Language otherwise: Linguistic natures and the ontological challenge

Abstract

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Why language revitalization fails: Revivalist vs. traditional ontologies of language in Provence

“…The sharp distinction between patois and Occitan (or, for that matter, Provençal) is indeed almost universal in the Occitan south of France among speakers of patois, pointing to the fact that the essential distinction for traditional speakers was not, as Blanchet believes, an ideological axis of differentiation (Gal & Irvine 2019) that was part of the 'Occitan' vs. 'Provençal' (or Gascon, or any other named variety) distinction, but an axis of ontological contrast (Hauck 2023) that contrasted patois to language. Whether this type of opposition of language practices is limited to the French use of the term patois or restricted to contexts long disappeared is doubtful too.…”

“…This work contributes to a growing conversation on language ontologies (Demuro & Gurney 2021;Hauck 2023), itself part of a wider discussion in anthropology asking how anthropologists can take seriously apparently paradoxical statements (Keck, Regehr, & Walentowitz 2015), such as 'the Bororos are Araras' (the Bororo are a people living in the Amazon, Araras are parrots) or, in our case, 'a patois is not a language'. What does the copula here entail, and how should we pay attention to it as linguistic anthropologists?…”