Symposium to advance multidisciplinary perspectives on minority languages in diaspora; June 29-30, 2019; Davis, CA

Suny At Albany, Albany NY

Investigators

Abstract

Millions of people around the world are displaced by war, disaster, environmental degradation, and the economic conditions of their countries of origin. While modern anthropological and sociological research is increasingly oriented toward the transnational nature of cultures and languages, other disciplines, like linguistics, may lag in comparison. Moreover, because many displaced people are speakers of minority languages, the pressure to shift to more politically and culturally advantageous languages threatens the transmission of minority languages to future generations. As a result, linguists are increasingly finding themselves conducting time sensitive work with speakers of understudied languages in diaspora communities. This award will convene a symposium to address this gap in linguistics, bringing the field into a fuller dialogue with other social sciences, as well as emerging research on transnational networks and their relevance to the economic, medical, and legal problems of the modern world. The broader impacts of the symposium include enabling community language experts who are personally affected by the threat of linguistic and cultural attrition in diaspora environments to connect with others in similar situations in order to develop mutually beneficial solutions, as well as to prepare a set best practices for linguistic research in diaspora contexts that incorporates perspectives from migration studies and can be disseminated to enhance the training of those involved in linguistic research with diaspora communities. The symposium will bring together linguists working with threatened languages spoken in diasporic contexts in both urban and rural communities around the United States of America to interact with specialists in different areas of migration studies, including political conflict, refugee studies, and urbanization. Best practices in the social sciences must adapt to the changing social and political circumstances in our world, in particular the worldwide flows of immigrants and refugees. Yet many of the widely accepted best practices in linguistic research fail to take the sociopolitical situation of speakers into account and start from assumptions about language communities that are inapplicable to languages spoken in diasporic contexts. Working in diasporic contexts also raises questions beyond the scope of traditional training. These questions pertain to how a language community is defined; how to work with communities in conflict; and how language change takes place in hyperdiverse contexts. Symposium participants will write a consensus-based white paper proposing best practices for linguistic research in diaspora contexts and promulgate this text for wider scholarly discussion among linguists and other researchers with overlapping specializations. Such a collaborative effort has the potential to increase the efficacy of future work on languages spoken in diaspora communities. Project activities will be valuable to scholars already working in diaspora contexts and will offer foundational training to both undergraduate and graduate students in anthropological, descriptive, documentary, and theoretical linguistics programs. Activities also have the potential to enhance multidisciplinary research beyond linguistics with the involvement of other social scientists. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.