Abstract:In this article, I engage the “language as heritage” trope to critically examine a popular belief that underlies it: the idea that a shared language primordially connects an individual to a group of people, a homogenous culture and a particular territory—the notion of the ethnolinguistic group. Judith T. Irvine has long urged linguistic anthropologists to problematize the linguistic side of these classifications, to recognize the ideologies that shape both scholarly language descriptions and speakers’ own inte… Show more
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