Nicholas G. Faraclas - Böcker

This innovative book contributes to a paradigm shift in the study of creole languages, forging new empirical frameworks for understanding language and culture in sociohistorical contact. The authors bring together archival sources to challenge dominant linguistic theory and practice and engage issues of power, positioning marginalized indigenous peoples as the center of, and vital agents in, these languages’ formation and development. Students in language contact, pidgins and creoles, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies courses—and scholars across many disciplines—will benefit from this book and be convinced of the importance of understanding creoles and creolization.

This innovative book contributes to a paradigm shift in the study of creole languages, forging new empirical frameworks for understanding language and culture in sociohistorical contact. The authors bring together archival sources to challenge dominant linguistic theory and practice and engage issues of power, positioning marginalized indigenous peoples as the center of, and vital agents in, these languages’ formation and development. Students in language contact, pidgins and creoles, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies courses—and scholars across many disciplines—will benefit from this book and be convinced of the importance of understanding creoles and creolization.

Challenging the boundaries of linguistics as a field, and transgressing the limitations of genre in writing about language, this book explores the possibilities of what the authors call a ‘hospitable linguistics’. It offers a critical discussion of how linguistics endeavors to domesticate, subdue and integrate both people and languages into existing academic structures and theories, and how as a discipline academic linguistics has barely begun to move beyond its colonial, patriarchal and conservative foundations. In this book, leading figures in their fields reflect on their own and others’ practices and experiences in three key areas: the agency and power of refugees and migrants; Indigenous people’s (in)hospitable responses to strangers; and hospitable language as expressed through art, music and artefacts. As a whole, the book represents a crucial intervention in attempts to fashion a new, more integrative, responsible and respectful linguistics that makes way for the ideas of people who are often the object of study.

Challenging the boundaries of linguistics as a field, and transgressing the limitations of genre in writing about language, this book explores the possibilities of what the authors call a ‘hospitable linguistics’. It offers a critical discussion of how linguistics endeavors to domesticate, subdue and integrate both people and languages into existing academic structures and theories, and how as a discipline academic linguistics has barely begun to move beyond its colonial, patriarchal and conservative foundations. In this book, leading figures in their fields reflect on their own and others’ practices and experiences in three key areas: the agency and power of refugees and migrants; Indigenous people’s (in)hospitable responses to strangers; and hospitable language as expressed through art, music and artefacts. As a whole, the book represents a crucial intervention in attempts to fashion a new, more integrative, responsible and respectful linguistics that makes way for the ideas of people who are often the object of study.