Linguistic anthropologists have used the concept of "scale" to describe how everyday interactions are linked to global flows and movements, particularly in the urban centers of Europe and North America. This article reconceptualizes the notion of "scale" by examining how residents in a small market village in eastern India order, in both hierarchical and nonhierarchical configurations, multiple graphic repertoires in dialogic engagement with the built environment. In the article, I suggest that script is an important semiotic modality through which indigenous and nonindigenous residents align notions of community, language, and territory according to different evaluative metrics, often in conflicting and antagonistic ways. These differential scalings of multiple scripts on the village's surfaces, and the disjunctures that exist between these scalings illuminate how dominant language hegemonies are perpetuated and, at the same time, contested by indigenous and minority language communities. [script, scale, indigeneity, linguistic landscape, literacy] 6Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
This article examines the role of "borders" in the writing practices of Santali speakers, who are spread across the states of Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Assam in eastern India. A tension between a "trans-border" linguistic homogeneity and a "bordered" linguistic heterogeneity occurs in discussions around script. Santali is written in the various "official" scripts. Together with regional scripts, there is a recently invented script, called Ol Chiki ('writing symbol') in circulation as well as a Roman script invented by Christian missionaries. This article examines the alternating use of Ol Chiki, Roman and regional scripts in Santali language media. I argue that these media simultaneously posit a linguistically homogenous future while at the same time affirming a present that is deeply influenced by differing linguistic environments.
This article discusses the way in which assemblages of technologies, political institutions, and practices of exchange have rendered both language and script a site for an ongoing politics of authority among Santals, an Austro-Asiatic speaking Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) community spread throughout eastern India. It focuses particularly on the production of Santali-language print artefacts, which, like its dominant language counterparts, such as Bengali, has its roots in colonial-era Christian missions. However, unlike dominant languages, Santali-language media has been characterized by the use of multiple graphic registers, including a missionary-derived Roman script, Indic scripts such as Devanagari and Eastern Brahmi, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. The article links the history of Santali print and graphic practice with assertions of autonomy in colonial and early post-colonial India. It then ethnographically documents how graphic practices, in particular the use of multiple scripts, and print technologies mediate a contemporary politics of authority along vectors such as class and generation within communities that speak and read Santali in the eastern state of West Bengal, India.
Present in many of the world's languages, expressives (also called ideophones or mimetics) are commonly discussed as iconic ‘depictions’ of speaker's sensual experiences. Yet anthropologists and linguists working with these constructions have noticed that they also index ‘social types’ that perdure across interactional events. This article analyzes the semiotic relation between depiction and social stereotypes embedded in expressive use by examining video data from interviews with speakers of Mundari, an expressive-rich Austro-Asiatic language spoken in eastern India. Presenting interview data taken from both lab-based elicitations as well as ethnographic interviews in Mundari-speaking villages, the article claims that speakers deploy multimodal resources such as gesture and gaze in concert with expressives in order to re-intepret social indexes as felt, embodied experiences (rheme) while also juxtaposing these experiences with elements in the immediately perceptible material world (dicent). The article also addresses issues of ethics, agency, and materiality entailed by multimodal expressive depiction. (Ideophones, multimodality, materiality, embodiment, semiotics)*
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