Ideologies of Language: Some Reflections on Language and U.S. Law

I present two U.S. court cases in which I participated as a linguistic anthropological "expert" to show how language ideologies of the law both influence legal outcomes and conflict with "scientific" ideas about language. One case was the murder trial of a young Mixtec-speaking Indian from Oaxaca; the other was a civil suit brought by four Hispanic women dismissed from an elder-care center for speaking Spanish on the job. I identify in the linguistic ideologies of both cases a principle of "referential transparency" that takes the essential business of words, regardless of the linguistic code, to be communicating propositional information. In the second case, 1 describe a further notion of "linguistic paranoia" in which speaking a language other than English is taken as inherently insulting or threatening. I relate these implicit ideological threads to the legal outcomes, to the restricted notions of potential "language rights" that might emerge from such ideologies, and to the clash between theoretical and judicial perspectives on language. [Keywords: U.S. law, language rights, linguistic ideology, expert witnesses, linguistic anthropology]     

Climate, Econiche, and Sexuality: Influences on Sonority in Language

Previous cross-cultural research by Robert Munroe and colleagues has linked two features of language to warm climates—a higher proportion of consonant-vowel syllables and a higher proportion of sonorous (more audible) sounds. The underlying theory is that people in warmer climates communicate at a distance more often than people in colder climates, and it is adaptive to use syllables and sounds that are more easily heard and recognized at a distance. However, there is considerable variability in warm as opposed to cold climates, which needs to be explained. In the present research report, we show that additional factors increase the predictability of sonority. We find that more specific features of the environment—such as type of plant cover and degree of mountainous terrain—help to predict sonority. And, consistent with previous research on folk-song style, measures of sexual restrictiveness also predict low sonority.     

Language: Life without numbers

If your language did not have words for numbers, would you be able to think about numeric quantities? An Amazonian culture where number words are limited to one, two and many has provided new insights to the interaction between thought and language.     

UML应用建模研究

介绍了UML产生的背景、基本内容、应用机制及其扩展性。在此基础上,对UML建模的一般过程做了概述,并以商业管理信息系统(MIS)的开发过程为例,具体介绍了UML的建模过程。     

Language Revitalization and Identity in Social Context: A Community-Based Athabascan Language Preservation Project in Western Interior Alaska

This study documents a language planning effort funded by an Administration for Native Americans Grant to the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a regional nonprofit tribal organization. The language revitalization project focuses on western interior Alaska and encompasses five traditional Athabascan languages with few remaining speakers. Project discussions included options for language planning, training activities, and educational program and materials development that would enhance language survival. Three dominant project themes are identified and discussed. They are (1) critique and resistance, (2) self-determination and activism, and (3) collaboration and leadership.     

Understanding Language Evolution: Beyond Pan-Centrism

Language does not fossilize but this does not mean that the language's evolutionary timeline is lost forever. Great apes provide a window back in time on our last prelinguistic ancestor's communication and cognition. Phylogeny and cladistics implicitly conjure Pan (chimpanzees, bonobos) as a superior (often the only) model for language evolution compared with earlier diverging lineages, Gorilla and Pongo (orangutans). Here, in reviewing the literature, it is shown that Pan do not surpass other great apes along genetic, cognitive, ecologic, or vocal traits that are putatively paramount for language onset and evolution. Instead, revived herein is the idea that only by abandoning single-species models and learning about the variation among great apes, there might be a chance to retrieve lost fragments of the evolutionary timeline of language.     

Language evolution: the origin of meaning in primates

Research on alarm calls has yielded rare glimpses into the minds of our closest relatives. A new study suggests that primates monitor the effect alarm calls have on others.