ANTH 262
Language and Power Fall 2016
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” This (originally Yiddish) aphorism points to a paradox: language, often imagined to be a neutral or apolitical medium of communication, proves in practice to be a social domain fully implicated in the operations of power. How do we broadcast or disguise our social location by the way that we talk? How are ideologies and cultural values encoded into everyday speech and styles of speaking? In this introduction to linguistic anthropology, students will gain familiarity with key concepts (sociolect, performatives, code-switching, language ideology), themes (language and nationalism) and debates (the relation between language and thought) in the social scientific study of language. Assignments include regular postings of 1-page critical response papers and an ethnographic project: either an analysis of a linguistic ideology operative in the Williams or Berkshire County community, or an ethnographic micro-study of a linguistic interaction.