English

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is arguably the most widely studied variety of American English, including its employment to establish authenticity in literature. This study attempts to provide a descriptive account of the features of AAVE employed by Charles W. Chesnutt, an African American author from the Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem literary period, through the examination of three short stories with publication dates ranging from 1887 to 1901. Data were obtained from The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, from which a corpus constituting approximately 10,000 words was created. The present study builds upon recent descriptive accounts of AAVE, in addition to earlier work, including Foster’s (1971) focus on phonology in seven separate short stories, Green’s (2002) consideration of The House Behind the Cedars, and Minnick’s (2004) examination of The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales.

Since the establishment of the Islamic State, Da'esh has been extremely successful in producing English-language propaganda for the purposes of recruiting extremists and radicalizing the disenfranchised. This study utilizes Spier's 500,000+ word corpus of Da'esh extremist periodicals and specifically examines the extent to which particular verses from Qur'anic scripture are utilized in the first 14 issues of Dabiq, which were published during a period of 22 months (July 2014 to April 2016). Almost three-quarters of the 624 quoted or referenced verses are cited only once or twice, and approximately 70% of these are unique. The six most frequently attested verses come from five books of the Qur'an (Al-Ma'idah, Al-Anfal, Al-Hashr, At-Tawbah and Al-Imran) and account for 8.17% of all the cited scripture. This study considers the translations and content of each verse and the manner in which they are included in the periodicals as reflective of their significance.

In countries with limited state-supported public transportation, privately owned vehicles-regularly exceeding a safe speed and a safe number of passengers-have oftentimes arisen to fill this void, and some scholars have considered in different ways the numerous slogans on these vehicles of the African continent. In Eastern Africa these vehicles arrive in a variety of forms, including the pikipiki (motorcycles), bajaji (three-wheeled cars), and daladala (minibuses). While most studies result in the amalgamation and analysis of such messages, others consider the historical transition from messages on material culture to a variety of vehicles, resulting not only in semantic categories but also in a demarcation among the archaic, modified, and innovated. Nonetheless, this study qualitatively identifies 140 unique tokens-collected over a period of three weeks-listed on the typically brightly colored daladala vehicles in Usa River, Tanzania and attempts to provide a taxonomy of larger discursive categories that delineate these messages and sayings, which are believed to present a metalinguistic commentary on relevant, salient topics of everyday conversations.

This real-life memoir chronicles the journey of Arousiag Magarian over a four year period as she struggles to survive during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1919). Originally written in a small notebook in Armenian, the authors (Arpi Poladian and Troy E. Spier) have translated and prepared for the reader a version in literary English that hopes to capture all of the nuance from Magarian's deeply emotional voice. Finally, a description of the historical circumstances surrounding Aintab and her residents during this time period is provided by Dr. Ümit Kurt, a scholar of the late Ottoman Empire.

Linguistic landscapes refer broadly to the study of perceived or actual language use in a particular environment. Such an ever-changing landscape, metaphorical or not, can be most readily identified through the visible or audible presence of language, and this frequently occurs through the analysis of signs. The present study considers the small city of Hazleton, located at the southern edge of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Although it was recognized in the early and mid-nineteenth century as a refuge for Eastern European immigrants pursuing employment in the anthracite industry, Hazleton has garnered national attention in the last decade for its increasing Latino population, the overall reduction in monolingual English speakers, and the public reactions and legislation of local government officials. In particular, this study analyzes the types of signs found along the almost two-mile length of Wyoming Street, a street that intersects multiple neighborhoods commonly associated with the reification of Hispanidad. As such, we attempt here concurrently to determine the functions for which the Spanish language is employed publicly and also to consider the extent to which these signs reflect the identity of the Spanish-speaking community more broadly.

M.A.K. Halliday once remarked that ''linguistics is everywhere because language is everywhere.'' This is made all the more evident with the publication of this monumental volume, which invites readers on a journey through issues related broadly to agency, discrimination, ideology, and literacy, and more generally to the role of language in navigating the complex worlds of politics, sexuality, race, multilingualism, technology, employment, and education. To this end, "The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society" contains, in addition to an introduction and conclusion by the editors, twenty-six chapters of approximately fifteen to twenty pages. Nonetheless, as these chapters are not divided into thematically organized sections, each chapter is treated very briefly below for readers' consideration. The introduction begins by invoking the names of scholars from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who contributed to the later rise of sociolinguistics as a field of study in the 1960s. Subsequent criticism of the early developments is offered, as the field had been dominated by white men who privileged the linguistic at the expense of the sociological. Next, the immediate goals for this volume are outlined according to a "critical poststructuralist" perspective, which understands and recognizes the sociohistorical, political, and economic conditions surrounding language usage. This means, for instance, that scholars must

No religious tradition or country seems to be unequivocally, inherently free from the threat of extremism. As a result of domestic and international acts of terrorism, much of the world seems occupied with the views and actions of Muslims, calling particular attention to the Salafi sect. Some groups belonging to this sect disseminate and promulgate their views through online periodicals, in order to solidify their ideological base and recruit new members. In particular, this chapter relates secular and non-secular characterizations of √KFR-the Arabic triliteral root referring to disbelievers and states of disbelief-to the characterization espoused in electronic periodicals from al-Qa'ida and Da'esh. Over one thousand tokens of derived lexemes of √KFR are extracted using AntConc from thirty issues, reduced to a taxonomy, and examined through the discursive strategies utilized.

The Women of Mabumba The Aushi are an ethnolinguistic group located in the Lwapula Province of the Republic of Zambia and in the Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The following tales were recounted and shared collectively by a group of

Although the field of composition/rhetoric has existed as a topic of scholarly inquiry for almost three thousand years, 'basic writing,' its lesser-known, disenfranchised sibling, only formally appeared in academic discourse in the 1960s. Furthermore, there seems to be both a widespread lack of understanding over precisely who the writers are who enroll in these courses and also a limited consensus over exactly what should be taking place in these classrooms. To this end, the present study attempts to investigate which topics, objectives, and assignments are most prominently foregrounded through two levels of analysis, viz. form/content and function/meaning. To reach this goal, a corpus study is undertaken of the college-and university-level course descriptions offered for various levels, if they exist, of developmental writing/composition at seventy-two post-secondary institutions in the United States, ultimately representing all four regional areas of the country and covering approximately 3.44% of the college student population (677,187). The resulting discussion of the textual-conceptual functions employed is couched within the related fields of Corpus Stylistics and Critical Stylistics. As such, the present study attempts to present, following Bartholomae (1993), an exploratory, actionable project and not simply "more talk about basic writing."

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remarked almost forty years ago that “[l]anguage carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world [...] at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings” (1986 [1992], 16). Although his comment originated in post-colonial literary thought within an East African linguistic context, these words retain increasing significance today and are more broadly applicable to any sociologically-informed literary discussions in the American classroom. To this end, the literature of the Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem (cf. Chesnutt 1931, inter alia) offers a window into the complex sociocultural, historical, and political context of the United States in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had previously been defined as the Black Nadir. Accordingly, this paper presents the results of a four-week instructional unit, which took place in a tenth-grade English classroom at a semi-suburban high school in north-central New Jersey, that required students to read and engage critically with James Weldon Johnson's (1912 [1927]) The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Most importantly, the present study advocates a departure from ‘interpretation by free association’ (Reader Response Theory) and, instead, proposes a more nuanced understanding of the United States at the fin de siècle through student-driven questioning of and conversations about the sociological, cultural, historical, linguistic, and literary dimensions of such works.

Despite the fact that this article began as a formal response to Chattaraj (2020), it serves a larger purpose in contextualizing the first-year composition classroom and the training required to provide effective instruction to students across all academic fields. Although an anthropologically-minded approach to the teaching of writing can be quite beneficial, suggesting that an anthropologist can-or even should-assume the responsibilities of first-year composition without additional training is ill-advised. To this end, this article draws upon not only the prior literature on Composition/Rhetoric, but also on the place and benefits of writing in the anthropology classroom more generally. Because the initial publication (i.e. Chattaraj, 2020) relied strictly on personal anecdotal evidence for academic success in a particular classroom setting at a liberal arts university, the findings are not generalizable to most post-secondary institutions due to the institutional accreditation requirements for educators, the concerning statistics on the literacy rates of incoming undergraduate students, the general objectives of curricular pathways, and the remarkable consistency found in first-year composition courses. As a result, this response presents a transparent overview of the first-year composition classroom and offers concrete suggestions for anthropologists who endeavour to support writing across the curriculum and/or in the disciplines.

Although it has been repeatedly suggested in western media coverage that the countries of Latin America are currently or could become future covert breeding grounds for Muslim extremism, there is no substantive evidence to support this otherwise imagined threat. On the contrary, Catholicism is so widespread that the estimated Muslim population across the continent is projected for the next forty years to remain the same relative to the whole (0.1%). Despite this realization, however, Islamophobia is on the rise even in Latin America. In this context, the present study extracts and examines the most comment-provoking statuses posted during a two-year period on the Facebook page of the Ahmadiyya community of Quito, Ecuador, in order to identify the ideological-linguistic stances reflected in and discursively created, reproduced, and reified through almost 600 responses by other users. In doing so, this study employs Critical Discourse Analysis to examine (1) the types of multimodal messages presented to the public; (2) the way in which the 'Other' is conclusively, collaboratively defined; and (3) the discursive strategies employed both in negative Other-presentation and in solidarity-building measures, ultimately indicating religious, linguistic, and nationalistic group positioning recreated in the 'online world.'