Transliterating Cities: The Interdiscursive Ethnohistory of a Tamil Francophonie

Das, Sonia N.

doi:10.1086/706249

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Spanish students were expected to attune carefully to the linguistic features necessary to intelligibly convey Catholic doctrine and other colonial content to indigenous populations. Artes’ discourse on writing and the relationship between written and spoken language mirrored this communicative orientation by privileging content over form, whereby mastery of pronunciation and grammar was crucial only to the extent necessary to transmit missionaries’ evangelizing message (compare e.g., Das 2020, 131–135; Xavier and Županov 2015, 215–218). Consequentially, orthographic instructions and examples in artes focus on production of Mayan phonemes and lexemes instead of recognition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Letters of Conversion: Meta‐Alphabetic Discourse and Linguistic Participation in Colonial Highland Guatemala

Matsumoto

2021

J Linguistic Anthropol

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The alphabets that Spanish missionaries developed in the sixteenth century to record Amerindian languages were intimately tied to the evangelizing and civilizing projects of colonialism. This article highlights the consequences of missionaries’ alphabetic ideologies for engagement, in writing as well as speech, with native speakers of highland Mayan languages in Guatemala. In their alphabetic metadiscourse, missionaries juxtaposed Spanish‐speaking learners and indigenous speakers in different and unequal roles for linguistic participation. Through close examination of missionary sources, I demonstrate that missionary ideologies of written language not only articulated script with speech but also delineated knowledge circulation and shaped the power dynamics implicated in language’s actual use in colonial Guatemalan society.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Letters of Conversion: Meta‐Alphabetic Discourse and Linguistic Participation in Colonial Highland Guatemala

Matsumoto

2021

J Linguistic Anthropol

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“…The presence of different scripts in public places is understood in different ways as political action (Choksi 2021). Scholarship looks at multilingual public signage more generally, in India and Sri Lanka (and different diasporas), in relation to issues of the representation of ethnolinguistic groups, institutions, and places (Das 2020, Davis 2020, LaDousa 2020 that is further subject to framing or erasure, and provide an important basis for understanding government and development (Hull 2012). In Nepal, what constitutes communicative practice in the public sphere is bifurcated as two voices, or realizations of subject positions.…”

Section: Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media

LaDousa

Davis

2022

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Scholars such as Murray Emeneau and John Gumperz made India prominent in the development of sociolinguistics as a field of study through their simultaneous attention to difference and cohesiveness. Later, scholars stressed the ideological mediation of practice, especially the importance of colonial constructions that continue to be relevant in the postcolonial period. Work on specific notions such as mother tongue and medium of instruction, and the salience of English, led scholars to provide insights into multilingual practices in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Finally, a vast scholarship on an array of older and newer media forms ranging from early print publications to social media has posed questions about the possibilities of representation and participation. Ethnographic approaches to digital media that focus on the complex dynamics between ideologies and practices have put South Asia at the forefront of studies of communication. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 51 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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“…3 3 See Barker and Nakassis (2020), Das (2020), Hoffmann‐Dilloway (2021), LaDousa (2011), Nakassis (2019, 2021), and Padgett (2021). …”

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confidence: 99%

Memes, Emojis, and Text: The Semiotics of Differentiation in Sri Lankan Tamil Digital Publics

Davis

2021

J Linguistic Anthropol

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This article draws on Judith T. Irvine’s theorizing of the semiotic processes of differentiation to investigate how Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims configure similarity and difference in multimodal social media interactions. I analyze Facebook discussions around memes of Tamil‐language blunders in trilingual public signs, which are widely taken to represent the incomplete implementation of Tamil as a co‐official language. Insider status in groups is not contingent on code use, but on expressing particular alignments toward the memes as tokens of a type. By virtue of their metapragmatic ambiguity, emojis are powerful in enabling participants to create shared affective stances around the memes, but they are also useful in demarcating difference between Tamil speakers and Sinhalas. I contribute to studies of social media communication by examining how different linguistic and non‐linguistic forms of expression are used to delineate transnational Tamil digital publics.

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Transliterating Cities: The Interdiscursive Ethnohistory of a Tamil Francophonie

Cited by 4 publications

References 40 publications

Letters of Conversion: Meta‐Alphabetic Discourse and Linguistic Participation in Colonial Highland Guatemala

Letters of Conversion: Meta‐Alphabetic Discourse and Linguistic Participation in Colonial Highland Guatemala

South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media

Memes, Emojis, and Text: The Semiotics of Differentiation in Sri Lankan Tamil Digital Publics

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