Theorizing Salience: Orthographic Practice and the Enfigurement of Minority Languages

Choksi, Nishaant; Meek, Barbra A.

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139680448.012

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…4 On notions of joint attention see Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, and Moll (2005) and Enfield and Sidnell (2022). 5 Contemporary scholars have generally attended less to the relative salience of forms than the content of language ideologies (Woolard, 2008;but see Babel, 2016a;Choksi and Meek, 2016;Errington, 1985;McGowan and Babel, 2020;Mertz and Yovel, 2009;Osgood et al, 1954, 51-54;Preston, 1996;Preston, 2016). 6 Angus Wheeler prepared this map.…”

Section: E N D N O T E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These technical cultural creations are loaded with ideologies of how language works and should work (see, e.g., Choksi, 2021). Explicit metalinguistic comments about the spoken forms of language are often sieved through them (Auer, Barden, and Grosskopf, 1998, 165; Bloomfield, 1944, 49; Choksi and Meek, 2016, 249; Harkness, 2012, 375–376; pace Sapir, 1949, 54). Think of when an English speaker states that English has five vowels—a, e, i, o, and u—when in fact the language has around twelve distinct pure vowel phonemes and eight diphthongs, depending on the dialect.…”

Section: ‘Heavy Sound Light Sound’: a Conventional Metalanguage For R...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 3 Choksi and Meek (2016, 229) make a similar point when they define “salience” over and against “awareness.” They write: “salience is a social‐culturally entangled and constitutive aspect of a process of representation, where part of what is representable may be cognitively derived and the other part may be socio‐culturally derived.” On different approaches to this broader question, see McGowan and Babel (2020). …”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…5 5 Contemporary scholars have generally attended less to the relative salience of forms than the content of language ideologies (Woolard, 2008; but see Babel, 2016a; Choksi and Meek, 2016; Errington, 1985; McGowan and Babel, 2020; Mertz and Yovel, 2009; Osgood et al, 1954, 51–54; Preston, 1996; Preston, 2016). …”

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confidence: 99%

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The limits of thematization

Zuckerman,

Enfield

2023

J Linguistic Anthropol

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A fundamental capacity of language is its reflexivity. But not every aspect of language is equally accessible to being reflected upon. Michael Silverstein's 1981 paper, the “Limits of Awareness,” set the terms of this discussion in linguistic anthropology with his study of speakers' “awareness” of pragmatic forms and their corresponding capacity to talk about them. His notion of differential “awareness” of aspects of language has since been foundational to linguistic‐anthropological understandings of language ideologies. Here we consider Silverstein's argument with reference to our research in Laos, exploring the limits of metalinguistic discourse. We argue that the apparent constraints on our capacity to talk about aspects of language do not evidence limits of awareness of elements of language, but rather constraints on our ability to thematize those elements, that is, to bring them into joint attention. The central issue is thematization, and the relation of interest is a relation of joint attention between speakers. Metalanguage is thus constrained not (only) by psychological limits but by the social and semiotic limits on what people can bring into mutual focus within interactions. To present our framing of the issue and show what it helps us see, we distinguish two kinds of thematization and describe their subtypes, affordances, and constraints. We then demonstrate how social conventions—broadly understood—can circumvent these constraints, allowing people to thematize otherwise difficult to thematize forms.

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Section: E N D N O T E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ‘Heavy Sound Light Sound’: a Conventional Metalanguage For R...mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 97%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The limits of thematization

Zuckerman,

Enfield

2023

J Linguistic Anthropol

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“…2 Bodding claimed that the Roman alphabet, in which sounds like the checked consonants can be easily marked, could address the "uncertainty and lack of correct pronunciation, specifically with foreigners, both when reading or speaking the language" (1922,5). As Meek and I have argued elsewhere (Choksi and Meek 2016), the Roman script, originally devised to help "foreigners" with acquisition and fluency of the Santali language, soon came to "enfigure" Santali persons themselves. 3 Bodding goes on to say, "Santals have a mind much directed towards concrete and special subjects.…”

Section: Missionaries and The Artifactualization Of The Checked Consomentioning

confidence: 99%

From Transcript to “Trans-Script”: Romanized Santali across Semiotic Media

Choksi

2020

Signs and Society

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Perceiving isn't believing: Divergence in levels of sociolinguistic awareness

McGowan

Babel

2019

Lang. Soc.

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The influence of social knowledge on speech perception is a question of interest to a range of disciplines of language research. This study combines experimental and qualitative approaches to investigate whether the various methodological and disciplinary threads of research on this topic are truly investigating the same phenomenon to provide converging evidence in our understanding of social listening. This study investigates listeners’ perceptions of Spanish and Quechua speakers speaking Spanish in the context of a contact zone between these two languages and their speakers in central Bolivia. The results of a pair of matched-guise vowel discrimination tasks and subsequent interviews demonstrate that what people perceive, as measured by experimental tasks, is not necessarily what they believe they hear, as reported in narrative responses to interview prompts. Multiple methodological approaches must be employed in order to fully understand the way that we perceive language at diverging levels of sociolinguistic awareness. (Perception, sociophonetics, sociolinguistics, awareness, Andean Spanish)

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Theorizing Salience: Orthographic Practice and the Enfigurement of Minority Languages

Cited by 7 publications

References 13 publications

The limits of thematization

The limits of thematization

From Transcript to “Trans-Script”: Romanized Santali across Semiotic Media

Perceiving isn't believing: Divergence in levels of sociolinguistic awareness

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