an Fysk (Fish Home). Notably, these names can be used by anyone, including the mail carrier or someone writing out an address or the homeowner themselves, without needing any knowledge of the language. Because they then become officially registered, they mark and infuse the landscape with new Kernewek names, though this is not always successful as in one case I knew a Cornish man who referred to the Krowji (“Hovel, Shack”) Café as a “Polish restaurant” due to the unfamiliar name. Similarly, Kernewek enthusiasts also began to use the language to name their businesses. Figure 2 includes images of the stationary for Gweal Dower (Working with Water), a now-defunct landscaping business, and the sign for An Brythen Kernewek (the Cornish Tartan Center), tailor specializing in tartans. English translations or explanations are provided alongside the name in both cases so Kernewek knowledge is not necessary for the business’ clientele. Over time, the language movement began to promote certain stock phrases which could be easily memorized and employed by non-Kernewek users. One is “Nadelik Lowen” (“Happy Christmas”); in Fig. 3 are two examples of this phrase—a traditional municipal Christmas light display and in the window of a opticians’ employed with many translations of the same term—and in both cases the phrase’s meaning can be reckoned by those without knowledge of the language. Another stock phrase with near-universal understanding in Cornwall is “Kernow” which is the name for Cornwall itself. This term is widely

Fig. 2 Business names in Kernewek

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Fig. 3 Stock holiday greetings in Kernewek

used in business names: Kernow Massage, Kernow Animal Welfare, Kernow Property Services and Kernow Kabs for example and is typically used within an otherwise English name. During fieldwork in the late 2000s, all of the residents of Cornwall I asked were aware of the term’s meaning, however it was not required to be able to become a client of any of these businesses as the term carried no explanatory power for the business’ purpose. By the 1990s, Cornish Nationalists had won elections in several town and district councils across Cornwall and began to push for public signage. Figure 4 is an image of the very first publicly funded bilingual sign: the welcome sign for the town of Camborne, a center of the Revival. The term “Kammbronn A’gas Dynnergh” means “Welcome to Camborne”, however as the Conservative government had only allowed local governments control over their town welcome signs, it was not until the election of the Labour Government in 1997 that roads began to have bilingual signs. Today, Cornwall Council policy is when a monolingual sign needs replacing, it is done with a bilingual; reportedly some enthusiasts have “accidentally” hit signs with some frequency. Building upon these successes, in the early 2000s, the Cornwall Council took on an official Kernewek translation of its long-standing motto “One and All” into “Onen Hag Oll”—and began renaming its institutions. The road sign and private business home signage has combined to act as a form of mandatory ethnolinguistic infusion. Anyone who wishes to interact with one of these places or businesses must utilize the Kernewek terms or risk failing to deliver their package, receive their massage or navigate their car.

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Fig. 4 First Kernewek-English Bilingual Road sign

Finally, this process reached a peak in 2003 when the Blair Government recognized Kernewek as co-official with English within Cornwall and established Maga, an official funded body. One of Maga’s most popular services remains its free translation service. The Partnership regularly receives requests to provide official translations from the public. During fieldwork visits to Cornwall from 2008 to 2014, I observed the emergence of this program and conducted domain-style open interviews with Maga staff about their work. The translation project, being a major part of their outreach was discussed and the translators reported that a large percentage of these were for the names of businesses, roads, homes, pets, boats and children as well as stock phrases like mottos, greetings and welcomes.

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Understanding the Trifurcated Role of Kernewek The example of Kernewek shows how a language revitalization movement employing the tools of ethnolinguistic infusion may, in fact, have several target audiences in mind. This research has uncovered three target groups in the Cornish context. The first is, of course, the language activists and potential language activists that populate classes and committees, the second being ethnically Cornish individuals living in Cornwall and the third being non-Cornish—primarily English—individuals who live primarily outside Cornwall and are perceived as having political and economic power over Cornwall. As the chart in Fig. 5, “Ethnolinguistic Infusion and Varying Populations”, displays, the language movement’s efforts are felt differently by these three populations, with a particular difference being felt by those who are considered part of the Cornish ethnic ingroup and those in the outgroup. Cornish residents of Cornwall are understood—rightly or not—to be potentially sympathetic members of the ingroup while participants of the language movement are described (and often describe themselves) as ethnically Cornish. That said, it is important to note that the situation on the ground is more complex: my previous research has shown that these identities are often far more ambiguous and fluid and

Fig. 5 Ethnolinguistic infusion and varying populations

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that the process of learning the language is a tool to harden Cornish ethnic identity (Harasta, 2017). The activities of ethnolinguistic infusion are aimed at groups in general, rarely at individuals. This typically involves creating the passive context of infusion which is then encountered. It is the individual’s decisions (to drive down a road, to patronize a store, etc.) that place them within one of the three target audiences. While the movement actively reaches out to members of Cornish ethnicity, the impacts of ethnolinguistic infusion is felt by all groups—with efforts made to “export” the language to London and Brussels through its use in rallies, by Cornish elected officials in Parliament (BBC, 2010), in letters and petitions and in lawsuits over its status. During fieldwork I directly encountered a number of similar examples, such as a 2013 mass New Year’s email from a Cornish activist who was intensely involved in bringing EU programs and recognition to the region. The email read: Happy New Year to you all, from all of here—Bledhen Nowedh da! Trust things go well, and let’s keep in touch as we go forward into 2014. Much to do! Best Wishes and take care—lowena dhys. (emphasis in original)

The use of two stock phrases, “Bledhen Nowedh Da!” (“Happy New Year”) and “Lowena Dhys” (“With Affection”) was typical of many activists. However this individual told me that he had adopted the practice of the Kernewek sign off and the annual Kernewek New Year’s greeting when he began to pressure EU agencies to recognize Cornish ethnic distinctiveness and sought to subtly remind them of Cornish difference through the language. To emphasize the use of Kernewek, he had bolded “Bledhen Nowedh Da”. However, he had never studied the language, could not pronounce these terms and had copied them from a booklet of stock phrases. He was eager to have me look over the use of the phrases to make sure he hadn’t misused them grammatically (he hadn’t). This is similar to the ways that Ahlers describes “framing discourse” among Native Americans who utilize short sections of indigenous languages to open or close public events in order to mark their

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speech in English as coming from an authentically native perspective (2006). However, there are differences in the effectiveness of ethnolinguistic infusion depending upon the audience in question. Efforts of building affective metalinguistic community do not include outsiders and are directed inwards to ethnically Cornish individuals with the goal of fostering the Herderian nationalist language ideology. This had been successful among Language Activists, as invocation of the existence of Kernewek as “proof ” of Cornish distinctiveness was repeated in dozens of interviews and conversations. While I have less data on the impact upon English decisionmakers as they were outside the scope of my ethnography, I was told on numerous occasions’ interviews that this tactic did in fact work. For instance campaigners who successfully argued that Cornwall’s application for European Union Objective One Funding5 should be divided from that of its English neighbor, Devon, told me that demonstrating cultural difference like language was key to the campaign. The assumption of the presence of the Herderian National Language Ideology among those decisionmakers had borne fruit.

Conclusion Understanding transmission of meaning between speakers is a fundamental object of linguistic anthropology. The rich level of meaning deliverable through the content of utterances can divert our attention from the meanings carried through form—such as language or dialect choice. However, in the context of language revival, where a lack of conversant audience (or often even speakers), form becomes the primary driver of meaning. This can be an aid to scholars seeking to understand the importance of form.

5 Objective One was an EU-funded cohesion fund which provided economic stimulus to economically marginalized areas. When Cornwall’s application for cohesion funds was tied Devon’s, they collectively qualified for lesser tiers of aid. But when the regions were decoupled, Cornwall became the only region legally within England to qualify for full funding.

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The majority of those who write Kernewek or see it written cannot understand the content of their meaning. It is not what is said or written in Kernewek that matters but that it is in Kernewek in the first place (Shandler, 2008). Those who interact with the infused objects mostly belong not to the small group of language enthusiasts with some competency but instead to one of the other target groups discussed in this chapter: language activists, ethnic Cornish in Cornwall and (primarily) ethnic English decisionmakers outside Cornwall. Hence, if we are to understand the purpose of this case of ethnolinguistic infusion, we should differentiate between the varying target populations and their current and potential relationship to the metalinguistic community, a relationship mediated by language ideology. It appears that it is necessary for the success of this project that there be an identifiable language elite a core group able to produce high quality spoken and written utterances in the language; however, the case of Kernewek shows that this movement can have significant success without needing to expand this core group. The uses of Kernewek in this chapter may have parallels in other metalinguistic communities, especially among small groups who view language as a carrier of values and identity in a hostile world and within contexts (like Europe) where being able to claim linguistic distinctiveness allows a group to claim cultural or economic autonomy. Jaffe (1999) noted a similar dynamic in Corsica between language enthusiasts and those who had learned Corsican through community use and intergenerational transmission. In conclusion, I have argued that the ineffectiveness of the Kernewek language movement to produce their own stated goal of stable speech communities makes sense when one understands language as a tool for achieving other, non-linguistic goals and language ideology as a necessary component of that process. Ethnolinguistic infusion, metalinguistic community and language ideology are all components of a complex, long-term and often successful campaign directed not at language shift but instead at political, cultural and economic autonomy, one which engages many stakeholders and parties in varied ways.

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References Ahlers, J. C. (2006). Framing discourse. The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 16 (1), 58–75. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/ 15481395 Anderson, B. (2016). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso. Avineri, N. (2018). The ‘Heritage Narratives’ of Yiddish Metalinguistic Community Members. In E. Falconi & K. Graber (Eds.). The tales we tell: Storytelling and narrative practice. Brill Publishers. Avineri, N. R. (2012). Heritage language socialization practices in secular Yiddish educational contexts: the creation of a metalinguistic community. https://eschol arship.org/uc/item/9f50n171 Avineri, N. R. (2015). Yiddish language socialization across communities: Religion, ideologies, and variation. Language & Communication, 42, 135–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.12.006 Avineri, N. R. (2017). Contested stance practices in secular Yiddish metalinguistic communities: Negotiating closeness and distance. Journal of Jewish Languages, 5 (2), 174–199. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134638-05021119 Benor, S. B. (2020). Ethnolinguistic infusion at sephardic adventure camp. In R. Blake & I. Buchstaller (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the work of John R. Rickford . Routledge. Beresford-Ellis, P. (1998). The story of the Cornish language (3rd ed.). Tor Mark Press. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism (theory, culture and society) (1st ed.). Sage. BBC. (2010, May 20). St Ives MP Andrew George swears Commons oath in Cornish. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/869443 9.stm Burley, S. (2008). A report on the Cornish language survey conducted by the Cornish language partnership. Maga: The Cornish Language Partnership. https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/media/21486875/survey-report.pdf Deacon, B. (2007). Cornwall: A concise history. University of Wales Press. Deacon, B. (2019). Industrial celts: Making the modern Cornish identity 1750– 1870. CoSERG. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Multilingual Matters. Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (1995). The boundaries of language and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research, 62, 967–1001.

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Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (2019). Signs of difference: Language and ideology in social life. Cambridge University Press. Gendall, R. (1975). The Cornish language around us. Lodenek Press. Gumperz, J. (2006). Speech Community. In Duranti, A. (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 43–52). Blackwell. Harasta, J. (2017). ‘Because they are Cornish:’ Four uses of a useless language. Heritage Language Journal., 14 (3), 248–263. Hymes, D., & Gumperz, J. (Eds.). (1972). Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. Holt. Jaffe, A. (1999). Ideologies in action: Language politics on Corsica. Mouton de Gruyter. Joseph, J. (2004). Language and identity: National, ethnic. Palgrave Macmillan. Kirschen, B. (2019). Language ideology and practice among Judeo-Spanishspeaking Sephardim in Seattle and South Florida. Language & Communication, 69, 84–96. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. Leonard, W. Y. (2011). Challenging ‘extinction’ through modern Miami language practices. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35 (2), 135–160. Lyon, R. T. (2008). Gorseth Kernow: The Cornish Gorsedd what it is and what it does. Gorseth Kernow. Peter Brett Associates, LLP. (2013). River Tamar crossings study, Final Report. http://www.plymouth.gov.uk/river_tamar_crossings_study_final_report.pdf Reyhner, G. C., St. Clair, R. N., & Parsons Yazzie, E. (1999). Revitalizing indigenous languages. Northern Arizona University Press. Sallabank, J. (2013). Attitudes to endangered languages: Identities and policies. Cambridge University Press. Shandler, J. (2008). Adventures in Yiddishland : Postvernacular language and culture. University of California Press. Thomas, M. C. (2007). ‘K’ is for decolonization: Anti-colonial nationalism and orthographic reform. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49 (4), 938–967. Woolard, K., & Schieffelin, B. (1994). Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 23(55). Woolard, K. (2016). Singular and plural: Ideologies of linguistic authority in 21st century Catalonia. Oxford University Press.

Retaking Hãhãhãe: Revitalization and Reindigenization in a Context of Indigenous Erasure Jessica Fae Nelson

Positionality Statement I first came to Brazil as an exchange student in the city of Salvador in 2002. Having noticed the contradictions inherent to Brazil’s celebration of Indigenous ancestry and erasure of Indigenous people in a city known for its Afro-Brazilian heritage, I returned to Salvador in 2006 to conduct undergraduate thesis research on urban Indigenous identities. Two years later, I started to pursue a graduate degree in linguistic anthropology focusing on language revitalization. I asked an Indigenous friend from Salvador, Paula Kalantã, if she knew a community who was working to revitalize their language and she introduced me to Pataxó Hãhãhãe language activists and community leaders. I would soon learn that I was J. F. Nelson (B) University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_8

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continuing work started in the 1980s during a critical moment in which the Pataxó Hãhãhãe were retaking reservation lands and reclaiming their Indigenous identity. I consider myself to be both insider and outsider in what is sometimes an uncomfortable sense. In part I feel personally drawn to Indigenous language work because my grandmother, who passed away when I was eleven, told us that we have Lakota heritage. I am not Indigenous, but I empathize with others who may not know much about their heritage or who feel conflicted about it for some reason. Also, while I have been living in Brazil off and on since 2002, am married to a Brazilian, speak Portuguese fluently, and am comfortable with everyday life in Brazil, I continue to struggle with my status as a white foreigner in a context in which both whiteness and foreignness carry significant ideological weight. I am grateful to my Pataxó Hãhãhãe colleagues who have welcomed me into their lives, their homes, and as a partner in a shared luta, or “struggle,” for, in the words of Aracy Lopes da Silva “survival, dignity and the freedom to want to be Indigenous” (1982).

Introduction This paper is largely based on dissertation fieldwork carried out in 2014– 2015 on and near the Caramuru-Paraguaçu posto indígena, “Indigenous post” or what would be called a reservation in the North American context, in the state of Bahia, Brazil.1 It is also informed by my ongoing collaboration with community language revitalization efforts and experiences living in Brazil off and on since 2002, mostly in the city of Salvador, Bahia. Indigenous people in the Brazilian Northeast, including Bahia, have survived more than 500 years of ongoing colonization. Most of the Indigenous languages once spoken in the region have been lost, many 1

This field research was funded by Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship P022A1300. I am deeply grateful to everyone in Caramuru-Paraguaçu and Pau Brasil, especially the Titiá family, who have welcomed me into their homes and treated me like family. I am also grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers of this volume. It is a pleasure and an honor to be a part of this work.

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with little or no documentation. The Pataxó Hãhãhãe language has not been fluently, openly spoken since the 1920s, when the Hãhãhãe underwent removal to a settlement on Caramuru-Paraguaçu and forced acculturation. They have some documentation of their heritage language: a primer of roughly 100 words that continues to be of great symbolic value to the community (see Paraíso, 1988; Silva et al., 1982). Outside of specific social contexts it is rare to hear the language spoken beyond a few words or names, yet the Pataxó Hãhãhãe are clearly a “metalinguistic community” (Avineri, 2017, p. 175) and people of all generations participate in practices that value Pataxó Hãhãhãe language and identity. When I first began working with the Pataxó Hãhãhãe, language activists suggested that I frame my research not in relation to “revitalization,” but as part of a retomada da língua, or “retaking of the language.” At first, I interpreted this as a suggestion to fit my research into a political moment in which the Pataxó Hãhãhãe were mobilizing to reclaim reservation lands. Eventually, I realized that it was actually a significant reframing of the idea of revitalization that shifted the focus away from concepts of fluency that are too vague or unobtainable, or that did not fit current patterns of language use. Language revitalization scholarship has increasingly recognized Indigenous perspectives and goals (see, e.g., Hinton & Hale, 2001; Hinton, 2013; Meek, 2010; Leonard, 2011, 2017; Cruz & Woodbury, 2014; Bowern & Warner, 2015). Discursive disjunctures (Meek, 2010) such as these are important to take note of for more effective collaboration, as indications of what to examine in the ideological context [see Fishman, 1991; Dauenhauer & Dauenhauer, 1998; Kroskrity & Field (Eds.), 2009, on “ideological clarification”], and, hopefully, as part of moving toward a reclamation frame of language work in which Indigenous perspectives are valued and prioritized (see Leonard, 2017). The Pataxó Hãhãhãe are among a growing number of communities who are reawakening a language formerly considered to be “extinct” (see Hinton, 2001; Leonard, 2011; Yamane, 2001). Wesley Leonard (2011) asserts that the reclamation of the myaamia language from historical documentation after three decades of dormancy is difficult for “experts and nonexperts alike” to understand because of existing ideologies of linguistic purity and the permanency of linguistic “extinction” (137).

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Leonard ties current myaamia language use to a broader ideological struggle in which Indigenous people “challenge existing power structures by showing that Indians can and do participate in all aspects of life and will not accept an imposed narrative in which they live(d) only in the past” (136). The Pataxó Hãhãhãe are challenging similar power structures. Situating language use within a broader semiotic context, I argue that the ways in which the Pataxó Hãhãhãe are using their languages reshape existing linguistic and racial ideologies that would otherwise erase their presence in present-day Northeastern Brazil. I take a Peircean semiotic approach as it has been taken up in linguistic anthropology (see, e.g., Silverstein, 1976; Irvine & Gal, 2000; Agha, 2005), looking at how the Pataxó Hãhãhãe use both linguistic and nonlinguistic signs to reindigenize themselves and their social world. Below, I will first describe the broader social context, focusing on ways in which Indigenous people are erased and describing some signs of indigeneity that have become broadly salient and that are used in the local context. Then, I will discuss examples from Caramuru-Paraguaçu that illustrate a semiotic pattern of retaking and reindigenizing that I argue is consistent between linguistic and non-linguistic modes.

Indigenous Erasure in Northeastern Brazil and the Amazon as Source for Signs of Indigeneity The dominant ideology of race in Brazil has been described by Da Matta (1981) as the “Fable of Three Races,” the idea that all Brazilians share African, European, and Indigenous heritage. It is intimately connected to the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy (see Da Silva, 2014, p. 319), which Sheriff (2001) has described as “a nationalist ideology, a cultural myth, and … a dream of how things ought to be” (4). Both ideologies are myths that work to erase ongoing structural racism and prejudice, a phenomenon that Roth-Gordon (2017) has called a “comfortable racial contradiction” (4). For Indigenous Brazilians, these myths are part of an ongoing history of erasure and settler colonialism.

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As Da Silva (2014) explains, paraphrasing Vargas (2004), “Brazil’s founding logic, rendered commonsensical, negates the relevance of racial identification because most Brazilians are neither black nor white nor Indian but rather a combination of the ‘original’ three races” (p. 319). Brazil’s “racial geography” further contributes to Indigenous erasure.2 In general, Brazilians associate the Northeast with racial mixture and a colonial history, and Bahia with Afro-Brazilian heritage (see Ickes & Reiter, 2018). “Real” Indians are imagined by Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike to live in villages in the Amazonian rainforests (see Ramos, 1994, 1998). In the early 1980s, as Brazil’s process of re-democratization was gaining momentum (Ramos, 1998), the Pataxó Hãhãhãe were mobilizing to retake reservation lands in the Northeast. Simultaneously, Amazonian Indigenous peoples were mobilizing to protect their lands and communities. In the process, they formed alliances with national and international environmental groups, and began to strategically use visual signs such as feathers and body paint to construct presentations of self that drew on existing romanticized ideas of Indianness, especially in contexts of political mobilization and cultural performance (see Conklin, 1997; Conklin & Graham, 1995; Graham, 2002, 2005; Oakdale, 2004; Ramos, 1994; Redford, 1991; Turner et al., 2002). These events were widely publicized in both national and international media (ibid.). As a result, some bodily adornments became decontextualized (Briggs & Bauman, 1992) and enregistered (Agha, 2005) as signs of indigeneity generally, while remaining closely associated with Indigenous mobilization and resistance to the former dictatorship. The Kayapó style of feathered headdress is a good example. As Beth Conklin (1997, p. 727) explains: “The feathered headdresses that formerly were part of Kayapó sacred rituals have become secular political props and the sine qua non of activist apparel.” In other words, they became decontextualized from the sacred rituals in which they once had primary significance and are now widely used in contexts of political mobilization. In my 2

This phenomenon is of course not limited to Brazil. See, for example, Smith (2015) for an exploration of Indigenous erasure and the racial geography of Ecuador.

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experience the Kayapó style headdress is one of the most preferred and commonly used items in the Indigenous Northeast in both ritual contexts and political mobilization. Starting in the early 1980s, there was a noticeable increase in the use of bodily adornments such as seed jewelry and feather headdresses by Indigenous people in the Northeast, especially in contexts of political activism and community rights mobilization, as people actively and explicitly (re)claimed Indigenous identities (Paraiso, 1988; Conklin, 1997). I argue that this reflects their enregisterment as signs of indigeneity more broadly. T-shirts and bags from Indigenous political mobilization events are now coveted items, and often feature images iconic of indigeneity. Like seed jewelry, these items index indigeneity and/or solidarity. At the same time, as items of Western clothing they contradict widely-held stereotypes that Indigenous people do/should not wear Western clothing (see Ramos, 1998). At one community celebration, for example, I noticed a man wearing both a Kayapó style headdress and an event t-shirt featuring an almost identical headdress. These were paired with sunglasses, which especially index wealth and technology, jeans and a backpack. Jeans, a tshirt, a backpack, and sunglasses all carry counter-to-stereotype meaning, while the feathered headdress and event shirt index the wearer’s indigeneity. This layered combination of contrasting signs is common and is a good example of the kind of heterogenous semiotic pattern that I describe below.

Semiotic Reindigenization at Caramuru-Paraguaçu. By the 1940s, regional violence and different forms of trauma had forced most Pataxó Hãhãhãe to leave Caramuru-Paraguaçu. Many sought wage labor and other means of survival. Others were given as children by government officials to work without pay in the homes of wealthy families. For an entire generation prior to the 1980s community members had either lived in diaspora, stayed in the region but actively denied

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being Indigenous for fear of physical harm, or were unaware of their Indigenous heritage. The context in which the Pataxó Hãhãhãe are now reasserting their indigeneity is best understood not in terms of using specific signs to index a more or less authentic indigeneity, but as a broader semiotic pattern of reindigenization that exists recursively in everyday life (see Irvine & Gal, 2000 and López-Espino in this volume on “fractal recursivity”). In this section, I describe this pattern as it occurs in various spheres, from the reindigenization of the reservation landscape to the everyday objects that are commonplace in Hãhãhãe homes. In the next section, I explore how the use of Pataxó Hãhãhãe and other Indigenous languages can be understood as part of the same broader pattern. This pattern of reindigenization can also be seen as a form of semiotic decolonization. The spaces reclaimed by the Pataxó Hãhãhãe as they reoccupy reservation lands have been reindigenized in a variety of ways. Existing structures have been re-purposed, for living space and as schools and cultural centers. Signs of indigeneity are layered onto the exteriors of these structures left over from another era. One building used for cacao processing in the 1900s has become a community center; the garage of the “post boss” has been turned into a classroom. Images iconic of indigeneity, such as a figure with long black hair and a headband, have been painted onto the community center. In the reservation school of Bahetá Village, word lists decorate the walls alongside grass skirts as symbols of Indigenous culture (see Fig. 1). Sometimes, when a Pataxó Hãhãhãe word is unavailable it is borrowed from Patxohã, the re-elaborated variety of the related Pataxó language (see Bomfim, 2012). Inside homes, many of the same objects that decorate rural homes throughout the region can be found in Hãhãhãe homes: portrait photographs of relatives, calendars, and soccer team emblems. These are combined with photographs of families in Indigenous dress, and indigeneity-indexing items not currently in use such as seed necklaces, feather headdresses, and grass skirts (see Fig. 2). Rattles, another icon of indigeneity in Brazil, are everyday objects; these may be on display and/or be used as toys by children, who are encouraged to play at singing their own Torés (see discussion below).

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Fig. 1 A grass skirt hangs to the right of a list of greetings in Brazilian Portuguese and Patxohã on a wall of the main classroom of the reservation school at Bahetá Village. To the left is a state-sponsored poster promoting habits related to health and nutrition; in the upper right is a poster describing social values and featuring various signs of indigeneity including geometric designs, a man in a feathered headdress, and Bahetá herself. Photo by author 2015

Fig. 2 Bow, arrow, carved portrait and Kayapó style headdress decorate the interior of a home on Caramuru-Paraguaçu. Photo by author 2015

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Fig. 3 A young girl’s doll has been indigenized by her older cousins using ball point pen to represent the face painting commonly done in semi-permanent jenipapo fruit juice. Western style eyeliner seems to be another feature. Photo by author 2015

Like buildings, everyday objects can also be indigenized. While I was at Caramuru-Paraguaçu in 2014, a young girl’s doll was indigenized for her by her older male cousins using ball point pen (Fig. 3). A blond, blue-eyed Barbie style doll, it is tied to racialized ideas of class and even the idealized exterior (see, e.g., Roth-Gordon, 2017), the origin of “first world” foreigners, even as its added face paint valorizes a local, Indigenous beauty and way of being. Likewise, the “www” on the front of its shirt simultaneously indexes the www of the high-tech “world wide web” and the kind of grafismos, or graphic designs, that have come to be iconic of indigeneity throughout Brazil. In all of the above examples, innovation is valued and signs of indigeneity drawn from a wide variety of source contexts are added in creative fashion. Because of this variety and creativity, ideological contrasts are blurred between indigeneity and concepts such as modernity that are stereotypically imagined as contrasting with authentic indigeneity. This kind of semiotic reindigenization is a common part of everyday life in Caramuru-Paraguaçu.

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Linguistic Reindigenization In this section I focus on spoken language and how Brazilian Portuguese (hereafter BP) and various Indigenous languages are used in the same kind of semiotic pattern discussed above—by layering signs with potentially contrasting meanings in a heterogenous and even creative manner. Some words are drawn from a broad national context and are recognizable as indexical of indigeneity by a general Brazilian audience. Words from Indigenous languages might be used when their referential meaning is unknown to some or even all speakers, highlighting the significance of their symbolic value (see Ahlers, 2006). The Pataxó Hãhãhãe community is actually an alliance of what are known locally as “ethnicities,” whose heritage languages are only distantly related, if they are related at all: (in alphabetical order) Baenã (isolate/undocumented), Kamakã (Macro-Jê - Kamakanan), Karirí-Sapuyá (Macro-Jê - Karirian), Pataxó Hãhãhãe (Macro-Jê – Maxakalian),3 and Tupinambá (Tupi-Guaranian) (see Campbell, 2012; Loukotka, 1968; Rodrigues, 1986). Historically, BP has itself been influenced by the Tupinambá language and loans from Tupinambá into BP are numerous (Bacelar & Gois, 1997, p. 110). While many loans are no longer recognizable as Indigenous to speakers of BP, some still carry symbolic meaning associated with indigeneity. Common examples are óca, lit. “house,” understood to be specifically a traditional Indigenous structure of some kind; pajé, the BP equivalent of the English word “shaman”; and maracá, or “rattle” (Rodrigues, 1986). Recognizably Indigenous words borrowed into BP are one more symbolic resource for reindigenization. Like the Kayapó style feathered headdress, they are broadly recognizable as Indigenous in Brazil. The same is true of BP words that refer to icons of indigeneity such as bows, arrows, and villages (see also Graham, 2002). Just as spaces are retaken and reindigenized by repurposing and reshaping buildings and interiors, as discussed above, this semiotic retaking is also accomplished through spoken language. Regions of the reservation are known informally by their names from the times when seasonal migration was still common in the area. Some place-names have 3

Not to be confused with the related Pataxó language (see Bomfim, 2012; Urban, 1985).

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been changed officially. The São Lucas farm near the town of Pau Brasil, the first to be retaken in the retomada movement, is now known as Caramuru Village. The area on the reservation where the Pataxó Hãhãhãe were first made to live has been renamed Bahetá Village in honor of the last recorded speaker of Hãhãhãe. Even though signs remain with the names of many of the non-Indigenous farms, the Hãhãhãe locate themselves in an Indigenous landscape with this second layer of Indigenous names (see also Shulist, 2018). It is also common practice around Caramuru-Paraguaçu for people to have more than one name (see also Shulist, 2016). Some of the younger generations have Indigenous legal names or surnames that refer to their ethnicity, a common practice among Indigenous people in Brazil. Others might use an Indigenous name in addition to their legal name in BP. Many of my Indigenous colleagues prefer to use the name of an ancestor as their surname, a practice that also marks ethnicity among the Hãhãhãe. In online spaces such as Facebook and WhatsApp, some might additionally use a chosen Indigenous first name that they may or may not use in face-to-face contexts. Again, there is a general valuing of creative use and semiotic layering. Of any social context, the use of indigeneity-marking signs and the Hãhãhãe language is most concentrated at Toré events. The Toré is a multi-layered and complex social practice. It is at once prayer, dance, performance, political protest, and assertion of identity (see Grünewald, 2005; Reesink, 2000). It has had a central role in processes through which Indigenous groups in the Brazilian Northeast obtained federal recognition, and has been explicitly taught, learned, and revitalized between different Indigenous groups as part of regional ethnic mobilization. Toré songs are written by youth groups, community leaders, poets, and teachers, shared between communities, and learned on reservation schools. The Toré is both “the main symbol of Indianness in the region” (Grünewald, 2005, p. 17) and “work related to the realization of praxis that brings [a people] into existence” (14). On and around the Caramuru-Paraguaçu reservation, it is a social activity enjoyed by all generations. It is also performed for non-Indigenous audiences at political events and celebrations.

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Even at Toré events, signs of indigeneity are used in creative and at times seemingly haphazard combinations. At any given Toré event a variety of songs will be sung ranging from songs composed entirely in (an) Indigenous language(s) to songs sung exclusively in BP. Participants have usually learned and practiced the Torés beforehand, and the call and response structure of Toré singing facilitates the participation of anyone unfamiliar with a particular song even if they do not understand the referential meaning of the lyrics. In addition to featuring words in Indigenous languages, the lyrics in 4 refer to established icons of indigeneity: the bow, arrow, rattle, and forest. This is often true of Torés composed in BP. Another key feature of many Torés is that they explicitly refer to o índio, or “the Indian” (Fig. 4 line 1). This Indian character metaphorically represents all Pataxó Hãhãhãe, or even all Indigenous people, and is a means through which specialized knowledge (“a ciência do índio,” or “the Indian’s science”) or counter-tostereotype characteristics can be associated with indigeneity. Some Torés talk about work or the Indian working, for example, in contradiction to 1

Tihi Pataxó Indian

Hãhãhãe hameá

Pataxó

Hãhãhãe

no

dance

hamanguí, in.the

forest

2

3

com puhui

atexé e

maracá,

with bow arrow

and rattle

hameá

Pataxó

no

dance

Pataxó

in.the

hamanguí. forest

Fig. 4 A popular Pataxó Hãhãhãe Toré song composed by teacher, activist, and poet Bawaí Pataxó Hãhãhãe (Kariri-Xocó et al., 2013, p. 35). Words in BP are in bold

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the common “Lazy Indian” stereotype that positions indigeneity in opposition to social ideals such as progress and modernity. These are the songs of Indigenous mobilization of the Brazilian Northeast. They often refer implicitly or explicitly to the luta, or collective fight to reclaim culture and identity, and address anti-Indian violence and oppression or social injustice, as in the following Toré lyrics: “Com o rosto pintado, maracá na mão, nós vai a nossa luta com Tupã no coração,” “With a painted face, rattle in hand, we go to fight with Tupã in our hearts” (Kariri-Xocó et al., 2013, translation my own). At any given Toré there will be most likely a similar range of songs resulting in a variety of ways in which indigeneity is indexed, from songs in Indigenous languages in which the referential meaning is secondary to the symbolic, to songs in BP that refer to shared knowledge and/or challenge known stereotypes. The result is a heterogeneous and creative mix of signs. Just as signs of indigeneity are layered onto the existing landscape and physical environment, so are Indigenous words and those that refer to icons of indigeneity layered onto existing social and linguistic practices, from the informal speech of teenagers among their friends to community events like the Toré .

Discussion Scholars have critically explored Indigenous uses of visual symbols that index ethnic authenticity for non-Indigenous audiences, but that also draw on and reproduce dominant ideologies of indigeneity as an antimodern, racialized other (see Conklin, 1997; Conklin & Graham, 1995; Graham, 2002, 2005; Oakdale, 2004; Redford, 1991; Ramos, 1994; Turner et al., 2002). Some have also pointed out the conflicting pressures between contexts in which “exotic body images” (Conklin, 1997) are valued as indexes of authentic indigeneity, and contexts of local antiIndian racism in which signs of indigeneity are taken to be indexical of negative characteristics associated with racialized stereotypes of Indians (see also Graham, 2005). Indigenous people have employed nuanced semiotic strategies for navigating this treacherous ideological contradiction. Conklin (1997,

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pp. 716–7) argues that clothing that conforms to local social norms can be used by Indigenous people “to gain greater respect and equality in face-to-face interactions” and to avoid being targeted in openly racist contexts. More recently, she notes a tendency to combine “Western” clothing with “native body decorations” that, she argues, mark indigeneity in contexts such as urban centers where Indigenous people would otherwise not be recognized as Indian. She also notes that such combinations have an “aesthetic appeal” for non-Indigenous allies, giving the example of Kayapó cameramen “resplendent in headdresses, body paint, feathered armbands, and earrings” that have been widely disseminated by global media. Conklin (ibid.) argues that Kayapó cameramen, by appropriating “complex Western technologies” as Indigenous people, challenge “views that equate authenticity with purity from foreign influences.” I would argue that often such images resonate so well with nonIndigenous audiences precisely because they so clearly index, and reify, this contrast between modernity and indigeneity, because it is the point of contrast itself that is interesting to the audience. If we imagine that the cameramen are not using headdresses, body paint, feathered armbands, and earrings, if a cameraman is wearing blue jeans and an event shirt featuring an image of a headdress, or has curly hair, suddenly there is less of a semiotic contrast. The cameraman is indexically further from established stereotypes of indigeneity and it becomes that much less interesting that he is using a camera, and that much less likely that he will be considered a “real Indian”—perhaps especially because he is using a camera. Graham and Penny (2014, p. 16) suggest that the performance of indigeneity may be even more critical to Indigenous peoples who do not conform to common stereotypes. Among potential consequences for not conforming to these stereotypes is the loss of non-Indigenous allies. For example, Alcida Rita Ramos (1994) has criticized the tendency of Brazilian “indigenists,” or (often academic) supporters of Indigenous political actions and rights mobilization, to support or criticize Indigenous people based on how well they conform to their perceptions of how “real Indians” should be, or act. In my experience the Pataxó Hãhãhãe explicitly reject the idea that race or shared cultural practices might

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make them less Indigenous, and view such perspectives as an element of anti-Indian racial prejudice. The Pataxó Hãhãhãe are not using signs of indigeneity to perform what might seem to others to be a more authentic indigeneity; the diversity and individual creativity with which they use these signs to assert their indigeneity in a context of anti-Indian racism and Indigenous erasure are itself a rejection of the limitations of how Indigenous authenticity is imagined. Signs that would otherwise index non-indigeneity are not generally hidden or minimized, but indigeneity-indexing signs are instead layered on, whether they are objects hanging on the wall of a home, seed jewelry, or Indigenous words and references added to everyday speech. I argue that the resulting multiple semiotic contrasts blur, rather than reify, distinctions between indigeneity and concepts such as modernity. By blurring these distinctions and making indigeneity-indexing signs relevant to the everyday, indigeneity is also made present tense. This time aspect is important, given that Indigenous erasure is often accomplished by locating authentic indigeneity in the past.4 Used in such combinations, signs are also enregistered as new indexes of indigeneity. The use of Hãhãhãe and other Indigenous languages by the Pataxó Hãhãhãe is best understood in terms of a broader process of “retaking,” itself inseparable from the retaking of reservation land and reclaiming of Indigenous identities, in which indigeneity is semiotically brought into the present and made locally relevant. In this context, goals oriented toward degrees of linguistic fluency resonate uncomfortably with stereotypes of authentic Indians who are fluent in an Indigenous language and dis-fluent in BP. Recognizing this disjuncture (Meek, 2010) is important because, as McCarty et al., (2018, p. 170) remind us, language work is fundamentally about social justice. Indigeneity continues to be a contested identity here, as elsewhere, but Pataxó Hãhãhãe valuing of individual creativity and mixing of signs destabilizes an ideological framework in which Northeastern Indigenous people are erased and

4

This is part of the significance of Indigenous futurism in the North American context (see Dillon, 2012).

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contests anti-Indian stereotypes. At the same time, in using recognizable markers of indigeneity the Pataxó Hãhãhãe draw on and to some extent reproduce existing concepts of indigeneity, and even racialized stereotypes. Locating language use within multimodal semiotic processes allows us to explore these links between processes of language revitalization and processes through which ideas about indigeneity, race, and racism are remade.

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Language Mediating Relations with the State

“I Didn’t Know It Was a Language Back Then”: The Ideological Value of Recognition Among Gallo Advocates in Brittany Sandra Keller

Positionality Statement I first encountered Gallo while serving as a high-school English language assistant in Brittany, France. Born and raised in the United States, I am a native speaker of neither Gallo nor French. While I had initially requested placement in Brittany because of my interest in the betterknown regional language of Breton, I was placed in a traditionally Gallo-speaking area. Fortuitously, a colleague explained that this part of Brittany had “our own language,” and invited me to a Gallo storytelling evening. I found Gallo arresting—close enough to French that I could understand a bit, but also intriguingly new. The performances, too, were compelling; I loved hearing people share stories, poems, and songs. I S. Keller (B) Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_9

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would go on to attend Gallo classes and festivals, and my experiences in Brittany led me to pursue graduate study in sociolinguistics. When I returned to Brittany for dissertation fieldwork, my local history and friendships led to Gallo advocates’ welcome—if also to good-natured humor about the idea of “une Ameriqhaine,” a vector of globalization par excellence, being interested in a language popularly perceived to be so local in scope. My non-native status doubtless meant I did not interpret some nuances as locals would, but it also helped me enter into dialogue with people of varied positionalities toward Gallo. When I was asked what I saw to be the future of Gallo, I explained that what interested me was what Gallo users were doing today, and that the future of Gallo was for its speakers to decide. Across the years, I have seen myself in the roles of Gallo appreciator, learner, user (when locally ratified), and scholar, while never forgetting my ultimate position as a guest within the community. My time in Brittany has informed my commitment to representing language in France in all its diversity, both in scholarship and through my teaching of French, where I encourage students to appreciate Francophones worldwide who fight linguistic hegemony in creative ways.

Introduction This chapter concerns Gallo, a regional language of Brittany, and the advocates, artists, and everyday users who strive to render Gallo visible and compelling despite France’s long history of marginalizing regional languages and their speakers. Gallo is a langue d’oïl, a Romance variety typologically closely related to standard French. This similarity, especially in contrast to the co-present Celtic regional language of Breton, has resulted in residents’ often denying Gallo ontological status as a language. Instead, locals widely characterize Gallo as “du français déformé” [deformed French] or “une langue de plouc” [hick language] (Blanchet & Le Coq, 2007; Le Coadic, 1998; Keller, 2016). This misrecognition means that those invested in using and promoting Gallo often find themselves defining to acquaintances what they believe Gallo

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to be—a separate language, not just “hick talk”—as well as explaining why it matters to them. During my fieldwork in 2013–2014, I noticed that definitions of Gallo and its community often foregrounded matters of knowledge. In particular, advocates distinguished two different ways of “knowing” Gallo: speaking Gallo (knowing how to use it), and knowing that Gallo was a language. When I asked Bèrtran Ôbrée, a prominent Gallo musician and activist, why he wrote a Gallo-language column for the magazine of the département of Ille-et-Vilaine, his explanation highlighted these different ways in which locals were understood to know—or not know—Gallo: [J’ecris] pour s’avizer qe ce qe le monde, il apelent ‘le patois’ ben c’ét ça ! C’ét le galo, c’ét les mots qe vla, qe je dis den les articls. […] Y’a bel e ben de monde ben, du galo, i nen qenéssent, més qhoqefai i s’avizent pâs […]. I pensent qe c’ét du françaez alors qe c’ét pâs du tout du françaez standard hein ? Ça c’ét une chôze. Més ce qe j’e en téte itout c’ét qe du monde qi vivent den le couin, qi sont pâs de dede la, […] c’ét yeûs doner un petit des cllës pour vla, pour un petit de qenéssance su la langue. Mai j’ses ben qe c’ét pâs du tout come ça q’i vont aprendr a caozer galo hein ? pasqe c’ét just une fai tous les touéz mouéz ! […] C’ét yeûs doner un petit de conscience de ce qe c’ét […] J’e des retours du monde qi dizent ‘Ah ben oui, on ét benéze, on regarde [tai] a chaqe fai […] Ça nous fèt pllézi.’ [I write] to make aware that what people call ‘patois,’ well it’s that! It’s Gallo, it’s the words that voilà, that I say in the articles. […] There’s a lot of people, well, they know some Gallo, but sometimes they don’t realize. […] They think that it’s French, whereas it’s not at all standard French yeah? That’s one thing. But what I have in mind also is people who live in the area, who aren’t from here […] it’s to give them a few keys for, well, a bit of knowledge about the language. I know that it’s not at all like that that they’re going to learn to speak Gallo, eh? Because it’s just once every three months! […] It’s to give them a little bit of consciousness about what it is. […] I get some feedback from people who say, ‘Ah well yes, we’re happy, we look at [your column] each time […] We enjoy it.’

Bèrtran’s response imagined a local community (Anderson, 1991) in which “a lot of people […] know some Gallo”—that is, they have

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some degree of proficiency—but “don’t realize” that Gallo is a language different from French. Five different verbs of cognition (“to make aware,” “to know,” “to realize,” “to think,” “to learn”) along with the nouns “knowledge” and “consciousness,” used in quick succession, highlighted the centrality of epistemology to Bèrtran’s view of language advocacy: he wanted to bring about an epistemological transformation from ignorance about Gallo to knowledge. Simultaneously, Bèrtran hoped to inspire a sense of “happiness” or “enjoyment” in recognizing Gallo, even if his quarterly column would not by itself lead to proficiency. These concepts—knowing how to speak Gallo, knowing that it is a language, and fostering positive affect toward the language and its users—will be the central concepts this chapter will explore. Like other contributions to this volume, this chapter speaks to how minority language users negotiate community membership through tools other than linguistic proficiency. Specifically, I discuss how Gallo artists, advocates, and learners oriented toward a subject position I call language recognizer and made that role seem positive and compelling across several genres of discourse: on stage at language festivals, in print materials about Gallo, and in conversation. While proficiency in Gallo was positively evaluated, it was not entailed by the recognizer role, nor was widespread revitalization a chief goal for most. Instead, advocacy focused on helping audiences build locally valued epistemological and affective relationships with Gallo. Through how they modeled the recognizer role, advocates encouraged popular recognition of Gallo as “a language,” in contrast to its frequent designation as “deformed French,” and fostered a positive affective connection to Gallo and its speakers. Ultimately, by tracing the recognizer role across genres, I hope to delineate at a micro-interactional level one type of symbolic process through which minority language speakerhood can be made both inhabitable and compelling, even for those who are not fluent users of the language in question.

Stance, Ideology, and Community The Gallo advocacy scene can be termed a metalinguistic community, or a “communit[y] of positioned social actors shaped by practices that

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view language as an object” (Avineri, 2017, p. 174). Gallo advocates frequently treated Gallo as an object, commenting on their own or others’ Gallo usage, defining Gallo in relation to Breton and French, and debating its status and future. Avineri highlights that, for metalinguistic communities, “socialization into language ideologies [is] a priority” (p. 175). In this chapter, I illustrate how Gallo advocate discourse socialized community members into stancetaking patterns that promoted locally valued ideologies. While language attitudes and affiliation accrete over lifespans, every act of affiliation necessarily occurs in a specific moment of interaction. These micro-interactional acts are known as stances, defined by Du Bois (2007) as public communicative acts “through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field” (p. 163). I will concentrate on two types of stance: epistemological stances, related to knowledge (e.g., “I didn’t know it was a language”), and affective stances, related to emotion (e.g., “We enjoy it”). Stancetaking occurs at an immediate emergent level, but it enters into identity-based, macrosocial, and ideological negotiations as well, particularly when stances are repeated within a community in successive iterations over time (Wortham, 2003). As Jaffe (2009) explains, “the taking up of particular kinds of stances is habitually and conventionally associated with particular subject positions (social roles and identities; notions of personhood) and interpersonal and social relationships (including relations of power)” (p. 4). Within the field of minority language ideologies, I follow scholars including Avineri, Jaffe, and McEwan-Fujita (2010), who have employed the notion of stancetaking to understand how specific acts of (dis)alignment toward language-objects accrete into identities and define communities.

Ethnographic Background The data analyzed here were collected over twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Brittany in 2013–2014. Working with Gallo

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students (preschoolers to retirees), teachers, association members, and artists (storytellers, writers, and theatre performers), I audio-recorded language classes and group interviews; audio-/video-recorded theatre and storytelling performances; and collected print materials promoting Gallo. Gallo is both nationally and locally marginalized. The Herderian nation-state of France has long engaged in hegemonic language politics (Jaffe, 1999); a recent statement by Gallo advocacy groups decried “a ‘French-language monoculture’ system that imperils linguistic diversity and is incompatible with the fundamental right to express oneself in one’s language of choice” (Bertègn Galèzz & Chubri, 2020; my translation). While most advocates today speak standard French—and many are teachers or other professionals—many share stories of (grand)parents who were shamed for Gallo ways of speaking. Locally as well, Gallo is marginalized with respect to the Celtic language of Breton. Since 2004, Brittany’s official language policy has considered both Breton and Gallo to be “les langues de Bretagne” [the languages of Brittany]; however, Brittany’s cultural specificity rests strongly on its Celtic heritage, and it is Breton that connotes this cultural cachet. It is Breton that denotes regional identity in product branding and most bilingual signage (Conseil Culturel de Bretagne, 2015; Hornsby & Nolan, 2011).1 The two languages have similar numbers of self-declared speakers—roughly 200,000 for each—but while virtually all residents have heard of le breton, a 2018 survey found that 35% of the population in traditionally Gallo-speaking areas, and 46% in traditionally Breton-speaking areas, did not know what was meant by the labels gallo or patois 2 (TMO Régions, 2018). Gallo and Breton advocates have succeeded in gaining a place for both languages in the national education system. If opportunities are less fully developed for Gallo than Breton, Gallo is nonetheless the only langue d’oïl other than French itself to be a subject on the baccalauréat. While 1

Elsewhere (Keller, 2016, 2019), I elaborate on the difference in visibility and cultural commodification between Gallo and Breton, as well as tactics advocates have used to broaden Gallo’s semiotic sphere beyond a strict association with the rural past. 2 The label gallo is preferred in advocacy contexts, but many speakers instead refer to the variety as patois. The latter term, used across the French-speaking world to refer to a range of nonstandard variants, can encapsulate a great variety of stances toward Gallo, from disdain to affection (Blanchet & Le Coq, 2007; Keller, 2016).

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Gallo can be studied from preschool to university, advocates and teachers alike often seemed to encourage recognition of Gallo as a language— and feelings of attachment to it—before proficient use. These ideological positionings offer an alternative to revitalization approaches that foreground fluent speakerhood above all else. As I discuss times when Gallo advocates highlighted affect and recognition above proficiency, I will ask: how did locally circulating genres encourage residents to take up a role of “Gallo recognizer”? What specific stances toward Gallo and its speakers did this role entail? And, finally, what greater purpose might this role serve within the larger context of minority language advocacy?

Tracing the Recognizer Role Across Community Genres The following analyses concern three genres that circulated within advocacy spaces: (1) narratives insiders told about their past, non-Gallorecognizing selves; (2) print materials that presented Gallo to wider audiences; and (3) a play where characters discuss Gallo. Across these genres, I will trace a “Gallo recognizer” position entailed by stances of epistemological confidence and positive affect. Recognizers know that Gallo is a separate language from French, and feel attachment toward Gallo, even if they do not (necessarily) know how to speak it. Furthermore, I will show that these texts invited even non-proficient observers to become recognizers, by socializing them into asking the right questions about the language—and feeling the right feelings.

Genre 1: Advocate Narratives of Past Ignorance and Present Knowledge I will first present two personal experience narratives in which Gallo advocates juxtaposed a past self who did not recognize Gallo as a language with a present self both knowledgeable and passionate about it. The narrative in Example 1 comes from my interview with two Gallo radio hosts: storyteller Matao Rollo and his colleague, author

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and educator Anne-Marie Pelhate. Here, Matao relates an episode from his teenage years, when a cousin told Matao he should take a Gallo class, given that his grandparents spoke Gallo. Matao voices his past self as dismissively retorting: “Oh but it’s not a language, you know, it’s deformed French!” (2–3). Matao identifies this memorable moment as “the first time I put words on how my grandparents spoke” (20): Example 1. “It’s not a language, you know”3 1

Matao:

2 3 4 5 6

Anne-Marie: SK: Matao:

7 8 9 10

11 12

Anne-Marie: Matao:

13 14 15

16

Anne-Marie:

E la mai je me rapele li direr, And there, I remember telling him, “Ah mais c’est pas du- C’est pas une langue hein, “Oh but it’s not- it’s not a language you know,” “C’est du français déformé !” “It’s deformed French!” [Mmm ! [Mmm ! […] Pisqe mai j’avaes[…] Because I hadje ses méme pâs si je- je savaes qeI don’t know if I- If I knew thatje cres, I think, je ne me ses jamés dit I never told myself, “Pépé e Mémé caozent patouéz” “Pop and Granny speak patois” ((blows out air)) Mm ! Je cres qe je ne ses jamés dit ça cai. […] I think I never said that you know. […] Mémé, a parlaet le mémé ! […] Granny, she spoke Granny! […] Elle parlaet le mémé She spoke Granny E toutes les mémés caozaent de méme. […] And all grannies spoke that way. […] ((laughter)) Tu t’és pôzë ben la qhéssion cant méme ! Well, you still asked yourself the question! (continued)

3 I have represented words that impressionistically sound French to me in French orthography, and words that sound Gallo in Gallo. While Matao’s choices here strike me as intentional voicing shifts, recognizably Gallo/French lexemes commonly co-exist with bivalent ones (Woolard, 1999), and some may disagree with my judgments.

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(continued) 17 18 19 20

Matao:

E don ça ce taet la permiere fai qe je dizaes And so that was the first time I said “Ben ouais més c’ét pâs du françaez défo“Well yeah but it’s not defor“C’est ! C’est du français déformé.”4 “It is! It is deformed French.” Ça taet la permiere fai qe je mettaes des mots su coment qe mes grands-parents caozaent It was the first time I put words on how my grandparents spoke

Punctuating his narrative with five epistemological verbs (“remember” (1), “know” (7), “knew” (7), “think” (8), “think” (12)) and five verbs of declaration of facts about Gallo (“telling” (1), “told” (9), “said” (12), “said” (17), “put words on” (20)), Matao orients to his own past lack of Gallo recognition as autobiographically significant. In this rich ideological moment, the younger Matao turned down the opportunity to claim Gallo as a language and affiliate with his grandparents—a decision Anne-Marie and I interactionally frame as unfortunate by our reactions of “Mmm!” (4–5). Matao’s past designation of Gallo as “not a language”—and his current ruefulness about it—makes clear the ideological weight of labeling. The choice to designate one way of speaking as “a language” and another as dialect, patois, or, here, deformed French, is obviously political. Gallo recognition is accomplished partially through a stance of opposition toward the power dynamics that would exclude Gallo from status as “a language.” Anne-Marie’s bracing remark to Matao, “Well, you still asked yourself the question!” (16), suggests that the act of labeling, of “asking oneself questions” about language status, resonates with her as a fellow advocate. The remaining examples will further explore the important role of asking oneself questions about Gallo—and of knowing how to answer.

4

Interestingly, Matao misspeaks, initially voicing his past self saying “It’s not deformed French” (emphasis added), before clarifying that he had actually declared that it was. Denying that Gallo is deformed French seems to have become part of present-day Matao’s habitus. Matao thus embodies Gallo recognition in the interactional moment, even while depicting his past self as a non-recognizer.

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Example 2 is excerpted from an interview with four of my classmates in a Gallo leisure course. All learners were over the age of 50, myself excepted, and the interview took place during the final days of the term, when we were well-acquainted. When Marie5 introduces the idea of “some people” having been ashamed of Gallo-speaking relatives (1–4), our classmate Josette says, “myself included” (7). Josette then recounts her own childhood shame regarding her mother’s Gallo (13–14), and lack of knowledge that Gallo “was a language” (15, 19). Classmate Bernard implies he felt similarly toward his own mother (16) and admits his own past ignorance that his mother’s use of the Gallo term pratiqes [pocket money] (33) was actually Gallo, and not an odd use of the French word pratiques [practices] (35): Example 2. “I didn’t know that it was a language back then!” 1

Marie:

2 3 4 5

Josette:

6 7 8

Michelle:

9

Josette:

10 11 12

Certaines personnes dizaent Some people used to say “cant je taes jeune, euh “when I was young, um, cant je taes adolescente, when I was an adolescent, j’avaes honte de mes parents.” I used to be ashamed of my parents.” Oui ben oui ! Yes, definitely Ouais mais ça c’est pasYeah but that’s notje pense que moi la première hein ? I think myself included, you know ? [Mhm ! Tu l’as vécu, mm. [Mhm! You lived it, mm. [Tu sais quand j’allais en ville avec ma mère, [You know when I used to go into town with my mother, moi je l’ai vécu hein ? I lived it, you know? quand j’allais en ville avec ma mère euh When I used to go into town with my mother um il y avait les commerçantes, there were the shopkeepers, (continued)

5 While I use the actual names of artists and authors with their permission, I use pseudonyms for these classmates.

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(continued) 13 14

15

16

Bernard:

17 18 19

Josette:

30

… Bernard:

31 32 33 34 35

36

Michelle:

37

Josette:

38

Bernard:

39

SK:

40

Josette:

41

Michelle:

“Bah oui bah” je disais à [maman], “Hey,” I would say to [Mom], ((deep voicing)) “Mais parle français hein ?” “But speak French okay?” ((higher pitch)) Parce que moi je savais pas que c’était une langue à l’époque ! Because me, I didn’t know that it was a language back then! Ben ma mère c’est pareil hein ? Well my mother it was the same thing yeah ? elle me disait ça quand euhShe used to tell me that when um[elle habitait à Rennes au départ, [she lived in Rennes at the beginning, [Je savais pas que c’était une langue hein ! [I didn’t know that it was a language you know! ((10 turns omitted)) Je me suis toujours demandé, I always asked myself, pourquoi ma mère euh elle disait des trucs comme why my mother um she would say things like “Va voir ta grand-mère” ou je sais pas quoi ‘Go see your grandmother’ or I don’t know what “Elle va te donner des pratiqes.” Je‘She’s going to give you some pratiqes’. Imais je me dis but I say to myself, “Mais qu’est-ce que c’est que cette histoire de ‘pratiques’ ?” ‘But what’s with this ‘practice’ business? ((laughter)) Mhm ! Mhm ! Mhm ! Mhm ! Oui oui Yes yes Hein ? C’est- c’est You know ? It’s – it’sMés qhi q’ét une pratiqe ? But what is a ‘pratiqe’ ? C’est- pratiqes c’est des étrennes tu sais ? It’s- pratiqes it’s some pocket money you know ? Un petit peu de- un petit peu de sous euh A few- a few pennies euh (continued)

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(continued) 42

Marie:

43

Josette:

44

Bernard:

45

De l’argent Some money De quoi- de quoi acheter un paquet de guenaods ! Something to buy a packet of candy! ((laughter)) Voilà ! That’s it ! ((laughter)) Ça va, des pratiqes So no problem, pratiqes

While Josette recognized as a young girl that what her mother habitually spoke was not quite French—indicated by her recounted plea “’But speak French okay?’” (14)—she reports not knowing it was “a language” (15, 19). In this childhood episode, Josette occupied a position of nonrecognizer, reacting with shame to her mother’s speech. In contrast, her adult self recognizes Gallo’s linguistic status. In her use of the past imperfective form of the epistemological verb savoir [to know] (15, 19), Josette’s repeated insistence that she “didn’t know it was a language” presupposes that “it,” Gallo, actually is a language, and that she now knows that to be the case. While both Josette and Bernard portray their past selves as ignorant of Gallo’s language status, they both occupy recognizer roles in our present-day interaction. When I reveal my own ignorance of the Gallo lexeme pratiqes (39), all four classmates assume a knowledgeable epistemic stance toward Gallo, supplying three French translations (40–42) and a related Gallo word (43), all of which Bernard ratifies with “voilà!” (44). The very multiplicity of translations, punctuated by laughter, suggests that these classmates are motivated by enjoyment of their own Gallo knowledge at least as much as by resolving my confusion. This contrast highlights the narrated gap between these speakers’ past, non-Gallo-recognizing selves, and their current role as Gallo recognizers, marked by positive affect and confident epistemology.6 6 Elsewhere in this interview, Michelle and Marie also narrated moments where they explained to acquaintances what Gallo was, clearing up misconceptions that Gallo was equitation (le gallo sounding like le galop, galloping) or something different from “notre patois.” These self-reports suggest they also inhabited recognizer roles in the larger community.

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By incorporating such narratives into sociolinguistic interviews of their history with Gallo, these classmates, like Matao and Anne-Marie before them, showed that the transition from non-recognizer to recognizer was locally salient, an important step in advocates’ ontogenetic identity narratives (Wortham, 2003). Key to this transition was the importance of “asking oneself the question” about what Gallo was, thereby renegotiating family belonging and identity.

Genre 2: Promotional Texts Moving Audiences from Ignorance to Knowledge Advocates did not stop at inhabiting a recognizer role themselves. In this next analysis, I will demonstrate that promotional texts encountered at Gallo festivals contained structural traits that encouraged festivalgoers to become recognizers too. Importantly, this movement from nonrecognizer to recognizer once again occurred by asking and answering questions. At many cultural and linguistic festivals around Brittany, Gallo associations maintained small stands: tables featuring Gallo books and CDs for sale, as well as fliers for upcoming Gallo performances or language classes. As expected, these materials used some Gallo, or at least were “infused” with it, in Benor’s (2019) terminology. At the same time, though, texts displayed at these stands often prominently featured the question “What is Gallo?”, at times written in Gallo itself (e.g., Le galo: Qhi q’c’ét don ? ).7 A selection of such texts can be seen in Fig. 1, along with my English translations of each text’s answer. The fact that the question “What is Gallo?” was usually asked in Gallo (texts A, B, C, D) shows that the advocate community distinguished between people who used Gallo proficiently, and thus could understand the question as written, and those who already recognized Gallo as “the (Romance) language of (Upper) Brittany.” Figure 2 takes a closer look at the cover of one of these works, written by Anne-Marie Pelhate from Example 1. This cover illustrates how such 7 Avineri (2017) notes that in metalinguistic communities, use of the community code is often pedagogical and illustrative in nature, as here.

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Text Type A. Book title

Title asking “What is Gallo?” Gallo: So what is it?* What you’ve always wanted to know about Gallo

Answer to the titular question

Author or organization

Like its French, Norman and Walloon sisters and its Spanish, Italian and Romanian cousins, Gallo is a language born from the evolution of Latin and is part of the family called the ‘oïl’ languages. In this Romance language of Upper Brittany, the term [‘Mil Goul’] designates chatterboxes.

Anne-Marie Pelhate (2011)

B

Newspaper ad title

Gallo: So what is it?*

C

Poster section title

Gallo: So what is it?*

Gallo is the language of Upper Brittany.

Campaign to promote Gallo, headed by Chubri, in partnership with Bertaèyn Galeizz and Dihun Breizh

D

Brochure section title

What is Gallo? Gallo, what is it?*

The term Gallo is old. Gallo is not a patois even if the term is frequently used. It is the Romance language of Brittany.

Brochure published by l’Académie de Rennes and the Association of Gallo Teachers, advertising Gallo classes

E

Brochure section title

What is Gallo?

Gallo is the Romance language spoken in the East of Brittany. Coming from vernacular Latin, like French, its evolution has nevertheless been different. It is often designated by ‘patois.’ *Italics indicate that the titular question has been asked in Gallo itself.

Ouest-France, September 2013, advertisement for the upcoming Mil Goul festival

Brochure published by the Celtic Circle of Rennes and Bertaèyn Galeizz, advertising a Gallo course

Fig. 1 Promotional texts asking “What is Gallo?” (my translations)

texts not only produce a representation of a Gallo recognizer, but also frame recognition as ideologically desirable. By interpellating her readers as “you” in the subtitle, What you have always wanted to know about Gallo, Pelhate imagines them currently to be non-recognizers, in that they “want” to know information about Gallo, rather than already possessing that information. But importantly, the subtitle attributes a stance of positive affect to readers; they desire this knowledge. In their application of Bakhtin’s notion of “ideological becoming” to language learning, Freedman and Ball (2004) emphasize the importance of the self-positioning choices learners make, toward both the language and the social world in which it helps them move. In such an analysis, the focus of learning is on possibility, on becoming— on inhabiting a new role. By modeling the question-and-answer script

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Fig. 2 The cover of Le galo: Qhi q’c’ét don ?, with my translation

for festivalgoers and imbuing it with potential, Gallo writers portrayed the recognizer role as both attainable and compelling.

Genre 3: A Play Socializing Audience Members into Gallo Recognition I close with excerpts from a play entitled Pouchée de Beluettes [Bagful of Stars], created by Matao Rollo (Example 1) and his creative partner Marie Chiff ’mine and performed during Brittany’s Semaine des Langues [Languages Week]. The play hinges upon an encounter between Jean, Matao’s Gallo-speaking language scholar character, and Ghite, Marie’s French-speaking character, who accidentally discovers Jean’s laboratory. While Jean is a Gallo recognizer all along, Ghite is socialized into recognizing Gallo by learning to ask what Gallo is, and then learning to use it. After Ghite falls into the irascible Jean’s underground lab, he reluctantly invites her to listen to recordings of the world’s languages. When he plays a Gallo recording, he hands Ghite a mirror. Holding the mirror to her ear and listening, Ghite asks Jean “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” [What is this?]. He answers, lifting his chin to indicate the world above, “Ben, c’ét du galo!” [Well, it’s Gallo!]. The moment is depicted in the video still in Fig. 3.

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Fig. 3 A scene from Pouchée de Beluettes: “Qu’est-ce que c’est ?”

By asking “What is this?” Ghite has taken her first step toward Gallo recognition; the mirror in her hands underscores the importance of selfreflection to the recognizer role. What follows is a routine repeated five more times, as Jean changes the radio from one Gallo recording to another. Each time, Ghite asks a variation of “What is this?”—and each time, the answer is du galo. After dancing delightedly to Gallo music, Ghite grows pensive, hands the mirror back to Jean, and asks: “Qu’est-ce que c’est, le gallo?” [What is Gallo?]. Ghite has finally asked the right question. Jean answers by quietly pointing, first to his image in the mirror, and then to himself. Gallo, says the character played by the man who reported once calling Gallo “deformed French,” is spoken by those who “caozent come mai” [speak like me]. This moment is depicted in Fig. 4. Ultimately, Ghite’s knowing that Gallo is a language helps her learn how to use Gallo, as Jean teaches Ghite the pronouns “mai” (me) and “tai” (you, informal), and she uses them in turn. This exchange of deixis and discovery, presented in Example 3, is portrayed as a moment of strong affective connection:

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Fig. 4 A scene from Pouchée de Beluettes: “I caozent come mai”

Example 3. Pouchée de Beluettes: “Qu’est-ce que c’est, le gallo ?” 1

GHITE:

2 3

JEAN:

4

5

GHITE:

6

JEAN:

7

8

9

GHITE:

Qu’est-ce que c’est ? (.) What is it ? (.) le (.) ga:::llo ? Ga:::llo ? ((Pointing to mirror)) I caozent come mai ! They speak like me ! ((Points to himself, looks at Ghite)) I caozent come mai They speak like me I (.) causent (.) comme (.) mai ! They (.) speak (.) like (.) me ! ((points at Jean)) Nouna No ((points at himself)) Mai, Me, ((points at her)) tai ! You! ((points at herself)) Mai, Me, (continued)

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(continued) 10

((points at him)) tai ! You! ((They go on to play with several more Gallo pronouns, laughing and smiling))

Staged for an audience that included both older adults (who may have grown up hearing but misrecognizing Gallo) and children, this transformative language-focused encounter was an invitation to viewers to assume the recognizer role alongside the fictional Ghite. As Marie Chiff ’mine, who plays Ghite, said about the play in our later interview: Ça permet de faire vivre la langue. Et de la vivre avec ses émotions et tout ça. […] Tu vois dans Pouchée de Beluettes par exemple je pense que le public, il peut très facilement se mettre à ma place. […] Il y a toujours des gens qui viennent parler de leur enfance, qui viennent nous parler de leur grand-mère, de leur grand-père […] Des fois c’est fort parce que les gens pleurent. [...] Y a vraiment des gens qui pleurent parce que c’est l’accent de leur grand-mère. […] Il y en a pour qui c’est une jubilation. ‘Ouah ! J’ai tout compris.’ It allows us to keep the language alive. And to live it with its emotions and all of that. […] You see, in Bagful of Stars for example, I think the public can very easily put themselves in my place. […] There are always people who come talk about their childhood, who come talk to us about their grandmother, their grandfather […] Sometimes it’s powerful because the people cry. […] There are really people who cry because it’s the accent of their grandmother. […] There are some for whom it’s a jubilation. ‘Wow, I understood everything!’

The recognizer role is thus inclusive of both externally focused recognition, in which one affirms Gallo’s existence and worth to others, and internally focused recognition: mirror-gazing, learning to accept and honor one’s own Gallo proficiency. This final analysis has shown that texts of a variety of modalities—artistic and celebratory as well as promotional—can interpellate potential language recognizers as they navigate the cultural space of a festival. Becoming a recognizer is a multimodal

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and holistic form of cultural engagement; community membership cannot be reduced to judgments of objective linguistic mastery.

Conclusions, or Le galo: Qhi q’c’ét don ? Just as other chapters in this volume have shown that the choice to use a minority or heritage language is symbolic and political, I have sought to illustrate that the choice to critically interrogate oneself about the language is equally symbolic and political. The critical question “What is Gallo?” enabled advocates to define Gallo as a language; to insist on its existence, in the face of symbolic dominance of French and Breton; and to imbue it with positive affect. Three different genres were structured in parallel fashion to foreground the importance of “asking oneself questions” about Gallo, and connecting to loved ones (and to oneself ) in new ways through the recognition process. Beyond the specific micro-interactions analyzed here, might Gallo recognition serve a greater purpose? I would like to propose two possible answers. First, the recognizer role may provide a useful intermediating lens between individual acts of identification by minority-language speakers on the one hand, and variety enregisterment on a sociohistorical timescale (Agha, 2005). When community members see the same stances enacted repeatedly toward Gallo forms across genres and interlocuters, they may come to recognize those forms as belonging to a discrete language-object known as le gallo. Elsewhere, I explore the potential link between the recognizer role and enregisterment in more detail (Keller, 2016). Second, as Avineri (2017) has said about the discourses that bind metalinguistic communities, “these practices are about much more than language; they are indexical of identity, community, [and] history […]. They exhibit a contestation about”—and, I would add, a recognition of —“participants’ own place in the story of [the language]” (p. 193). The discourses constituting the recognizer role insisted not only that Gallo was a language separate from French, but also that individuals could write their personal future with Gallo differently from past prejudices. Recognition became a tool both to restore dignity to people’s

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memories of (grand)parents, and to fight Gallo’s erasure from the social landscape of Brittany. By fostering the sorts of affective and epistemological links I have described, Gallo advocates instantiated a community centered on recognizing Gallo’s local existence and worth, thus saving Gallo and its users—if locally and conditionally—from oblivion. Acknowledgements Financial support for this research was provided by the Bilinski Educational Foundation and by the Linguistics Program/College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. My gratitude goes as well to the mentors and colleagues who informed this work: Elaine Chun, Jennifer Reynolds, Sherina Feliciano-Santos, Alexandra Jaffe (in grateful remembrance), Anne Diaz, Julia Grabbatin, Sara Matthews, and Paul Reed. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2018 meeting of the American Anthropological Association; it has since benefitted from the thoughtful comments of the editors and Javier Domingo, my peer reviewer. I also thank the many Gallo users who shared their words and perspectives with me. All remaining errors are my own.

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Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Spanish Speakers in a California Child Welfare Court Jessica López-Espino

Positionality On one of my first days in court, I asked the supervisor of attorneys if they had a record of the languages spoken by parents that they worked with. He responded, ‘we don’t keep track of ethnicity, but I can say that Spanish speakers comprise about fifty percent of our caseload. That number is probably even a bit low.’ This was an example of what Rosa (2019) calls the co-naturalization of language and race, where language is perceived to be linked to the racialized body of a person, and race is perceived as being connected to one’s language. I wrote in my field notes, ‘either the supervisor conflates language and ethnicity, or thinks that I do.’ By not initially contesting the label and generalizations implicit in the use of the term Spanish speaker , I participated in the circulation of J. López-Espino (B) University of California, Irvine, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_10

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this term. However, once I noticed that other attorneys, social workers, and judges made statements about Spanish speakers that included a variety of other characteristics, I made it a subject for analysis. As a Spanish-speaking, but also English and French-speaking scholar of language, I am both fascinated and troubled by the power of language ideologies to shape perceptions and generalizations about types of people. My experience as a Mexican woman of color living in the US and my engagement with Latinx scholarship informs my commitment to validating the multiple and diverse experiences of people categorized as Latinx. My studies in anthropology have taught me that sharing a language does not create homogenized cultural practices or identities. Like Chavez (2013), Dávila (2008), and Santa Ana (2002), I am concerned about how contemporary discourses can stigmatize large groups of people who are racialized as non-white as dangerous, burdensome, or lacking in rights based partially on perceptions about their language and cultural practices. In my scholarship I seek to disrupt the normative violence of these racialized views as they occur in everyday interactions, especially in settings that claim to enact fair and just treatment for everyone.

Introduction Attorneys, judges, and social workers in child welfare courts inhabit expert positions in that they can assert their expertise in establishing the relevant features of a case. Compared to the parents who have been called to court on account of allegations of child maltreatment or risk of harm to children, court actors’ opinions and insights have significant power in shaping the trajectory of a case. Like other chapters in this volume, I also find that metalinguistic communities share language ideologies that create a sense of collective belonging and shape distinctions between themselves and persons outside of their metalinguistic communities. Central in this process is the reference to language as a semiotic object (Avineri, 2019), through which qualities of language can be perceived to be indexical or iconic to particular kinds of persons and communities.

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While many chapters in this volume explore how metalinguistic communities share language ideologies corresponding to their own communities, in this chapter I emphasize how metalinguistic communities also share language ideologies about language practices of communities external to their own that reify boundaries of differentiation, belonging, and legitimacy as a social group. In the context of child welfare courts in California, I analyze how the category of Spanish speakers is circulated and used by court actors as if it were an objective, transparent, and neutral descriptor for the Spanish-dominant clients from a variety of countries in the Americas, including the US. Using the frameworks of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2019), white public space (Hill, 1998), and the semiotic processes of fractal recursivity, erasure, and rhematization (Gal & Irvine, 2019; Irvine & Gal, 2000), I argue that the labeling and description of Spanish speakers by court actors reinforce negative stereotypes about Spanish-dominant speakers in US courts. Raciolinguistic ideologies refer to ideologies that conflate and overdetermine linkages between language practices and other signs associated with racialized subjects (Rosa & Flores, 2017). The linguistic practices of non-white persons are often perceived as nonstandard and implicitly deficient from the perspective of white listening subjects, who assume a subject position that hears and sees linguistic deviance and difference in non-white racialized bodies without reference to an empirical analysis of language practices (Flores & Rosa, 2015). The routinized articulation of raciolinguistic ideologies comprises a covert, yet pervasive way in which ideas about racialized groups as being non-normative and deficient circulate among professionals who appear interested in creating a context of fairness and equality through providing legal aid to racialized and minoritized persons. In this chapter I consider legal professionals to comprise their own social group and metalinguistic community, in that attorneys, judges, and social workers meet regularly, work collectively, and share raciolinguistic ideologies about the language practices of their clients. These actors develop a metalinguistic community in which shared normative ideas about Spanish speakers are discussed and circulated in conversations throughout the court day. As Rosa (2019) argues, ideologies about language inform ideologies about race and ideologies of race inform

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ideologies of language, co-constituting the ways in which language and personhood are socially understood. While legal professionals will admit that there are exceptions to their generalizations, this chapter argues that the labeling of Spanish speakers establishes and reinforces a default raciolinguistic ideology in which Spanish-dominant speakers are discussed as habitually lacking in adequate education, financial means, stability, and normative parental behaviors that are considered important in normative parenting. In reifying these characterizations of Spanish speakers, court actors reinforce differences between themselves and the Spanish-dominant clients that they work with. The ideologies of these professionals must be understood within the context of the standard language ideology. A standard language ideology is a belief in an idealized standardized language code as being the most correct form of speech (Milroy, 2001). Distinguishing between “speech communities” as groups of people who share communicative norms and regularities in interaction, and “linguistic communities” as being made up of a group of people who share ideological beliefs in their language practices as part of a cohesive and standardized denotational practice, Silverstein argues that the dominant linguistic community in modern US society is defined by the belief in “standard” English as the best language to use in government and other social contexts (Silverstein, 1996, p. 286). This ideal of a standard is also reinforced by hegemonic institutions, such as schools, publishers, and other entities that function to produce, teach, and enforce the standard (Silverstein, 1996). Child welfare courts reproduce a sense of English as the standard language by prioritizing English during hearings, in documents, and in signage that mirrors what is taught as English in schools and dictionaries. Due to the prevalent idea of the standard as both natural and ideal, speakers who are identified as speaking non-standard English (Rickford & King, 2016), with “accents” (Lippi-Green, 1994), or not in English at all are often seen as a problem to be managed in US legal settings. While some communicative practices might not be considered to be overtly racist in that they do not use slurs or discuss race explicitly, discursive practices that reproduce negative stereotypes of people of color constitute covert racist discourse (Hill, 2008). Hill (1998) describes the US as predominantly shaped by “White public space,” which refers to

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the delineation of the linguistic behavior of white persons as normative, and the speech practices of racialized communities as constantly subject to monitoring and evaluation. While not all spaces are overdetermined by white listening subjects (Flores & Rosa, 2015), thinking about white public space and covert racist discourse provides an analytical opportunity to examine how racialization occurs despite an overt individual intention to not be racist. In a legal setting such as a court, where racialized bias might undermine fairness, legal professionals are careful to avoid overtly demeaning statements. Yet discussions about language practices can be used to reinforce existing racial stereotypes. The semiotic processes of rhematization, fractal recursivity and erasure (Gal & Irvine, 2019; Irvine & Gal, 2000) allowed court actors to refer to a diverse range of Spanish-dominant speakers as a homogenous group whose language use indexed intellectual and cultural ‘unsophistication,’ a lack of citizenship, passivity, and inferior parenting practices. The use of Spanish speakers as a descriptive category used by non-Spanish speaking legal professionals involved various ideological commitments which positioned language as a central sign of identity, belonging, and exclusion. Rhematization is a social and semiotic process by which a sign, such as a language or phenotypic features, can become naturalized as iconic of social type (Keane, 2018). Rhematization is involved when the language that people are speaking at any given moment is perceived as iconic of the kind of person that they are. If one’s language variety becomes the focus of differentiation, two people who are assumed to not share a language may be considered to be different kinds of people. While rhematizations can be socially shared and largely accepted as natural, these configurations remain socially constructed facts that are subject to be debated, changed, or reimagined. The semiotic processes of fractal recursivity and erasure occur simultaneously with that of rhematization, however analytically separating these processes facilitates an examination of multiple levels of meaningmaking and differentiation through shared social signs. Fractal recursivity involves taking the linguistic differentiation at one level of social differentiation and projecting it into another level (Irvine & Gal, 2000). For example, fractal recursivity involves projecting the perceived differences between Spanish-dominant speakers and English-dominant

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speakers onto another sociolinguistic level to describe parallel differences between persons, communities, and socially-shared behaviors perceived as either English-dominant or Spanish-dominant respectively. If Englishmonolingualism is taken to be a normative quality of being “American” for example, then fractal logic can be employed to position persons, things, or places that are not similarly monolingual in English as non-normative and inherently “un-American.” The process of erasure occurs when information that complicates or does not fit with the dominant language ideology is omitted or explained away because it does not fit with the “totalizing vision” of the dominant language ideology (Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 38). Assuming that Spanishdominant speakers are non-normative, for example, avoids and erases the qualities that this group shares with the idealized norm. The positioning of Spanish speakers as non-normative could have contributed to how some Spanish-dominant parents were more easily ignored, dismissed, or taken less seriously by their social workers or attorneys. Attorneys estimated that more than half of their caseloads involved Spanish speakers. Despite the prevalence of Spanish-dominant speakers in this county and in these legal proceedings, court actors reproduce language ideologies positioning English as the normative language of US institutions. In what follows, I will first describe the methods used in this project, and then move on to an analysis of how legal professionals create and circulate an identity category of Spanish speaker imbued with four main characteristics: a lack of “sophistication,” noncitizen status, passivity, and deficient cultural practices of parenthood. I will demonstrate that even well-meaning court actors who might not hold conscious individual sentiments of bias against racialized persons perpetuate the marginalization of racialized clients by articulating and circulating stereotypes about them as non-normative. Through the processes of fractal recursivity, rhematization, and erasure‚ court actors’ references to Spanish speakers conflate language and racialized perceptions of personhood, creating an in-group referent for poverty, disorder, and risk to children. Cases in child welfare rarely have conclusive evidence of child abuse and neglect, and instead judges rely on a social worker’s reports and discussions with attorneys about what would be best for the child. Discourses that routinely depict Spanish speakers as unfit parents can negatively

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affect parents’ ability to maintain or regain custody of their children. The ability to judge and evaluate parents is central in these differentiations which simultaneously positions court actors as arbiters of normative personhood.

Methods I conducted eighteen months of observational research in a child welfare court in Northern California. Despite being located in a high-income county, most cases in this court involved low-income parent-guardians. Child welfare cases are part of the civil law code, not the criminal code, where parents who are alleged to have caused harm or risk of harm to children can be offered social services to regain or maintain custody of their children. I observed a group of eight attorneys, three judges, five interpreters, and eight social workers, and their interactions with forty parents who volunteered to participate in my study. I observed these interactions on a daily basis during court hours. I conducted formal and informal interviews with each of these participants, some of which were audio-recorded. I use double quotation marks for speech audio-recorded in interviews, and single-quotation marks for speech reconstructed from field notes of my courthouse observations. All names of participants are pseudonyms. In this chapter, I focus on attorneys, judges, interpreters, and social workers as a social group that considered themselves to differ from the parents that they worked with. Throughout this chapter, I italicize Spanish speakers to emphasize that it is a discursively constructed identity category, rather than my own description.

Spanish Speakers as Lacking in “Sophistication” Legal professionals socialized in English-dominant institutions and standard language ideology often reproduced categorizations of Spanish speakers that are reinforced through their interactions with their clients. Beliefs that individuals hold about languages and their speakers are

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shaped by their histories and their personal and communal circumstances (Avineri, 2017). Legal professionals’ subtle, negative discussions of Spanish speakers are informed by their personal ideas and histories, as well as from their experiences with hundreds of Spanish-dominant clients over the course of their careers. Still, the extent of lawyer-client interaction is limited to particular kinds of meetings with specific goals of child welfare law. Due to large caseloads and limited time at court, attorneys develop short-hand labels for types of clients and seek to streamline their work by highlighting the legally relevant qualities of clients for which they are responsible. This enacts a process of simplification and ideological erasure whereby legal professionals articulate common understandings of Spanish-dominant clients based on a limited set of interactions that they have during in-court exchanges. In the mornings before starting to meet with clients, the attorney secretary typically informed the attorneys if a particular client was a Spanish speaker , so that the attorney could remember to get an interpreter for their meeting. A social worker speaking to the judge before a hearing shared that she felt ‘the Spanish speakers don’t understand what is going on’ and asked the judge to explain the role of court services to the parents so that the interpreter could translate. References to Spanish speakers were meaningful to social workers, attorneys, judges, and court staff in that they worked to coordinate the use of interpreters and make adjustments to their interactions so as to allow Spanish-dominant speakers to participate in hearings. Over the course of conducting fieldwork, I found that the category of Spanish speaker communicated much more than just the denotational content referring solely to the dominant language of a person. These professionals were invested in helping Spanish-dominant parents have an equitable experience despite English-dominant court procedures, yet sometimes they construed speaking Spanish as one’s main language to be a source of deficiency. Expressing concerns about proposals to provide court documents through a digital platform, one attorney explained that “going paperless” could pose issues for her “Spanish only speaking” clients. She stated that, “you’ll have somebody that’s Spanish only speaking that’s aged that lives in a Spanish only speaking sort of community and world and to receive emails it’s just

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not it’s not, that’s problematic.” While this attorney expressed explicit concern and attention to the ways in which digitization may remain inaccessible to her Spanish-dominant clients, this attorney uses rhematization to depict them as “only” Spanish speaking and limited to Spanish speaking “communities,” creating an essentializing figure of personhood that erases the variation in speech practices and repertoires that her clients may have (Agha, 2007). Furthermore, the difference in language practices is projected onto class differences through fractal recursivity, implying that while English-dominant speakers may be assumed to unproblematically have access to the internet and technology, Spanishdominant speakers might not have such access. This assertion draws on preexisting stereotypes of Spanish speakers as living in isolated Spanish “only” communities that lack access to the internet and computer technology. Attorneys and judges referred to Spanish speakers as ‘unsophisticated’ on several separate occasions, thereby circulating and perpetuating a shared belief about these clients, defined by their language practices, as deficient. During a hearing to contest the termination of parental rights of a Spanish-dominant mother, the mother was slow to answer the judge’s questions to describe her relationship with her children. In addition to the usual delay caused by waiting for the interpreter to offer the parent an equivalent interpretation, the mother responded in slow and short sentences. During her statement, the mother’s attorney explained that while her client was ‘unsophisticated’ in her response and demeanor, her therapist could attest that she interacts well with her child and that the mother should be given more time to complete court requirements. Taking up the attorney’s use of the term ‘unsophisticated,’ the judge stated that he understood that the mother had a difficult time completing the court requirements due to ‘financial issues and the sophistication’ and decided to extend the case to give the mother more time to complete court requirements. Here the attorney and the judge seemed to agree that the Spanish-dominant mother fit the category of ‘unsophisticated.’ The mother’s unsatisfactory performance was discussed as lacking in “sophistication.” While the majority of parents in this court lacked a legal education, Spanish-dominant parents were consistently described

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as lacking in general education and were often assumed to be unable to fully comprehend court procedures. Months later, in a different case, I heard an attorney say that her Spanish-dominant client was ‘unsophisticated’ as a way of explaining why her client was caught on video roughly patting her child on the back. Later that day, that attorney asked me if I thought it was significant that the mother in question was from El Salvador and if I knew of any cultural practices from El Salvador that could explain her client’s behavior (I did not). This question could have implied that perhaps cultural practices learned from a Spanish-dominant country might be used to explain the ‘unsophisticated’ and inappropriate treatment of an eight-month-old child. On the second day of the hearing, the child’s attorney expressed concerns with the mother’s ‘level of sophistication’ and her ability to comply with recommended services for supervised visitation, therapy, and parenting classes. By taking up the term ‘sophistication’ and deciding whether or not Spanish-dominant speakers had this quality, legal professionals participated in circulating a social theory that ‘sophistication’ might be observable in the speech and demeanor of persons. In a review of my entire corpus of fieldnotes, I only noted the use of the word ‘unsophisticated’ by court actors who were referring to Spanish-dominant parents.

Spanish Speakers as Vulnerable Non-Citizens For court actors, Spanish speakers represent people who have a distinct lived experience from their English-dominant social world and this difference is often projected onto assumptions that Spanish speakers might not be US citizens. Court actors also routinely discuss Spanish speakers as being defined by poverty, precarity, and foreignness. Noting that he believed “Spanish speaking people are at a significant disadvantage,” a judge explained that “they may not think they can talk to financial services, they may not have time, they may be afraid to walk in there particularly if they’re undocumented and say I want a financial review of my situation, or some other government office.” In using the term “undocumented” as opposed to “illegal” the judge demonstrated

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that he is attentive to contemporary discourses against using the “i-word” to describe human beings and instead uses the term used by activists in the US. The judge assumes that Spanish speakers might be undocumented and that their legal status is related to their need for financial assistance and their hesitancy to actively engage with legal institutions. After a meeting with a Spanish-dominant client, one attorney stated to me that she could tell that her client was lying about being present at his daughter’s birth, saying ‘he’s undocumented and probably thinks we are immigration so he’s not going to tell us the truth.’ Legal professionals’ reluctance to ask about citizenship status or to publicize the court’s non-cooperation with ICE did not mean that discourses about Spanish speakers as being undocumented were eliminated. A lack of discussion on the subject meant that court staff members maintained an ideology that Spanish speakers might be undocumented, rhematically linking persons whose dominant language is Spanish with assumptions about non-regularized citizenship. This is a rhematization based on the socially shared perception that a person who is Spanish-dominant, lacks the assumed normative citizenship of English-dominant speakers. A lack of discussion about citizenship constitutes an erasure which compounds negative stereotyping by assuming that all Spanish-dominant speakers might be undocumented. Suggesting that Spanish speakers might be undocumented perpetuates the idea that Spanish-dominant speakers are non-normative citizens, in contrast to English-dominant speakers. This practice erases intra-group variation among Spanish-dominant speakers and the diverse experiences of Spanish-dominant speakers in the US. For example, several Spanishdominant speakers that I spoke to shared with me that they were legal permanent residents or US citizens. One day, an interpreter asked me if there was anything new with me. I shared that I had just passed my citizenship exam, and the interpreter stated that she did not know that I was not a citizen beforehand. As we discussed this in the lobby in Spanish, a parent who was waiting for his case nearby, came up to me and asked me in Spanish if the citizenship exam was difficult, since he still had to do it too. He shared that he has been a legal permanent resident in the US for sixteen years. During a life history interview with Clara, a Spanishdominant parent who was seeking to maintain custody of her daughter,

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I asked her where home was for her. Clara explained that while she was born in the US and a citizen of the US, she was taken to live with her parents in El Salvador until she was nineteen, so she felt more comfortable in El Salvador. The characterization of Spanish speakers as possibly undocumented persists due to the influence of raciolinguistic ideologies that continue to position Spanish speakers and their bodies outside of the bounds of normative citizenship.

Spanish Speakers as Passive Clients In addition to the discursive positioning of Spanish speakers as potential non-citizens, attorneys also articulate an ideology that Spanish speakers are deferential to authority and that this causes them to be passive actors in their cases. One attorney explained: “If a social worker tells my Spanish speaking clients that this is going to happen, they don’t question that they may have, that they have the option of doing something differently, which I find sad, and frustrating, ‘cause I want them to question. But they are more prone to just accept authority.”

A judge expressed a similar belief in stating, “the Spanish speakers are a little more submissive to the system, whether it’s from a lack of understanding or a lack of wanting to confront authority, when they don’t really understand the authority, but I find that they are much more likely to just accept what’s said, where the English speakers are more like more apt to fight back if you will.” The judge referred to Spanish speakers as submissive and as failing to understand the authority, bolstering the Spanish speakers as unsophisticated trope. In a rhematization, the perception of someone as Spanish speaker is interpreted as readily iconic of persons who are passive and deferential to authority. This difference is then through fractal recursivity used to explain the behaviors of parents on different scales, providing a rationale for why Spanish-dominant parents are perceived to lack assertiveness.

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The absence of questions or challenges to attorneys or judges by Spanish-dominant speakers presupposes for them a type of person likely to be passive and deferential. These characterizations avoid recognizing how the dynamics of requiring an interpreter may increase the length of time that Spanish-dominant speakers must wait to take up a conversational turn or how interpreting may affect the social dynamics of sharing or challenging information. Instead court actors frequently explain Spanish speakers’ behavior in meetings through a characterization of their behaviors as passive. Court actors label the bodies of Spanish-dominant speakers as passive and overly deferential by subjectively highlighting their perceived lack of interactional skills via their lack of English. Describing Spanish speakers as passive locates the problem of a lack of effective communication in the bodies of Spanish-dominant speakers as opposed to the linguistic barriers created and maintained by the English-dominant legal institution.

Spanish Speakers as Deficient Parents Parents who do not use English are distinguished from presumed middle class, white, normative citizens. The excerpt below from an interview with an attorney illustrates the ways in which court actors identify speaking Spanish as one’s dominant language as a complex sign that incorporates stereotypes about educational attainment, class, and cultural differences. “What you see a lot with um, sp- you know the Spanish speaking population, would be you have the absence of a lot of that so you don’t have oftentimes um, an education level that um allows for sort of easy communication of concepts, trial rights, that sort of thing. You have, in addition to the language barrier, you have maybe distrust of court that you wouldn’t have with um you know an English-speaking client that’s grown up in North Town that’s middle class where the parents maybe have had some involvement with lawyers and the court system and they sort of are not intimidated or anxious.”

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Speaking Spanish comes to imply an “absence” of much more than just English, but also an absence of education, comprehension, trust in the law, and emotional stability in interactions with the court system. Similar to Rosa’s (2016) finding that bilingual students in US schools are often perceived be “languageless” in that they are thought to speak neither English nor Spanish well, people who speak Spanish as their dominant language as opposed to English are routinely described as lacking in education, comprehension, and interpersonal skills that Englishdominant speakers are considered to inherently possess. Speaking Spanish becomes a rhematization of languagelessness, of a lack of education, and as a kind of personhood that exists below normative expectations of “middle class” persons who are English-speaking and perceived as unintimidated by legal professionals. Through fractal recursivity, this opposition of Latinx Spanish speakers as opposite to English speakers fuels racialized concerns with parenting practices of Latinx Spanish speakers. Court actors routinely discuss the parenting of Latinx Spanish-dominant speakers as not meeting accepted white middle-class norms. Expressing her confusion about the parenting practices of Spanish-dominant parents during an interview, one attorney stated, “I don’t understand the cultural decision, but we have parents who leave their children in Mexico, come here and work for five, six, seven years, and then bring their kids up, and then don’t know how to parent them…The kid doesn’t speak English and they’re… I don’t understand leaving your children.” Framing migration as a “cultural decision” that hurts children rather than as a human strategy for survival, this attorney highlights that Spanish-dominant parents make irrational decisions that do not make sense for children due to their “culture.” By invoking cultural differences as the cause of risks posed to children in the care of immigrant parents, this rationale facilitates the erasure of economic inequalities that parents face as they navigate parenthood and the restrictive legal systems that constrain the opportunities that are available to them. Instead of identifying fault with a parent due to race or ethnicity explicitly, this attorney describes the parent as lacking in the appropriate “cultural” practices for child-rearing. Under the framing of “cultural practices” Spanish-dominant speakers are described as incompetent parents due to an implicit concern with children lacking proficiency

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in English and a more explicit concern that children will be at risk of harm due to the deficient “cultural” parenting practices of Spanish speakers who “don’t know how to parent.” While scholarship on the children of immigrants demonstrates that children in the US learn English over time and feel gratitude for parents who brought their children to the US (Cuevas, 2019; Perez, 2012), legal professionals outside of this community continue to share and circulate raciolinguistic ideologies that depict Spanish-dominant speakers as risky and non-normative parents.

Conclusion Throughout this work, I have argued that court actors use the term Spanish speakers to convey much more than just a reference to the language spoken by some individuals. I demonstrate that by sharing and circulating the term Spanish speakers in the context of describing the persons indexed by that category as non-normative, passive, and unsophisticated, these actors reinforce raciolinguistic ideologies about Spanish-dominant Latinx persons as problematic people and clients. Legal professionals in this setting interact often with each other and share much more than a knowledge of legal terms and bureaucratic procedures. These actors share ideologies about language and personhood of nongroup members, particularly through their discussions about Spanish speakers. These ideologies about the language and personhood of Spanish speakers sustain legal professionals’ own identities as a distinctive social group, creating a sense of their own cohesive metalinguistic community (Avineri, 2019). In the process of sharing and circulating stereotypes about Spanish speakers, court professionals participate in an identity-making process that constructs their own metalinguistic community in opposition to that of Spanish speakers. By highlighting perceptions of difference in language and projecting those differences as being connected to differences in intellectual capacity, citizenship status, interactional behavior, and cultural practices, professionals emphasize their own identification with the linguistic and social normativity. Routine references to “Spanish speakers” as a cohesive and non-normative community have

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the secondary effect of positioning legal professionals and their predominantly white, middle-class, and English-dominant colleagues as part of a more normative metalinguistic community. By emphasizing the differences of Spanish speakers, court actors emphasize their own position as inhabiting default forms of personhood and belonging. The metalinguistic discourse surrounding Spanish speakers cast Spanish-dominant parents as not belonging in the US and as not belonging as legitimate caregivers who can safely and responsibly raise future citizens. Such discourses signal staff member alignment with the Standard Language Ideology and raciolinguistic ideologies positioning English-dominant families as easier to comprehend and work with than Spanish-dominant families. These legal professionals would claim that they are equally concerned with allegations against parents of any racial, ethnic, and linguistic background, and that race is not a consideration in their decision-making. Still, the maintenance and circulation of raciolinguistic discourses disproportionately stigmatize and marginalize Spanish-dominant parents who are often racialized as non-white. While studies have found that children of immigrant parents are less likely to be at risk of maltreatment than children with parents born in the US (Dettlaff & Fong, 2016), a Texas study found that Latinx children of immigrant parents were less likely than children born to US citizens to have case goals be reunification or adoption by relatives and were more likely to be placed in long term foster care or independent living (Vericker et al., 2007). My qualitative analysis of a California child welfare court shows that while it is difficult to measure how speaking Spanish contributes to the decisions of judges, it is likely that the additional biases of court actors toward Spanish-dominant speakers may contribute to added suspicion and surveillance during their court participation. The attorneys, social workers and judges in my field site believe that they provide necessary services to children and parents and that they do not discriminate against any parent. Instead, these actors frame their perspectives on Spanish-dominant speakers according to what they would consider to be neutral evaluations of their language practices, behaviors, and performance in court. Yet, if we consider that all views of people and language are positioned relative to one’s own experience

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and power, it becomes evident that verbal categorizations of deficiency from legal professionals are difficult for marginalized speakers to challenge. Challenging the socially shared stereotypes of Spanish-dominant persons in the US will not be easily accomplished by switching the term Spanish speakers for another term. The implicit categorization of Spanish speakers as low-income, uneducated, and as deficient parents will persist absent a radical transformation of the raciolinguistic ideologies that shape ideas about legitimate personhood.

References Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press. Avineri, N. (2017). Contested stance practices in secular Yiddish Metalinguistic Communities: Negotiating closeness and distance. Journal of Jewish Languages, 5 (2), 174–199. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134638-05021119 Avineri, N. (2019). The ‘Heritage narratives’ of Yiddish Metalinguistic Community members: Processes of distancing and closeness. In E. Falconi, & K. Graber (Eds.), Storytelling as narrative practice: Ethnographic approaches to the tales we tell (pp. 90–135). Brill Publishers. http://ebookcentral.pro quest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5842403 Chavez, L. R. (2013). The Latino threat constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation. Stanford University Press. Cuevas, S. (2019). “Con Mucho Sacrificio, we give them everything we can”: The strategic day-to-day sacrifices of undocumented Latina/o Parents. Harvard Educational Review, 89 (3), 473–496. https://doi.org/10.17763/ 1943-5045-89.3.473 Dávila, A. (2008). Latino Spin: Public image and the whitewashing of race. New York University Press. Dettlaff, A., & Fong, R. (2016). Practice with immigrant and refugee children and families in the child welfare system. In A. Dettlaff, & R. Fong (Eds.), Immigrant and refugee children and families: Culturally responsive practice. Columbia University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyu library-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4563434

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Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85 (2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (2019). Signs of difference: Language and ideology in social life. Cambridge University Press. Hill, J. (2008). Covert racist discourse: Metaphors, mocking, and the racialization of historically spanish-speaking populations in the United States. The Everyday Language of White Racism, 119–142. Hill, J. H. (1998). Language, race, and white public space. American Anthropologist, 100 (3), 680–689. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680 Irvine, J. T., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of Language (pp. 35–84). School of American Research Press. Keane, W. (2018). On semiotic ideology. Signs and Society, 6 (1), 64–87. https://doi.org/10.1086/695387 Lippi-Green, R. (1994). Accent, standard language ideology, and discriminatory pretext in the courts. Language in Society, 23(2), 163–198. Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500017826 Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5 (4), 530–555. https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1467-9481.00163 Perez, W., 1974-. (2012). Americans by heart: Undocumented Latino students and the promise of higher education. Teachers College Press. Rickford, J. R., & King, S. (2016). Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the courtroom and beyond. Language, 92(4), 948–988. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0078 Rosa, J. (2016). Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26 (2), 162–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12116 Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language. Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46 (5), 621–647. https://doi.org/10. 1017/S0047404517000562 Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse. University of Texas Press. Silverstein, M. (1996). Monoglot “standard” in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In D. L. Brenneis & R. K. S.

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Macaulay (Eds.), The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 284–306). Westview Press. Vericker, T., Kuehn, M. D., & Capps, R. (2007). Latino children of immigrants in the Texas child welfare system. The Intersection of Migration and Child Welfare: Emerging Issues and Implications.

The Historical Tie that Binds: Deploying Kurdish to Index Ownership, Authenticity, Collective Memory, and Distinction within Kawaguchi’s Kurdish Metalinguistic Community Anne Ambler Schluter

Positionality Statement Fresh off of a dissertation that was fascinating to me but pedantic to many, I landed my first academic job in Istanbul. I sought to pursue a research agenda of greater socio-political importance than my dissertation; my background in applied linguistics and interest in social justice propelled me toward a sociolinguistic inquiry into the perennial Kurdish question. Efforts to learn about the historical and cultural context marked my early engagement with this area, and I punctuated them with uncomfortable questions lodged at my unwitting Kurdish contacts. With the help of a Kurdish research assistant, Mahmut, who happily briefed me on the fundamentals of culturally appropriate decorum, I A. A. Schluter (B) The Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_11

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gradually honed my ability to engage with members of Istanbul’s Kurdish communities. I also developed an understanding of my positionality as a female American researcher. Although requests to work with an American researcher often invite speculations about the researcher’s spying agenda, an American nationality also carries an important advantage: a perceived political alignment with the Kurdish cause. Thus, once we manage to overcome suspicions about my possible CIA connections, many participants feel comfortable candidly discussing socio-politically sensitive topics. My female identity also grants me greater access to the under-reported perspectives of Kurdish women. As for research with their male counterparts, some missteps along the way now serve as valuable (and comical) lessons in the ways that a western female researcher should NOT approach this group. While my ten-year residence in Turkey provided numerous opportunities to collect rich data about Kurdish, it was a less-than-ideal setting for disseminating my findings. From my current position in Hong Kong, dissemination is less challenging, and, luckily, the Kurdish population residing in Kawaguchi, Japan is not too far away. “It’s about the system. It’s about the system that they created…Kurds, we didn’t manage for ourselves, we didn’t govern ourselves for a thousand years…Always some others come and manage us, and we follow that. This kind of psychology, it’s because language was forbidden, and even speaking, until ‘88. And then they say, ‘Okay, you can speak. You can publish. Okay. But, education no.’ But older generations grew up like that. That’s why my father said, ‘Okay, you go to school. Don’t, don’t, don’t speak Kurdish. Don’t speak…No. It’s forbidden. They will do something.’” —Hevi, Community Activist, Japan Kurdish Culture Association cofounder, and Kurdish-Language Instructor [Kawaguchi, Japan: June, 2018]

Introduction A trans-national community’s sustained orientation to its homeland represents a central component of many definitions of diaspora

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(Grossman, 2019), and this is especially the case among groups whose emigration has been catalyzed by socio-political subjugation. Accordingly, the past casts a heavy shadow over the ideologies of the Kurdish diaspora community that resides in Kawaguchi, Japan. The above extract from Hevi’s heritage narrative (Avineri, 2019) highlights the rootedness of his perspective in his father’s and his own lived experiences as natives of Antep, Turkey; moreover, he contextualizes this perspective within the structures that have imposed a marginalized positionality on Kurds for a thousand years. From this vantage point, the lifting of language restrictions in Turkey that began thirty years ago and coincided with Hevi’s first days at school represents a recent change. Hevi’s embedding of these language restrictions within the larger structures that have traditionally sought to erase Kurdish cultural identity directly reflects historical Turkish state policy (Co¸skun et al., 2011). The struggle to counteract these policies’ legacy has increased the symbolic importance of Kurdish as an intrinsic aspect of Kurdish identity, including for ethnic Kurds with limited Kurdish-language competence. By contextualizing ethnographic data and signs from the digital linguistic landscape according to their cultural-historical meaning, the current paper addresses the function of Kurdish among members of Kawaguchi’s Turkish-dominant Kurdish community. This focus highlights examples of re-naming to assert ownership (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018), ethno-linguistic infusion (Benor, 2019), and post-vernacularity (Shandler, 2006), each of which works in tandem with semiotic resources to strengthen the authenticity of in-group and out-group projections of identity. The current study addresses the dual role of language to “make identities” within a given metalinguistic community and “mark boundaries” between differently perceived communities (Avineri & Kroskrity, 2014, p. 3) by focusing on both in-group and out-group presentations of identity. Specifically, it focuses on the following question: In what ways does Kurdish feature in the expression of identity among members of the Japan Kurdish Cultural Association with respect to both in-group belonging and portrayals of identity for the local Japanese community?

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Language, Historicity, and the Kurdish Socio-Political Positionality Hevi’s quote (above) juxtaposes the in-group (ethnically Kurdish hometown residents) against they (the Turkish rulers who have imposed their system on the in-group for a millennium). This contrast reveals an us vs. them discourse that informs his attitudes about language and identity. Moreover, suspicion toward the out-group motivates his father’s warning that the Turkish teachers/state “will do something” despite language policy changes. Such suspicion stems from decades of experience with government-led initiatives to culturally and linguistically assimilate Turkey’s ethnic minorities (Cf. Co¸skun et al., 2011). While laws that forbid non-Turkish languages like Kurdish currently apply only to the parliament, military, and prison system, the legacy of far more widespread restrictions from recent history has contributed to the stigmatization of public Kurdish-language use that has rendered it largely invisible to non-Kurds (Schluter & Sansarkan, 2014, Schluter, 2020a). Common results of this Turkish-language dominance include the limitation of Kurdish-language functions to primarily L-language domains and the widespread reduction in intra-familial Kurdish-language transmission rates, especially among younger, more educated, and more urban populations (Öpengin, 2012). From a linguistic standpoint, therefore, Turkification initiatives have progressed toward their aim of shifting Kurds’ primary community language to Turkish. Rooted in the backlash to these politics of erasure, Turkey’s Kurdish political movement (including the PKK Kurdish guerrilla movement) foregrounds Kurdish language rights. Consequently, Kurdish language has emerged as “one of the most important and salient manifestations of Kurdish identity” (Sheyholislami, 2010, p. 290). Following the glaring example of Turkish language-identity essentialism in front of them, Kurdish political activists have introduced language initiatives that raise the profile of Kurdish and underline its commensurate status with Turkish (Jamison, 2016). Moreover, a look at politically engaged Kurds’ widespread resentment of the Turkish state’s use of Kurdish-language media to influence Kurdish opinion underlines the in-group ownership of Kurdish (Schluter, 2019).

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Although the estimated 2,000 Kurds who migrated from Turkey’s Southeastern Antep province to Kawaguchi currently reside outside of the purview of the Turkish state, these ideologies, nevertheless, inform their language practices. Their relocation to Kawaguchi helps to satisfy worker shortages in the local construction industry; however, their ineligibility for official documentation contributes to a precarious migration status in which the fear of detention and/or deportation looms large. On the one hand, residence in Japan brings increased freedom to express a Kurdish ethno-linguistic identity. On the other hand, the prospects of a forced return to Turkey also motivate parents to ensure their children possess the Turkish-language abilities to re-enter Turkish schools. The community’s use of Turkish and Kurdish reflects this positionality. As the following analysis will show, the unity transmitted through in-group uses of Kurdish amidst dwindling proficiency levels highlights a case of post-vernacularity (Shandler, 2006), a practice that emphasizes the symbolic–rather than semantic–function of language. Through ideologically driven incorporation of Kurdish-language words into primarily Turkish and Japanese phrases, the data presented below also provide examples of ethno-linguistic infusion (Benor, 2019). These aspects underline the capacity for Kurdish among Kawaguchi’s Kurdish population to “mark community boundaries and make identities within them” (Avineri & Kroskrity, 2014, p. 3), two defining characteristics of metalinguistic communities.

Theoretical and Methodological Underpinnings This Investigation highlights the historical component associated with metalinguistic community membership (Avineri, 2019). The role of historical narratives in framing nationalist ideologies (Bilali, 2013) provides additional motivation to ground an exploration of the symbolic function of language within its larger historical context. As communityconstructed signs feature the “retellings of the remnants of histories” (Stroud, 2019, p. 15), they offer a rich site for this type of exploration. Moreover, given their “transmis[sion] of symbolic messages” that address

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“the legitimacy, relevance, priority and standards of languages and the people and groups they represent” (Shohamy, 2006, p. 110), signs serve as effective tools for researching the symbolic function of language within a designated community. The current paper focuses on the semiotic aspects of two signs that, as part of the virtual linguistic landscape (Ivkovi´c & Lotherington, 2009), are publicly displayed and shared online. A perspective that pairs language and imagery as equal co-producers of meaning is grounded in the methodological tradition of social semiotics. Given the intentional inclusion of the different components of a semiotic object, this approach emphasizes their contextual embeddedness (Hodge & Kress, 1988). Moreover, post-representational interpretations of performativity theory (Stroud, 2016), which look to the historical and political foundations that motivate sign creation, suit the current study’s emphasis on the sign makers’ historical socio-political positionality. In addition to this semiotic investigation, the current study borrows from the methodological approach, outlined in Albury (2018), in which interview extracts inform linguistic and semiotic landscape analyses. These interview extracts come from a larger ethnographic study into Kawaguchi’s Kurdish community that includes interviews, observations, Kurdish-language story narrations, and language attitude tests.

The Japan Kurdish Cultural Association, Their Signs, and Interviewees Based in Kawaguchi, Tokyo’s most ethnically diverse suburb, The Japan Kurdish Cultural Association (henceforth referred to by its Kurdish initials, KÇKJ) is a Kurdish-run association that focuses primarily on grassroots initiatives within the local community. The majority of its members are Turkish-dominant Kurds who reside in Kawaguchi; however, KÇKJ also includes some local Japanese and (non-Kurdish) Turkish members who are sympathetic to the Kurdish cause. The association has created the two semiotic objects analyzed below: (1) the group’s Facebook banner head and (2) a digital poster that promotes the celebration of the Kurdish holiday Newroz for the local Japanese community.

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These materials reflect members’ semiotic and linguistic expressions of identity intended for their in-group and the Japanese out-group. This paper incorporates English and Turkish-language interview data from three participants. Together, they present the perspectives of a Kurdish language and migration advocate (Hevi), an active KÇKJ member (Aza), and a Japanese attendee (Jiro) of the Newroz celebration. Hevi: (36) In addition to his job as a part-time Kurdish instructor at a Tokyo university, Hevi serves as a spokesman for Kawaguchi’s Kurds, whose plight he addresses frequently in the popular press. Together with his co-founders, Hevi created the KÇKJ to engage in advocacy work for the local Kurdish population. He also runs a Kurdish restaurant devoted to exposing Japanese customers to Kurdish culture. Aza: (40) Similar to the majority of Kawaguchi’s male Kurdish population, Aza’s husband is an undocumented worker in the construction sector, and the family’s ability to stay in Japan is uncertain. As an active member of KÇKJ, Aza participates in cultural cooking exchanges with Kawaguchi-based Japanese women. Aza describes her Kurdish language competence as “broken”. Her husband’s Kurdish underwent severe attrition during childhood. For these reasons, (and in spite of her deep identification of Kurdish as her heritage language), Turkish represents the primary language of her household and the first language of her children. Jiro: (24) Jiro is one of Hevi’s Japanese students who study Kurdish at the university. His Ph.D. thesis in linguistics outlines an understudied Kurdish-language syntactic structure. He is an enthusiast of Kurdish culture and food, both of which he consumes enthusiastically during his regular visits to Hevi’s restaurant.

The forthcoming analysis builds off of the data collected in collaboration with KÇKJ members like Hevi and Aza, informing an understanding of the role and function of Kurdish in forging the KÇKJ’s identity as a metalinguistic community.

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Analysis and Discussion Naming, Language, Identity, and Resistance As a means of exploring the role of Kurdish for in-group identity construction among KÇKJ members, the following discussion addresses the linguistic and semiotic aspects of the association’s group Facebook banner head and supports this analysis with interview extracts. The linguistic aspects highlight the symbolic use of Kurdish for names and authentic expressions of identity. The images that accompany these linguistic aspects embed these insights within Kurds’ collective memory of resistance against assimilation. Due to potential copyright infringement, it is not possible to display this banner head here, necessitating reliance on a brief description. The most prominent feature of the banner head includes a close-up painting of nine Kurdish men who, dressed in colorful traditional costumes and suspended in their synchronized crossing of their left legs, perform a traditional circular line folk dance. The worm’s-eye-view perspective of the painting is noteworthy for its towering portrayal of the dancers from inside the circle: the nine men displayed here represent only a part of a much larger group that moves and postures powerfully together. To the upper left of this painting, a white circle frames a small, non-descript fire-colored map of the Kurdish-dominant region of Northern Syria that borders Turkey. Referred to as Rojava, this region includes Kobanî, the sole city identified by a red place marker. Also within this circle and directly below this map, the hashtag SAVE ROJAVA appears. Underneath this circle, the group has listed its name in Kurdish. Japanese and English-language versions, embedded in parentheses to identify them as translations, directly follow. The placement of the Kurdish name first, followed by its Japanese and English translations, reveals underlying language preferences (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), which omit Turkish completely despite its status as the group’s primary language of communication. Given group members’ experience with Turkey’s stringent requirements for all official associations to carry Turkish names, this order is important: KÇKJ’s presence

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in Japan allows its members to use the language of greatest symbolic importance to name their association. Regardless of this favoritism for Kurdish to name their association, interview comments from Hevi highlight KÇKJ members’ unconscious tendency to converse exclusively in Turkish, a practice that results from years of conditioning in Turkey, a state that designates all official institutions as tightly monitored Turkish-speaking spaces. As Hevi explains, “there is a government [in official Turkish institutions], there is a kind of police there, there is something watching you, so you have to speak in that language.” While high language attrition rates already limit full Kurdish-language expression in unofficial spaces, perceptions of institutional surveillance render the common practice of Kurdish-Turkish code-switching largely inappropriate within state-affiliated institutional domains. These perceptions have become internalized and transferred to the Japanese context. The unmarked status of the official language within this context creates the appearance of neutrality (Woolard, 2016) that belies the decidedly un-neutral language policies originally enacted to marginalize unofficial languages (Irvine & Gal, 2000). While reversing Turkish-language dominance within the association presents a formidable challenge, mastery of, and reference to “Komala Çanda Kurde Lı Japan” represent far more attainable goals. With this name, group members can assert ownership of this space and potentially dispel the specters of Turkish police surveillance. This example parallels the re-naming initiatives to change Turkish-language signs to Kurdish in Diyarkabır, Turkey’s Southeastern city commonly considered Kurdistan’s capital. By drawing attention to the language ideologies that normalize the use of Turkish in H-language domains, these efforts attempt to dismantle them in spite of widespread Turkish-language dominance among Kurdish heritage speakers (Jamison, 2015). Both the Kawaguchi and Diyarbakır examples reflect politically driven naming initiatives that symbolize triumph over a history of “socio-political Othering” (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018, p. 18). The resulting Kurdish-language names in both contexts function, therefore, as symbols of recovery from marginalization. This symbolic importance of naming also characterizes the SAVE ROJAVA hashtag that appears on the banner head with the small map

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described above. This region officially bore the name “Rojava” from 2012–2016 (Arafat, 2016), a Kurdish word that means west, and it remains a common reference for this territory among Kurdish nationalists for its location in western Kurdistan (Gurcan, 2019) despite its official new moniker: The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Similar to the Kurdish space of KÇKJ, this territory’s name is emblematic (Agha, 2007) of its inhabitants’ ethnic identity. Such essentialism also emerges in data from a primarily Turkishlanguage interview with Aza in which she expresses her pride in her Kurdish roots. In Extract 1 (below), she provides an example of TurkishKurdish code-switching in which she illustrates the symbolic role of Kurdish for articulating this identity. Extract 1* Aza: Ben gurur duyururum tabiki. Yani ‘Kûrmanci xwe’ gurur duyurur. (I am proud of course. I mean, being Kurdish itself carries pride.) *Interview primarily in Turkish; Bold in Kurdish

Aza emphasizes her pride in her Kurdish heritage through repetition and the emphatic maker “of course”. While shifting scales from individual to collective Kurdish identity, she inserts the Kurdish-language phrase, “Kûrmanci xwe” (being Kurdish itself ), into Turkish, the matrix language: “gurur duyurur” (carries pride). The inclusion of the discourse marker “yani” (I mean) to introduce this Kurdish-language expression indicates a conscious effort to reformulate her utterance to capture her intended meaning more accurately. Aza’s embedding of this Kurdishlanguage element to complement the Turkish-language discussion, thus, demonstrates her “knowing deploy[ment]” of the language of social identification “with a reflexive symbolism” (Coupland et al., 2003, p. 171). This code choice deepens her statement’s authenticity and displays the strong connection between cultural pride, language, and identity within this in-group context. Returning to the Facebook group page, this essentialist languageidentity relationship is woven into semiotic references to the preservation of Kurdish identity in the face of historical threats. Both the Rojava map

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and its singular inclusion of Kobanî city directly refer to military conflicts that have served as sites of struggle for Kurdish survival. While regional history presents numerous examples of military offensives that have targeted Kurdish settlements, the battles to save Kobanî from ISIS in 2014–2015 and the Kurdish-dominant region of Syria from Turkish military forces in 2019 demonstrate the continued relevance of these offensives. Considered an important development in the “evolution of the Kurdish movement’s collective action frames” (Ciordia, 2018, p. 774), Kurdish fighters’ successful defense of Kobanî in 2014–2015 serves as a powerful reminder of Kurds’ strength in unity. In the form of an internationally recognized SOS for the digital era, the hashtag SAVE ROJAVA triggers the collective memory – intensified by preservation of the Kurdish name – and urges renewed cooperation to defend the Kurdish people from annihilation. Moreover, the incorporation of the English-language verb “save” enhances its accessibility to an international audience and strengthens the scope of this plea. This image and hashtag’s pairing taps into the Kurdish historical narrative’s siege mentality, a state commonly used to mobilize support for a shared ethnonationalistic cause (Huddy et al., 2007), used here to promote a unified, pan-Kurdish identity. The iconic painting of dancing Kurdish men, an integral component of Kurdish celebrations, provides a reminder of the culture that Kurds are fighting to preserve. As mentioned in the banner head description above, it appears to the right of the association name and SAVE ROJAVA hashtag. With its capacity to “keep history alive within [the practitioners them]selves” (Baykurt, 1995, p. 14), folk dance can function as a powerful corporal modality for experiencing culture firsthand. Consequently, ethno-nationalistic projects often declare it as part of their intangible cultural heritage, the mastery of which compares to mastery of the heritage language (Taylor, 2009, p. 47). As the Turkish nation-state has diluted and re-packaged many traditionally Kurdish dances as part of a larger Turkification project (Karakeçili, 2008), Kurdish attempts to reclaim them represents a subversive act, which is punctuated by some of the dances’ intense drum beats, stomping, and unified chants reminiscent of indigenous dances originally intended to defend communities from large animals (Ehrenreich,

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2011). Such communal “performative memorialization” (Leopold, 2020, p. 148) embodies the collective action invoked by the SAVE ROJAVA hashtag through its ability to bring people together as one powerful body. In recognition of this power, Turkish law considers, communication of a pro-Kurdish ideology through these dances to be a punishable offense (Nyberg, 2012). Similar to KÇKJ’s Kurdish-language name and its reference to Rojava, its identifying picture suggests a dismissal of assimilationist policies and the reclaiming of authentic Kurdish cultural heritage. Kurds’ resistance against assimilationist language policies and cultural appropriation strategies featured here also inform the following discussion, which focuses on displays of Kurdish identity for members of the local Japanese community. Similar to the preceding discussion, both symbolic uses of Kurdish and ritualized dancing feature prominently.

The Role of Language for Performing Kurdishness for the Local Japanese Community With its exotic Kurdish drums, colorful traditional costumes, announcers on stage, and large chains of lively dancers, Newroz represents the most visible event on KÇKJ’s activity calendar. This celebration marks the beginning of spring, which, according to the Newroz legend, could only take place following the defeat of the Assyrian King Dehak by Kawa, a heroic Kurdish blacksmith. To publicize his victory, Kawa lit a hilltop bonfire. Newroz celebrations re-enact this narrative each year. Newroz commemorates a successful act of resistance and serves as a historical reference point for Kurds’ fight for independence (Hirschler, 2001). Recognizing this holiday’s symbolic importance, Kurdish nationalists throughout the Kurdistan region actively promote its widespread commemoration, a fact that accounts for the ubiquity of visible Newroz celebrations among members of Kurdish diasporas across various geographical contexts (Mahmod 2016). The spectacle of Newroz in Kawaguchi, thus, reflects alignment with a pan-Kurdish initiative to display the uniqueness of Kurdish cultural heritage that deviates from the region’s dominant cultures. As a holiday that honors resistance

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against hegemony, Turkey’s Newroz celebrations have been politicized by actors from different ends of the ideological spectrum. The Turkish state’s appropriation of Newroz as Nevruz, an official object of intangible Turkish cultural heritage, has exacerbated this effect (Akyan, 2014). Although Kawaguchi’s Newroz celebrations stem from this tradition, many Japanese attendees are unlikely to perceive this aspect of resistance. Nevertheless, the goal of emphasizing Kurdish distinctiveness, as Aza’s interview comments in Extract 2 (below) highlight, remains. Extract 2 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

Aza:

Benim ülkem Türkiye, evim Türkiye’de her i¸s Türkiye ile. Bu s¸ ekilde [Japonlar] ˘ ögrenmi¸ sler. Kürtleri bilmemi¸sler. Aza: My country is Turkey, my home is in Turkey, everything has to do with Turkey. They [the Japanese] have learned this. They don’t know about Kurds. ˙Is¸ te elimizden geldigince ˘ kendimizi anlatmaya çalı¸sıyoruz. Kendimizi tanıtmaya çalı¸sıyoruz. Biz de varız. Ana dilimiz Kürtçe, dilimiz Kürtçe. Biz Kürtçe konu¸suyoruz. It’s like we try to explain ourselves as much as possible. We try to introduce ourselves. This is who we are. Our mother tongue is Kurdish, our language is Kurdish. We speak Kurdish.

In Extract 2, Aza acknowledges that her roots in Turkey foster the misperception that her ethnicity, too, is Turkish. By referring to Kurdish as the mother tongue and/or community’s language in three consecutive formulations (lines 4–5), Aza’s interview comments repeatedly identify Kurdish language as a key characteristic that distinguishes her community from Japan-resident Turkish nationals with non-Kurdish backgrounds. This perspective casts an ironic shadow over Aza’s difficulties formulating Kurdish-language utterances. It simultaneously enhances understanding of her conscious incorporation of her heritage language as a display of identity, both for the interviewers (as seen in Extract 1) as well as for the local Japanese community, an audience that is largely unaware of their Kurdish neighbors’ Turkish-language dominance. In this way, Aza and other KÇKJ members demonstrate the common practice of “dis-identify[ing] with someone in order to identify with some[one]” else (Peralta & Anico, 2009, p. 1). This background informs analysis of the Kawaguchi Newroz invitation, which KÇKJ circulates to the local Japanese community through

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social media. To avoid the potential for copyright infringement, this invitation has, unfortunately, been removed from this paper, which merits a brief description of the image here. The top half of this invitation contains an image of flowers and, in the top right corner, the message: ‘NEWROZ PîROZ BE’ [Happy New Year]. On the bottom half of this invitation, information about the event is accompanied by a simple street map of the event’s location. With its Japanese-language information about the event’s time (10:30–15:00), date (the 20th of March), and location (JR Kawaguchi Station East, Exit Cupola Square), the information displayed on this invitation clearly targets a Japanese-speaking audience. Its analysis indicates some ways in which KÇKJ communicates Newroz’s symbolism to the local Japanese community. The colors of the Kurdish flag – red, green, yellow, and white – represent a conspicuous feature of the image in the top half of the invitation: it includes yellow and red-striped tulips, white daffodils, their green leaves and stems, barley stalks, and a striped butterfly that contains all of these colors. While the flowers’ naturalistic color-image correspondence may not draw attention to the intentional incorporation of these colors, the striped butterfly’s far less natural appearance more effectively achieves this effect. Moreover, the Japanese-language information – which appears on red, white, and green stripes – reinforces the salience of these colors. With the inclusion of the sun on the left side of the white stripe, the ordering of these colors, in fact, directly reproduces the Kurdish flag (displayed in Fig. 1). These aspects, thus, associate Newroz with the symbol of Kurdish national sovereignty. The display of two spring flowers that are indicative of seasonal rebirth, together with a stalk of grain that signifies the new growing season, symbolizes the start of the new year for a population that remains keenly aware of its traditionally agrarian roots. While the importance of the growing season may not be readily apparent to the largely urban Japanese audience, the focus on the flowers of springtime – commemorated in Japan by world-renowned cherry blossom festivals – represents a relatable motive for celebration. Unlike in nations with autochthonous Kurdish populations, the Kurdish flag poses no challenge to Japan’s territorial integrity. Instead, the images presented here convey

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Fig. 1 The Kurdish Flag

a seemingly innocuous blend of spring and cultural pride despite their contentious roots. Turning to the top right corner of the invitation, the Kurdish-language phrase ‘NEWROZ PîROZ BE’ (HAPPY NEW YEAR) appears in all capital letters in red and green, two of the four Kurdish national colors. The fire above the î in PîROZ represents Kawa’s legendary hilltop bonfire, and the second butterfly that appears alongside this phrase reinforces this mixture of Kurdish nationalism with the springtime motif. Looking closer at the linguistic features of the invitation, its multilingualism is noteworthy. This display of Kurdish in a Japanese-dominant setting increases the public’s exposure to the written language in a highly visible domain largely reserved for the dominant language. Described as the heightened “public dispensability” of Kurdish within the Turkish context (Jamison, 2015), this technique disrupts language practices that are grounded in stable power relations, and, as such, suggests resistance to these power relations (Heller, 1992, p. 123). Although less salient than in Turkey, visual displays of Kurdish in Kawaguchi’s Japanese-dominant setting also influence power: inclusion of a minority language in the linguistic landscape increases its perceived value within a given sociolinguistic setting (Landry & Bourhis, 1997, p. 25), an outcome that begins to offset some of the effects of marginalization.

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With a shift in focus to the sign’s untranslated content, the postvernacular (Shandler, 2006) function of Kurdish emerges as a salient feature. The essential information for attending the event appears in Japanese, the primary language of the invitation’s target audience. Given the widespread understanding of basic Japanese among Kawaguchi’s Kurdish population, this information is also largely accessible to them. In contrast, deciphering the Kurdish-language phrase, “Newroz pîroz be,” presents a challenge to many Japanese attendees, most of whom lack any Kurdish-language proficiency. As a result, the invitation effectively merges the holiday greeting with its surrounding imagery. Such use of language represents an example of a lingueme, a “signaling unit that functions as a flag for the language [it] represents, whereby the content and propositional value of the utterance is of lesser importance” than its cultural associations (Ivkovi´c, 2015, p. 103). Given the prevalence of the flag-like features discussed previously, this insertion of a Kurdish-language lingueme represents a case of ethno-linguistic infusion (Benor, 2019) by enhancing the imagery’s deep rootedness in Kurdish ethno-national identity without conveying any text-specific meaning. This example of language for “cultural display” (Coupland et al., 2006, p. 371) enhances the apparent authenticity of the invitation and event. Indeed, the colorful displays of Kurdish culture at the Newroz celebration, in line with the notion of existential authenticity (Wang, 2000), positions Japanese community members as tourists who can escape from the familiar by consuming the spectacle of an exotic culture. Comments from an interview with Jiro, a Japanese attendee and Kurdish student, suggest that such cultural displays hold appeal for many members of his culture. In fact, he explains, this appeal extends to lesserknown minority ethnic groups in general: “When Japanese people visit France, they don’t care about Paris now. They go directly to Brittany to find out more about the Breton [people].” Moreover, the remainder of his interview, during which he presents a vast archive of photographs of minority-language signs and folk costume-clad women of wide-ranging ethnic origins, points to his own enthusiasm for experiencing exotic authenticity. Such displays of authenticity for relatively privileged consumers have received criticism for their stereotypical treatment, or “eating” (Cf.

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Hooks, 1992) of the marginalized Other. In the case of Kawaguchi’s Kurdish community, the potential benefits of attracting this attention also merit consideration. Interviews with KÇKJ members cite the Japanese population’s increased awareness of their socio-political positionality as a key to earning sympathy for the Kurdish cause and, they hope, their asylum claims (Schluter, 2020b). Establishing a distinction between Kurdish and Turkish culture represents an important intermediate step to highlighting their political plight, and the ethno-linguistic infusion described above plays a central role. Unabashed displays of Kurdish nationalism and language have emerged in defiance of a history of assimilationist pressures. The prominent inclusion of these two components suits Newroz, a holiday that commemorates legendary resistance against hegemony. Set in a distant cultural context relative to that which inspired the Newroz legend, the symbolic importance of language and nationalism is not immediately clear to the average Japanese attendee, who is likely drawn by the exotic authenticity of the spectacle. Through its amplification of an identifiably Kurdish voice in the local community, this spectacle, nevertheless, fulfills an important function for Kawaguchi’s Kurds: it increases the visibility of a marginalized migrant community.

Conclusion Based on analyses of two artifacts from the virtual linguistic landscape and supporting interview data, the preceding discussion has focused on the post-vernacular (Shandler, 2006), ethno-linguistic infusion (Benor, 2019) of Kurdish as an intrinsic aspect of the historical narrative subscribed to by members of a Kurdish cultural association in Japan. In spite of the widespread use of Turkish (rather than Kurdish) as the primary community language, the in-group communication data suggest a strong language-identity link that results in both the use of emblematic (Agha, 2007) Kurdish names to claim ownership of a Kurdish space and the “reflexive symbolism” (Coupland et al., 2003, p. 171) of Kurdishlanguage insertions to index authenticity. These examples are embedded

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within references to collective action against those who have historically sought to assimilate different Kurdish populations (Ciordia, 2018). Reflecting the “performative memorialization” (Leopold, 2020, p. 148) of an authentic Kurdish identity, the iconic painting of Kurdish dancers signifies a rejection of historical attempts to erase Kurdish culture. With respect to the presentation of Kurdish identity to out-group Japanese community members, association members seek to portray themselves as a group that is ethnically distinctive from non-Kurdish Turks. This practice of demonstrating cultural distinction pairs language and nationalism with the prominent display of Kurdish national colors and the Kurdish phrase, “Newroz Pîroz Be.” For Japanese attendees, the cultural display (Coupland et al., 2006, p. 371) of this Kurdish lingueme demonstrates the role of language as part of the larger strategy of producing an existentially authentic (Wang, 2000) Newroz spectacle for the local Japanese community. Although it originates from Kurds’ historically marginalized positionality in their homelands, this strategy also serves association members’ goals. In the cases analyzed here, Kurdish serves as a tool that, together with other semiotic resources, helps to define Kurdish authenticity for both in-group and out-group projections of identity. Language plays a central role in the community-boundary marking and in-group identity construction practices outlined in Avineri and Kroskrity’s (2014) conceptualization of metalinguistic communities. The digital linguistic landscape artifacts presented here showcase the resonance of a collective identity linguistically constructed through Kurdish. Moreover, widespread attrition of this heritage language does not erase its rootedness in this community’s history, a finding that, in line with Avineri (2019), Benor (2019), and Shandler (2006), allows Kurdish phrases to retain their symbolic importance in a community that tends to use little Kurdish for daily communication. Acknowledgements This project was funded by a start-up grant from The Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [grant number 1-BE0H].

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Coupland, N., Bishop, H., Evans, B., & Garrett, P. (2006). Imagining Wales and the Welsh language: Ethnolinguistic subjectivities and demographic flow. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 25, 351–376. Ehrenreich, B. (2011). Dancing in the streets: A history of collective joy. Metropolitan Books. Grossman, J. (2019). Toward a definition of diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42, 1263–1282. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1550261 Gurcan, M. (2019, November 7). Is the PKK worried by the YPG’s growing popularity? Al-Monitor. Heller, M. (1992). The politics of codeswitching and language choice. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 13, 123–142. Hirschler, K. (2001). Defining the nation: Kurdish historiography in Turkey in the 1990s. Middle Eastern Studies, 37 , 145–166. Hodge, R., & Kress, G. (1988). Social semiotics. Cornell University Press. Hooks, B. (1992). Eating the other: Desire and resistance. In Black looks: Race and representation, 21–39. South End Press. Huddy, L., Feldman, S., & Weber, C. (2007). The political consequences of perceived threat and felt insecurity. The Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science, 614, 131–153. Irvine, J., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language (pp. 35–84). School for American Research. Ivkovi´c, D. (2015). Towards a semiotics of multilingualism. Semiotica, 2015, 89–126. Ivkovi´c, D., & Lotherington, H. (2009). Multilingualism in cyberspace: Conceptualizing the virtual linguistic landscape. International Journal of Multilingualism, 6 , 17–36. Jamison, K. (2015). Making Kurdish public(s): Language politics and practice in Turkey (Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Chicago). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Jamison, K. (2016). Hefty dictionaries in incomprehensible tongues: Commensurating code and language community in Turkey. Anthropological Quarterly, 89, 31–62. Karakeçili, F. (2008). Kurdish dance identity in contemporary Turkey: The examples of Delilo and Galuç (Master’s thesis, York University). Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16 , 23–49.

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Afterword

Afterword: Reclamation and Metalinguistic Communities Wesley Y. Leonard

It is an honor to write the afterword for this volume, and I thank the contributors for providing complex, thoughtful, and reflective analyses of topics that warrant much more attention than they have previously received. The authors expand and add theoretical complexity to the notion of what it means to know, speak, use, or even be “a language.” Explicating issues of agency, ideology, and symbolic uses of language are tremendously beneficial for advancing and refining several concepts, many of which are critically important and yet too often uncritically employed. In this essay, I outline key interventions that I observe in this volume, with the caveat that there are many others beyond those I describe. Prior to doing this, however, I first call attention to a metacontribution that emerges not from the specific arguments made in W. Y. Leonard (B) University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_12

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the chapters, but rather by virtue of how each chapter is introduced: the recognition that author-researchers are not just reporting on narratives of language, but are also occupying subject positions as narrators. Unfortunately, it is not yet common for academic essays, particularly in Linguistics1 but also in other language sciences, to begin with reports on author positionality. It is thus commendable that these authors have modeled how they bring particular backgrounds that must be considered for evaluating and understanding their approaches, arguments, and conclusions. Indeed, prominently featuring author positionality on the first page of each essay represents a welcome methodological intervention that I encourage other researchers to follow. Out of respect for this model, I begin my commentary by drawing attention to my own positionality. I am a linguist whose primary work revolves around reversing Native American language shift, and I incorporate into this work my cultural lens as an engaged citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. After completing my graduate training in Linguistics, I branched out into Native American Studies in recognition that the primary tools of linguistic science are useful, but often misaligned with Indigenous needs and perspectives. I consider myself to be a myaamia language affiliate (Davis, 2016), myaamia language learner, and participant in the narrative called myaamiaki eemamwiciki (Miami awakening, literally “Miamis awaken”).2 In a basic sense, myaamiaki eemamwiciki is the story of how my tribe consulted archival records to bring our myaamia language, which linguists had labeled “extinct” when it ceased to be known in the 1960s, back into our community. In a deeper way, it is also a story of a cultural renaissance and political resurgence that goes far beyond 1 Following a practice I have adopted in my recent work, and also to highlight the implicit critique by many authors in this volume of the limited and limiting ways in which academic fields and their categories are constructed, I capitalize the names of academic disciplines. Doing so captures how academic field names are proper nouns that describe particular communities of scholars, who come from particular backgrounds, and adopt research tools and questions in sociopolitical contexts that often privilege certain norms to the point where these norms can become an unquestioned baseline around which further research is framed. 2 For clarity, I will use “Miami” for the people and culture, and “myaamia” to name our language, though both terms are actually used with both meanings. I follow an emerging convention in my community of writing our language in lower-case.

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language. Centering the agency of Miami people and our points of view, myaamiaki eemamwiciki functions as a counternarrative to the assumed endpoint of Indigenous language shift that gets imposed through dominant discourses of language “loss” and “death.” It responds to a settler society which teaches that Native Americans and our cultures are—echoing the observations about the Tehuelche language made by Domingo in this volume—“vanishing.” Responding to these and related colonial logics, which not only erase Indigeneity but also impose the idea that “success” in reversing language shift must entail use and transmission of a Native American language in ways that mirror the norms of globally dominant languages, I developed a decolonial framework of language reclamation to refer to efforts “by a community to claim its right to speak a language and to set associated goals in response to community needs and perspectives” (Leonard, 2012, p. 359). Though these goals often include language-specific aims such as fostering intergenerational transmission, important to this framework is its focus on identifying and addressing the underlying issues and power structures that precipitate language shift, and on highlighting the ways in which contemporary resistance can change them. As asserted by Nelson in this volume, for example, Pataxó Hãhãhãe language work in Brazil responds to Indigenous erasure and anti-Indigenous racism in symbolically powerful ways, using a documented corpus of only around 100 words. This is an example of language reclamation. Drawing on the concept of the metalinguistic community (Avineri, 2017), the authors in this volume illustrate several limitations to describing and theorizing language with metrics that overly privilege language proficiency and use. This general theme is tremendously important for language reclamation, and in the remainder of this commentary I outline the following more specific contributions to reclamation theory that I observed from the chapters collectively: their expansion and refinement of units of analysis; their critique of normative notions such as “speaker,” especially as this relates to language education; and their emphasis not only on what people do with languages, but also on how they imagine these practices. Following the acknowledgment of author subjectivity discussed above, I embed into these comments several examples from my experiences in language reclamation work,

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focusing especially on problems I have observed which I believe the ideas presented in this volume can address. Language reclamation is ontologically dependent on the existence of what Keller describes in her study of Gallo as “language recognizers”— people who not only conceive of and identify a distinct code, but who also adopt praxis aligning with this idea. Particularly during the first several years of Miami efforts toward language recovery, when knowledge about the myaamia language was sparse, there was a need to point out that this language existed. Moreover, many of us who were involved in program development had to actively assert that myaamia was sleeping, not extinct, in response to many naysayers—mostly linguists—who asserted that our language was gone. In those early discussions, I defined “sleeping languages” simply as those that are not actively known but that are documented and claimed by a community, hence having potential for future use (Leonard, 2008). At the time, I did not fully theorize the latter point about what type of community claim might be necessary. The chapters in this volume provide insight on this matter: beyond being documented, a sleeping language has reclamation potential because it is claimed by a metalinguistic community, specifically one whose members view themselves as active stewards and/or users of the language. Extending this idea, I emphasize the importance of strengthening the metalinguistic community as part of building reclamation capacity. To give a specific example, back when myaamia language programs were just starting, I recall a Miami tribal member explicitly saying that they could learn myaamia but that they did not feel licensed to actually speak it. This is just one of many examples where the primary issue was language affiliation, or in this case the perceived lack thereof. The response thus entailed a shift in community programs to better situate myaamia learning and use within contexts that also promote Miami identity and cultural connection. Language reclamation praxis also fosters a critical approach to terminology and the conceptual frames around which languages and language practices are described. For example, the framework recognizes, as discussed throughout this volume and especially well explicated by López-Espino in her analysis of the deficit model associated with “Spanish speaker” within US courts, that speaker is a discursively created

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category as much as it is an observation of a person’s use of a given code. Similarly, language reclamation praxis firmly embeds the argument made by Boitel, in his critical account of Nahuát language work in El Salvador, that proficiency in the context of individual language ability “should be studied as a politically loaded term, used to draw borders of belonging, legitimacy and power to include the ‘proficient ones’ and to exclude the others.” Indeed, an ongoing challenge that language reclamation aims to remedy involves the hegemony of dominant (often colonial) ideologies, which frequently guide expectations about speakerhood and proficiency in ways that impose a narrow notion of speech community rather than engaging the broader notion of the metalinguistic community. A common outcome is that only first-language fluent speakers get counted as speakers, with the category sometimes restricted even further by additional criteria such as whether a person was raised in a particular place or through a certain set of socialization practices. The chapters in this volume effectively capture the structures that underlie the demarcation of speakerhood and build upon important queries raised in earlier work regarding how communities, rather than being overly demarcated or evaluated through metrics such as speakerhood, might instead be theorized based on how languages are spoken about or employed to achieve various sociopolitical objectives (e.g., Avineri & Kroskrity, 2014; Shulist, 2016). For example, learning and using myaamia kinship terms has helped Miami people better appreciate notions of relational accountability that underlie many Miami cultural practices. Enumerations of speakers and evaluations of linguistic proficiency would likely miss this outcome entirely. By shifting away from speakerhood and linguistic proficiency as normative criteria for assessment, to instead emphasize the agency of people to use and represent languages in diverse ways for diverse purposes, the chapters in this volume also offer an important intervention for language education. By illustrating how a range of language practices can address and be informed by community needs and goals, they collectively challenge the dominance of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) as a framework that tends to impose normative language

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learning outcomes with a heavy focus on individuals’ language proficiency. Through the lens of SLA, examples from this volume such as Avineri, Bunin Benor, and Greninger’s account of Hebrew schools, where the majority of communication occurs in English, or Harasta’s account of Kernewek reclamation, where longstanding efforts with government support are not producing fluent speakers, would likely be deemed as failures. Conversely, employing metalinguistic community as the analytical unit illuminates how these are actually stories of people engaging with and using language to produce meaningful social outcomes. Similarly, most Miami language programs employ ethnolinguistic infusion (Benor, 2019) and focus on fostering healthy relationships to heal the ruptures— between Miami people and our lands, our culture, our ancestors, and even each other—begat by colonization and settler colonialism. Though some of these programs do encourage participants to speak myaamia whenever possible, they put little focus on being a speaker of myaamia. This distinction is important. I end this commentary with a discussion of the future, a point that frequently comes up in the Indigenous language work in which I am most frequently engaged. The chapters in this volume describe diverse metalinguistic communities, highlighting the particular ways in which they have come to exist and how they perform functions in contemporary society, especially as this relates to a group and individual identity. As much detail as they provide, however, I assert that the stories described in this volume are not and cannot ever be fully complete because they all describe metalinguistic communities that continue to be (re)created in dynamic contexts. This raises at least two questions: First, what is likely to occur in the future for these metalinguistic communities given their current trajectories? Second, what can occur when things are imagined in particular ways—for example, in ways that reject marginalizing discourses which place many communities in subordinate social positions, or challenge deficit models of language learning to instead celebrate what people do with language, or question dominant assumptions that Indigenous languages such as Nahuát and Tehuelche are meant to “disappear?” Researchers might easily make educated guesses by drawing on attested examples to answer the first question, but I believe the

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second question, which is much harder to answer, represents the more interesting area for which the current volume fosters new lines of inquiry. To explore this point, I draw upon a theme in Indigenous Studies that I have frequently adopted for theorizing and engaging in language reclamation work: the notion of Indigenous futurities to imagine, and by extension endeavor to (re)create, healthy relationships with language as part of a larger project to undo colonialism, racism, and other -isms. As described by Kanaka Maoli scholar Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘¯opua (2018), “Futurity is not just another way to say ‘the future.’ Futurities are ways that groups imagine and produce knowledge about futures” (p. 86). The term futurities is intentionally plural not only to capture that there are many contemporary communities, but also because there can be many ways within a given community of imagining futures. The concept of the metalinguistic community as a type of “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) is particularly appropriate for considering futurities because it centers how communities imagine languages in particular contexts and guide practices accordingly, while also drawing focus to the social contexts that affect how this imagining takes place at any given time. To extend this idea, I suggest the notion of metalinguistic futurities, the ways in which metalinguistic communities exercise their agency by imagining and producing knowledge about their own futures to realize certain outcomes. I wonder how members of each metalinguistic community described in this volume imagine themselves existing in the future, and offer this inquiry as a potentially productive extension of the research shared in this volume.

References Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. Verso. Avineri, N. (2017). Contested stance practices in secular Yiddish metalinguistic communities: Negotiating closeness and distance. In I. L. Bleaman & B. D. Joseph (Eds.), Jewish Language Variation and Contact: Fifty Years After Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967) [Special Issue]. Journal of Jewish Languages, 5 (2), 174–199.

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Avineri, N., & Kroskrity, P. V. (2014). On the (re-)production and representation of endangered language communities: Social boundaries and temporal borders. Language & Communication, 38, 1–7. Benor, S. B. (2019). Ethnolinguistic infusion at Sephardic Adventure Camp. In R. Blake & I. Buchstaller (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the work of John Rickford (pp. 142–152). Routledge. Davis, J. L. (2016). Language affiliation and ethnolinguistic identity in Chickasaw language revitalization. Language & Communication, 47 , 100–111. Goodyear-Ka‘¯opua, N. (2018). Indigenous oceanic futures: Challenging settler colonialisms and militarization. In L. T. Smith, E. Tuck, & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: Mapping the long view (pp. 82–102). Routledge. Leonard, W. Y. (2008). When is an “extinct language” not extinct?: Miami, a formerly sleeping language. In K. A. King, N. Schilling-Estes, L. Fogle, J. J. Lou, & B. Soukup (Eds.), Sustaining linguistic diversity: Endangered and minority languages and language varieties (pp. 23–33). Georgetown University Press. Leonard, W. Y. (2012). Framing language reclamation programmes for everybody’s empowerment. Gender and Language, 6 (2), 339–367. Shulist, S. (2016). Language revitalization and the future of ethnolinguistic identity. Language & Communication, 47 , 94–99.

Index

A

Affect 186, 189, 194, 196, 201 Affiliation 98, 113, 114 Agency 2, 3, 11, 18 Anglification 145 Anti-immigration 79 Aonekko ‘a’ien. See Tehuelche Argentina 120, 131, 133 Artifacts textual 76, 77, 89 Assimilation 232 Authentication 98, 125, 134 Authenticity 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 125, 132, 134, 143, 173–175 Authorization 98, 104 Autonomy 80, 84

B

Bahia 162, 165

Banal nationalism 150 Belonging 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 143, 148, 149, 227, 253 cultural 143 Belongingness 114 Brazil 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169–171 Breton 183, 184, 187, 188, 201 Britain 143, 145, 151 Brittany 183, 184, 187, 188, 195, 197, 202

C

Caramuru-Paraguaçu 162–164, 166, 168, 169, 171 Celtic language 142, 145 Central America 52, 57 Central Mexico 57 Chabad 34

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Avineri and J. Harasta (eds.), Metalinguistic Communities, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0

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Chile 120 Chronotope 113 Citizenship 209, 215, 216, 219 lack of 209, 215 status 215, 219 Code-switching 75, 110, 111, 114, 233, 234 Colectivo Tzunhejekat 53, 60, 63 Colonialism 58 settler 254 Colonization 3, 11, 18, 57, 162, 254 Spanish 57 Communicative competence 47 Communicative practices 208 Community 121, 122, 124, 125, 128, 132, 134, 135. See also Identity Community membership 186, 201 Complementary schools American Jewish 31, 34 British 47 Jewish 30, 31, 33, 42, 45, 47 Co-naturalization 205 Cornish 141, 142, 144–147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155–158 culture 146 ethnicity 149, 156 language. See Kernewek Cornwall 141–146, 149–155, 157, 158 Court actors 206–211, 214, 217–220. See also Legal professionals Cultural appropriation 236 Cultural assimilation 110

D

Decoding 31, 34, 35, 37, 41

Decontextualization 165 Denaturalization 98, 107 Denomination Conservative 34 independent 34 Reconstructionist 34 Reform 34 Dialects 75 Modern Greek 102, 103, 109, 110, 113 Diaspora 226, 227 Greek 95 Diasporic communities 10, 17 Differenciation 53, 58, 63, 66 Disaffiliation 114 Discourse community 7 Discursive consciousness 12 Discursive disjunctures 163 Discursive practices 75, 83 Discursive strategies 83 Distinction 241, 242 Documentation 121, 132 collection 123 language 122, 127, 128

E

Educational settings 82 El Salvador Western 53, 55 Emigration 96, 99 Enoughness 128, 134 Enregisterment 53, 56, 60, 63, 66, 165, 166, 175 Enregistrement 201 Epistemology 186, 194 Erasure 10, 13, 18, 104, 121, 124, 161, 164, 165, 175, 207, 209,

Index

210, 212, 215, 218, 227, 242, 251 Indigenous 161, 164, 165, 175 Estrangement 114 Ethnic ambiguity 144 Ethnic authenticity 98, 113 Ethnic community 9 Ethnic revival 132 Ethnolinguistic infusion 31–33, 41, 44, 45, 143, 145, 147–149, 153, 155–158, 227, 229, 240, 241, 254 Europe 53 Exotic authenticity 240, 241

259

Heritage language 28, 31–33, 96, 134, 163, 170, 201, 235, 237, 242 education 33 learning 28 varieties 114 Heritage narrative 3, 227 Historical narratives 229, 235, 241 H-language domains 233 Hybridity 110, 114

I F

Flexible signifier 32 Fractal recursivity 207, 209, 210, 213, 216, 218 France 183, 184, 188 Futurities 255

G

Gallo 183–192, 194–198, 200–202 Grenglish 102, 104–107, 109–112

H

Haudenosaunee Confederacy 1 Hebrew 27–47 Hebrew infusion 29 Hebrew school 28, 31 Hebrew Through Movement 36, 41 Hegemony 10, 13, 18 Herder, J.G. 9, 121, 147, 150, 157, 188

Iconization 124. See also Last speaker Identity 3, 5, 8, 10, 16, 148, 155, 162, 163, 171, 173, 175 authentic expressions of 232 collective 78, 84, 89 construction 229 ethnic 121, 129 imagined 52 Indigenous 54, 61, 120, 162, 171, 173, 175 intimate 76–79, 82–84, 88, 89, 148 Kurdish 227, 228, 233, 234, 236, 242 linguistic expressions of 231 marker 114, 128 modernist 113 national 78, 120 of the community 121 Patagonian 124 performance 128 semiotic expressions of 231 Tehuelche 124, 127 Identity narratives 195

260

Index

Ideology(ies) 162–164, 169, 173, 175. See also Language ideological clarification erased 122 hegemonic 77 language 80, 82, 83 language-focused 124 linguistic 122, 134, 135 of race 164 racializing 76 solidarity 77 Illegitimation 98 Imagined community 185, 255 Indexes 169, 173, 175 of indigeneity 175. See also Signs Indexicality 55, 56 Indigeneity 13, 14, 16, 52, 61, 62, 65, 66, 124, 150, 166, 167, 169–176, 251 authentic 167, 169, 173, 175 performance of 174 Indigenous 145, 149, 156 Indigenous futurities 255 Indigenous mobilization 165 Indigenous people 10, 120, 135 In-group 227–229, 231, 232, 234, 241, 242 Iniciativa Portadores del Náhuat 53, 60 Intergenerational motivation 39 Intergenerational transfer 144 International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages 4 Intersubjectivity 98 Interviews 74, 75, 82, 97, 98, 100, 101, 104 Intimacy cultural 78

of exclusion 76, 89 Israel 27, 29, 30, 32, 36–39, 41, 43, 47 Israeli Hebrew 37, 38 Italy 75, 76, 80, 84, 88

J

Japan 227, 229–231, 233, 238 Jewish education 30, 31, 34 Jewish life vocabulary 41, 42 Jews 30, 31, 39, 47

K

Kawaguchi 227, 229–231, 233, 236, 237, 239–241 Kernewek 141–158 King, A. 53, 55, 62 Kurdish 227–242 Kurdish nationalists 236

L

Labeling 207, 208 Language ancestral 6 -as emblem of Indigeneity 61 endangered 2, 6 heritage 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13 immigrant 6 Indigenous 6, 9, 16, 17 minoritized 2, 5, 6, 10 sacred 6 Language activists 122, 123, 155, 157, 158 Language advocacy 186, 189 Language advocates 201 Language affiliates 250

Index

Language affiliation 76, 77, 252 Language artists 184 Language attrition 233 Language community 251 Native American 250, 251 Language ideological clarification 122 Language ideology 3, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 17, 32, 33, 35, 45, 47, 145, 147, 150, 157, 158, 206–208, 210, 211, 220 dominant 11 explicit 147, 148 hegemonic 98, 114, 147 Herderian 147, 150, 157 implicit 142, 147 mother tongue 109 nationalist 146, 147, 157 purist 112, 113 revival 61 standard 208, 211, 220 Language initiatives 228 Language labels 191 Language naming 55, 129 Language narratives 250 Language policies 233, 236 Language practices 252, 253 Language preservation 2, 10 Language reclamation 124, 125, 134, 136, 251–253, 255 Language recognition 189 Language recognizer 186, 194, 200, 252 Language revitalization 12, 14, 15 initiatives 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 88, 89 Náhuat 51, 54, 60, 62 practices 76, 80

261

Language revival movement 142, 143, 145 Language rights 228 Language socialization 121, 187, 253 Hebrew 30 nostalgia 134 Yiddish 28 Language status 191, 194 Language variation Greek 103 regional 103 register 103 Last speaker 121, 124, 125 Latinx children 220 community 219 identities 206, 219 persons 205, 219 Legal actors 210. See also Legal professionals Legal professionals 207–212, 214, 215, 218–221 Lega Nord 75, 76, 79 Lengua mexicana corrupta 57, 58 Liga Veneta Repubblica 80, 81, 88, 89 Lingueme 240, 242 Linguistic anthropology 146, 157 Linguistic community 7, 62, 208 Linguistic competence 113, 121, 125, 134 Linguistic distinctiveness 158 Linguistic diversity 96 Linguistic ideologies 52 Linguistic landscape 43, 132, 227, 230, 239, 241, 242 digital 227, 230, 242

262

Index

Italian 81 Linguistic objects 130, 131 Linguistic reawakening 163 Linguistic tokenism 142 ethno-political 143 Linguistic tokens 128 Literacy for endangered languages 129 L-language domains 228 Loanwords 33, 41, 42 Hebrew 41

return 114 Minority language ideology 187 Minority language speakerhood 186 Minority language users 186 Mitzvah bar 31, 39, 47 bat 28, 29, 31, 39, 47 Modern Hebrew 29–31, 41, 42 Modernity 10 Modernization 145 myaamiaki eemamwiciki 250, 251 myaamia language 250, 252

M

Maga 144, 154 Manchado, D. 119–126, 132 Marginalized migrant community 241 Marginalized positionality 227, 242 Materials language 128 learning 134 linguistic 121, 125 Maxakalian. See Pataxó Hãhãhãe Metalinguistic community 2, 3, 8–10, 12–18, 62, 81, 82, 114, 143, 145, 147, 148, 157, 158, 186, 206, 207, 219, 220, 227, 229, 231, 251–255 emerging 132 Hebrew 33, 45, 47 trifurcated 145, 147 Yiddish 37 Metalinguistic discourse 97, 101, 107, 113, 114 Metapragmatics 54, 66 Mexico 57 Miami people 251–254 Migration

N

Na:wat. See Náhuat Nahuas 57 Náhuat 53–55, 60, 62–66 Naming 150–152, 154 Naming initiatives 233 Narratives 73, 77, 82, 84, 97, 99, 105, 107, 113 National Heritage Language Resource Center 4 Nationalist ideologies 229 Nau 127 Newroz 236–238, 240–242 Nonmigrants 96–99, 104, 106 Northern Italy 73, 74, 76, 79, 82, 90 Northern League. See Lega Nord Nostalgia socialization 3, 8, 13, 16

O

Ôbrée, Bèrtran 185 Oklahoma 250 Onondaga language 1 #OnwardHebrew 30, 41

Index

Othering 233 Out-group 227, 228, 231, 242

P

Parenting 208, 209, 214, 218, 219 practices 209, 218, 219 Patagonia 119, 132 Pataxó Hãhãhãe 161–167, 170–172, 174–176 Patrimony artistic 84, 89 historical 89 Performance 183, 188, 195 Placenames 151 Polycentricity 98 Portuguese 162, 168, 170 Positionality 5, 17, 250 Positioning 98, 99, 112, 113 Posters 76, 81, 85, 89 Post-vernacularity 227, 229 Post-vernacular language 129 Post-vernacular literacy 129 Proficiency 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 148, 149, 186, 189, 200, 251, 253, 254 grammatical 10 Hebrew 29, 30, 35, 42 lack of 58, 59, 64, 65 language 30 linguistic 33, 184, 186, 253 performative 148 statements 56, 67 statements about 53, 55 statements on 54, 67

Raciolinguistic ideologies 207, 208, 216, 219–221 Racism 164, 173, 175, 176 anti-Indigenous 175 Recognition 5, 7, 10, 11, 16 Recognizer role 186, 189, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201 Reflexivity 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 67 Reform school 36–39, 44 Regional language 76, 89 Reindigenization 167, 169, 170 linguistic 170 semiotic 166, 167, 169 Religious education 31 Re-naming initiatives 233 Retomada da língua 163. See also Revitalization, Indigenous language Revalorization 84 Reversing language shift 135 Revitalization 161–163, 176 community 161–163, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173 contexts 122 Indigenous language 162, 167, 170, 172, 173. See also Retomada da língua initiative 133 language 119, 120, 135 Revitalizing Indigenous Languages 149 Rhematization 207, 209, 210, 213, 215, 216, 218 ROJAVA 232, 234, 236

S R

Racialization 205–207, 209, 210, 218, 220

263

Sacred language 31 San Salvador 53, 58, 60, 64 Santa Cruz 120

264

Index

Schoolscapes 41, 43, 44 Second Language Acquisition (SLA) 253, 254 Semiotic processes -of differenciation 52 -of typification 56 Semiotics 2, 124, 131, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173–176, 206, 207, 209 Signage 143, 153 Signs 76, 77, 85, 88, 164–173, 175 contiguous 56 indexical 56 indigeneity-marking 171 linguistic 56 non-linguistic 65 of indigeneity 164–169, 172, 173, 175 theory of 55. See also Indexes Sleeping languages 252 Social constructionist approaches 98 Socialization 82, 83 nostalgia 89 Social semiotics 230 Sociolinguistics 104 Spanish Conquest, The 57 Spanish speaker 205–221 Speaker. See also Last speaker ancient 132 authenticated 125 new 125, 127, 129 Speaker/Speakerhood 251–254 Speech community 2, 7, 143, 144, 148, 149, 208 Stance 187, 189, 191, 194, 196, 201 affective 103, 107, 110, 186, 187, 202 emotional 77 epistemic 107

epistemological 186, 187, 189 Stance practices 132, 134 Stancetaking 187 State recognition 11 Stereotypes 96, 100, 166, 172–176 of Indians 173 of indigeneity 174 racialized 173, 176 Stock phrases 152, 154, 156 Stories 73, 75, 81, 82, 84, 89 Supplementary schools 32 T

Tehuelche 120–135 Torah school 28, 31 Toré 167, 171–173 Total Physical Response 36 Transmigration 96, 114 Turkey 227–229, 232, 233, 237, 239 Turkish-speaking spaces 233 U

UCLA 4 Undocumented immigrant 215 United Kingdom, The 143 United States (US) 27, 29–31, 206–208, 210, 214–216, 218–221 V

Venetan 73–78, 80–85, 88, 89 Veneto 73, 76, 79, 80, 84, 85, 89 W

Whitening strategy 120 White public space 207–209