From South to North and back again: Making and blurring boundaries in conversations across borders

Systems, features, figures: Approaches to language and class vs. language and race

“…Surely one of the pathbreaking aspects of Labov’s work was his attention to the critical role of the observer—the way that the same sociolinguistic moment could be understood as evidence of logic and creativity or as a demonstration of incompetence. White Kenyans’ videos of “amazing toddlers” who speak indigenous languages are viewed by some as underwhelming (McIntosh, 2018); discourses that seem to be only about language or space for some point unambiguously for others to ethnonational and racializing subject positions (Dick & Arnold, 2018; Nichols & Wortham, 2018). What counts as an index of class is thus not only a matter of the degree to which that category is locally salient, but the fact that indexical meanings are not fixed—oppositions on the linguistic plane, like “yes” vs. “yeah,” can get associated with oppositions in register at one moment, but with oppositions of class and race at another, in line with the political discourses of the times (Flores, Lewis, & Phuong, 2018).…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…But at the same time, an equally large number of studies emphasize the agency of people on the move (De Fina ; Leone‐Pizzighella and Rymes ). Dick and Arnold (), for instance, discuss how their Salvadoran and Mexican research participants talking about migration to the United States appropriate the dominant trope of the North/South distinction to enact relations of morality and intimacy, thereby rescaling and reframing such spatial distinctions to negotiate and complicate the way they are positioned in state‐sponsored migration discourse.…”

Language socialization across borders

“…These youth have become part of the transnational economies of their extended families, finding work and participating in the sending of remittances upon which their families in El Salvador rely for survival. The inequality that characterizes international relations between the United States and El Salvador is echoed within families (Dick and Arnold 2018) in the sustained economic asymmetries between migrant bread-winners and their non-migrant, financially dependent kin.…”