Identity, authority and authenticity in language policy: Reflections from the Peruvian Andes

Lecture by Professor Virginia Zavala
Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

Monday, April 27th
3:00-4:30pm
103 Folwell Hall

This talk will be based on ethnographic research about a language policy favoring Quechua in the Apurímac region of the southern Peruvian Andes, which has developed in the context of the decentralization of the central government since 2000. At least at the level of official policy documents, the region is being imagined as a community of apurimenians unified by the local language, which creates an emotional identification with the region. In this talk, I will analyze the power relationships that are constructed between a community of practice of Quechua "experts" and the rest of Quechua-speaking people from Apurímac. Although the declared wish is to build a regional "us", Quechua experts interpret and negotiate language policy from particular language and literacy ideologies and end up establishing identity divisions between "us" and "them" through tactics of intersubjectivity based on difference, authority and authenticity (Bucholtz 2003). This work follows earlier studies about language ideological battles in relation to Quechua and shows that, after several decades, the former top-down language policies coming from the capital city are now being reproduced within the Quechua-speaking social actors themselves, and the conflict has diversified into new dilemmas.

Further information at: http://z.umn.edu/zavala

Towards a Theory of Situated Languaging

Lecture by Per Linell
Senior Professor in the Department of Education, Communication and Learning at Gothenburg University, Sweden

Friday, April 17, 2015
125 Nicholson Hall
10:30 am-12:00 pm

There is an ongoing perspective shift in the language sciences from unquestionably assuming abstract language systems to be primary with regard to language use, to the opposite assumption with situated languaging (language use) in talk, text events, new media, etc. as the primary phenomenon of language. This shift will move linguistics from structuralism to substantialism (but still with a fair amount of structuralism), and it will require partly new approaches to most domains of language study, as compared to modern linguistics of the 20th century. I argue that these theories of situated languaging should build on a dialogical meta-theory of human sense-making. Such a meta-theory is an antidote to monological theories of individualist information processing in cognition, unidirectional transfer in communication, and code models of language.

In this lecture I will sketch the implications of the meta-theory of dialogical activities for theories of syntax, lexicology/semantics, phonology and pragmatics. Other topics that will be mentioned, and at least minimally discussed, in the lecture are the embodiment of language, the relation of language to non-linguistic semiotic resources, the participatory agency of speakers (and other participants), and the relationship of talk and writing.

Further reading at z.umn.edu/perlinell