{"id":14411,"date":"2021-11-01T06:11:13","date_gmt":"2021-11-01T10:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=14411"},"modified":"2021-11-01T16:26:12","modified_gmt":"2021-11-01T20:26:12","slug":"linguistics-and-social-justice-seminar-11-2-carol-rose-little-ou-and-william-scott-oxford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2021\/11\/01\/linguistics-and-social-justice-seminar-11-2-carol-rose-little-ou-and-william-scott-oxford\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguistics and Social Justice Seminar 11\/2 - Carol Rose Little (OU) and William Scott (Oxford)"},"content":{"rendered":"

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, November 2nd, 2-5pm ET, on \u0093Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights\u0094 \u00a0(MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96). \u00a0Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu<\/a>> for information about Zoom link and readings. \u00a0NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. If you need assistance for accommodations or accessibility in order to fully participate, please\u00a0email degraff@MIT.EDU<\/a>\u00a0so that we can work out adequate arrangements.<\/p>\n

This Tuesday, November 2nd, we’re welcoming two guests:\u00a0Carol Rose Little<\/a>\u00a0on “doing linguistic work with and in Ch\u0092ol” and William Scott on “standardization\u00a0of minoritized languages”.<\/p>\n

From\u00a0definiteness\u00a0to\u00a0poetry: doing linguistic work with and in Ch\u0092ol<\/p>\n

Carol Rose Little<\/a>, University of Oklahoma<\/p>\n

This talk discusses applications of theoretical linguistics to the creation of pedagogical materials, capacity building and poetry translation with the Ch\u0092ol language. Ch\u0092ol is a Mayan language spoken by a quarter of a million people in southern Mexico and diasporic communities across North America. Although the language is still being passed on to children, most who speak it are never taught to read or write in the language, contributing to its minoritized status. Recently, there has been a growing interest in learning to read and write in Ch\u0092ol\u0097a desire further amplified by the fact that a Ch\u0092ol poet, Juana Pe\u00f1ate Montejo, won the 2020 Premio de Literaturas Ind\u00edgenas de Am\u00e9rica, an award that has been called the Nobel prize for literature in indigenous languages. In the first part of this talk, I discuss how the use of two corpora in Ch\u0092ol led to theoretically informed descriptions of definiteness and how these descriptions are informing pedagogical materials (see also Little et al., Forthcoming). I also discuss how project members have given talks on this research entirely in Ch\u0092ol to audiences in Mexico and the United States. In the second part of the talk, I discuss how my linguistic training has helped and informed translations of Pe\u00f1ate Montejo\u0092s poetry from Ch\u0092ol to English,\u00a0recently published in\u00a0Latin American Literature Today<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0I provide examples of the decisions I and my co-translator made in terms of translating certain structures (focus, topic), a special class of affect predicates, and even cases where we left in a Ch\u0092ol word with a footnote in English.<\/p>\n

Standardizing minoritized languages and the reproduction thesis: Does language activism necessarily create sociolinguistic hierarchies like those it seeks to disrupt?<\/p>\n

William Scott, University of Oxford<\/p>\n

In order to end linguistic exclusion, advocates of minoritized language communities often seek social institutions to be more\u00a0accommodating of these languages. For example, they may seek a greater place for the language in schools, court systems,\u00a0and the formal economy. To facilitate their effort in the face of resistance, it is natural for them to select one variant to perform\u00a0these official functions, as opposed to trying to simultaneously promote several spelling systems or disjoint sets of technical\u00a0vocabulary, etc.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Through this selection, they have created a new \u0093standard,\u0094 and thus in some respects made all other variants (\u0093dialects,\u0094\u00a0\u0093regionalisms,\u0094 etc.) nonstandard. As a result, some scholars claim that \u0093in advocating for their linguistic rights, minority\u00a0language movements tend to reproduce the values of dominant language ideology and, inadvertently, the inequalities and\u00a0hierarchies these values entail.\u0094 (Jacquelina Urla et al, 2017 p 43). This \u0091reproduction thesis\u0092 (ibid) potentially poses a serious\u00a0problem to such movements, which seek to break down sociolinguistic hierarchies, not create new ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We will elaborate on the \u0091reproduction thesis,\u0092 its potential causes and implications, then explore several critiques\u00a0that demonstrate how language advocacy movements can and do resist reproducing the sort of social inequalities that they are\u00a0working to end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, November 2nd, 2-5pm ET, on \u0093Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights\u0094 \u00a0(MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96). \u00a0Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings. \u00a0NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14411"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14417,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14411\/revisions\/14417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}