The Kitchen, the Cat, and the Table: Domestic Affairs in Minority‐Language Politics

Abstract

This article examines ideological constructions of the domestic sphere in metalinguistic commentary about loss in Buryat, a contracting language of Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Although calling Buryat "just a kitchen language" suggests that the kitchen is linguistically devalued, a popular joke told among bilingual speakers and its use-in-context show that kitchens can also be invoked to positively demarcate an inner sphere of comfortable, "offstage" interaction, to authenticate otherwise derided ways of speaking, and to build solidarity. The kitchen emerges as a complex discursive resource for commenting on-and for re-creating-pragmatic rules for the use of different codes and registers. [multilingualism, register, humor, performance, Russia] 152Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

A cline of enregisterment and its erasure: Intersections of ideology and technology in minority-language news

“…They focused instead on interviewees, in whose speech they found much to criticize. The interviewee in the employment office was interpreted as showcasing "how people really talk" and "mixed language"-of which many Buryat speakers are extremely critical (Graber 2017(Graber , 2020. His use of Russian udobno prompted viewers to shake their heads.…”

“…The standard for journalists working in Buryat is nearly always SLB, based on the Khori dialect of Buryatia's eastern steppes. Although its standardization and implementation have been incomplete, SLB is widely treated as the apotheosis of Buryat ethnonational development, according to a very strong post-Enlightenment language ideology opposing a well-developed, institutionalized literary standard to dialects and colloquial ways of speaking (Graber 2017(Graber , 2020; see also Shagdarov 1967Shagdarov , 1974. Among journalists producing news media in Buryat, two general principles follow from this.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2017: It Could Be Otherwise

“…A significant number of publications this year describe Indigenous approaches to sustaining and revitalizing language practices endangered by legacies of settler colonialism, many with attention to how the epistemological and ontological logics for so doing differed from those made dominant by those same legacies (e.g., Ahlers ; Berk ; Dlaske ; Feliciano‐Santos ; Graber ; Newmark, Walker, and Stanford ; Saft ; the “Collaborative Linguistic Anthropology Matters: To Native American Communities” [3‐1190] panel at the 2017 AAA meeting). For example, Ahlers (, 49) notes how linguists’ assessments of a speaker's competence in an endangered language often focus on the speaker's ability to produce morphological paradigms closely mapped to a “prototypical paradigm” characterized by “few if any irregularities.” However, in a discussion of morphological irregularities in a corpus elicited from Kawaiisu elders, Ahlers notes that though linguists interpreted this variance as resulting from “disruption of intergenerational transmission of linguistic knowledge” that had “hindered the acquisition of this paradigm,” the elders themselves “conceptualize[d] the selection among alternative forms” as a “critical ground for the expression of individual identity and style” (50).…”