Why Are Languages Worth Preserving?
This illustration represents how Indigenous peoples around the globe, as highlighted by depictions of a few specific communities, are striving to keep endangered languages alive as dynamic source…
Tag: Language
How Names Tell Stories of Loss and Resilience
Bhutanese Nepali performers—including Shyam “San” Rai at center—pose at a cultural festival. Katie Reilly When Shyam “San” Rai was 8 years old, he and his family were forced…
Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson on her dissertation
My dissertation, titled “Language Use and Global Media Circulation Among Argentine Fans of English-Language Mass Media”, explores the links between globalization, media/pop culture, and language throu…
Are Colors Universal?
[no-caption] Marcel Hirshegger/SAPIENS Remember the meme #TheDress? Was it white and gold, or blue and black? With the help of Nicola Jones, a freelance science journalist who writes…
“Warspeak” Puts All of Us in the Trenches
[no-caption] Complot/Shutterstock This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. In a manifesto posted online shortly before he…
Jessica Chandras takes the page 99 test
Page 99 of my dissertation, titled Multilingual Practices, Education, and Identity in Pune, India, is a first attempt at bringing readers into an ethnographically informed composite sketch…
Women Speak
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> Open Anthropology on Gender, Language, & Power Following the March 2019 Open Anthropology issue on Walls, Fences, and Barriers:…
Word Shell by Janelle Taylor
I have never lost my childhood habit of beachcombing for special rocks and shells, and I think of ethnography as involving a similar process of collecting bits of…
An Author by Any Other Name
[no-caption] Bill O’Leary/Getty Images Sitting in a packed hotel lobby café in Washington, D.C., in 2009, I leaned closer to the literary agent I was interviewing for my…
Where Do “New” Languages Come From?
As part of the Enduring Voices project, Abamu Degio (left) listens to a recording of herself singing a traditional Koro song, with linguist David Harrison (right). Jeremy Fahringer,…
On Responsibility (and Laziness) by Anne E. Pfister
I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts research with deaf children and their families in Mexico City. Echarle ganas is a Mexican colloquial expression that roughly translates to…
The Irresponsible Neanderthal
An article grabbed my attention last year but it took a while for me to realize why. The title, “Neanderthals Self-Medicated for Pain” examined research findings analyzing Neanderthal…
Speaking with Silence
Silence can be a powerful communicative tool in today’s political landscape. Words take center stage in the verbal sparring of the Twitter age. Against the backdrop of Trumpian…
How Men Stole Civilization
Museum objects such as this painting—Frieze of Dancers, by Edgar Degas—are often impressive and beautiful. But what do they tell us about the cultures that created them? Andrew…
The Oldest True Stories in the World
Australia’s iconic Opera House is lit up with an art installation called Songlines during a festival in 2016. For Aboriginal Australians, songlines are memories of routes through landscapes—which…
The village idiot: Language learning for anthropology fieldwork
In preparing for fieldwork, I took a class on language training with Piers Kelly. While Piers was talking more specifically about learning in a context where a language…
Why Can’t Apes Talk?
[no-caption] Science Photo Library/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. We all know that parrots can tal…
Wizards, Vampires, Klingons, and Other Alternative Cultures
On the last day of my introduction to anthropology class, we watch scenes from the documentary Trekkies. Students grin at the sincere folks dressed as Starfleet officers and…
At(tending) to Anthropological Language
The way anthropologists write and speak to each other about our work is a lot like memes. By memes I mean those bits of text and image used across…
Surviving Oregon Native Languages; Online Sources and Links
Oregon Tribal Languages have been endangered for over 100 years. From an original base of some 100 languages and dialects, the number of surviving Continue reading
Arctic Weather Words
In northern Greenland, the words people use to describe the sea ice and weather provide insight into the ongoing effects of climate change. The hunters and fishers of…
Petty Nationalism and the Right’s War on Language
This post was submitted by Phillip M. Carter, an associate professor of linguistics at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute The French Revolutionaries, compelled as they were by…
Ethnography & Case-Study Research: Grey Literature
What is “grey literature”? Is this a term that you use in your work? Why does knowing this language matter? The first time I heard the term “grey…