Linguistics Events

Lise Dobrin, Associate Professor of Anthropology & Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics at the University of Virginia will give a public talk titled 'Why a Unified Theory of Language Shift Is Not Possible, but a Cultural Symbolic Explanation for Particular Cases of Shift Is.'

Linguists are motivated to understand the mechanisms underlying language shift both out of theoretical interest and to guide their applied work with communities on language maintenance and revitalization. In this paper, we argue that rather than seek a common denominator that predicts when shift will occur, explanatory adequacy in the study of language shift can be achieved through ethnographic engagement with the particular histories and interpretive practices of linguistic communities in the process of transformation to reveal what changing patterns of language use mean for the people in question. Although language shift might be describable as a unified phenomenon from an etic point of view, there is a vast range of culturally organized symbolic meanings through which linguistic practices, and their change, are experienced, interpreted, and responded to. While we believe it is ultimately possible to make predictions about language shift and endangerment, these predictions are necessarily limited in socio-geographic scope, and they necessarily build upon in-depth ethnographic studies of the particular situations in which language loss, maintenance, and expansion are taking place.