Andresen Julie Tetel - Languages in the world : how history, culture, and politics shape language

Julie Tetel Andresen
Phillip M. Carter

This edition first published 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andresen, Julie Tetel, 1950 author.
Languages in the world : how history, culture, and politics shape language / Julie Tetel Andresen and Phillip M. Carter.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-53125-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-118-53128-0 (pbk.) 1. Language and languagesGlobalization. 2. Language and cultureHistory. 3. Languages in contact. 4. Historical linguistics. 5. Sociolinguistics. I. Carter, Phillip M. author. II. Title.
P130.5.A53 2016
306.44dc23

2015019352

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Map 0.1 World map with language families. By PiMaster3 (own work) used under CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 0.1 IPA consonants.

Figure 0.2 IPA vowels.

Please visit the companion website at www.wiley.com/go/languagesintheworld to view additional content for this title.

• Short follow-up blurbs on one topic from each chapter
• Engaging links and images

This book began with a simple phone call. In the Fall Semester of 2010, Julie was in Durham, North Carolina, where she is a Professor of Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Phillip was living in Los Angeles, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California. We were on the phone to speak about the pleasures and challenges of teaching a course called Languages of the World. We found ourselves in familiar conversational territory: lamenting the lack of materials for teaching the course in the interdisciplinary approach developed at Duke. Well, Phillip said, we could write our own book. Julie laughed, imagining the amount of work required to pull together a project of the magnitude necessary to capture the dynamics of the pedagogical approach she had helped to create. But the seed had been planted. Only one question remained: Could we do it?

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Julie had been teaching Languages of the World taught at Duke, which was pioneered by Professor Edna Andrews in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies. They wanted their students to have a broad understanding of language. Thus, they balanced the traditional content of such a course review of the language families of the world, emphasis on linguistic structures, historical reconstruction with the many rich nonlinguistic contexts in which languages are actually used. So, as students learned about the case and aspectual systems of Russian, for example, they also learned about the history of the Slavic language family, Cyrillic writing, Russian folk songs, and more. This approach required a great deal of work on the part of the instructor, since no materials systematically crossing linguistic structural information with historical, sociocultural, and political contexts existed in one place.

Over time, the course became a resounding success with students, not only among Linguistics Majors, for whom it is a core course requirement, but also with students from across the Arts and Sciences and even Engineering. The students came for what they heard would be a perspective-shifting and challenging experience. In retrospect, it is easy to understand why this course was so compelling to so many of our students. Our approach does not abstract language away from speakers, but rather situates it around them. It does not abandon experience and affect but makes space to acknowledge that experience and affect are fundamental to understanding why speakers make the choices they make about language. Simply put, students found themselves in the conversations the course made possible.

Once committed to writing our own materials Julie and Phillip agreed to meet in New York City in the Fall Semester 2011 when Julie was teaching the Duke in New York Arts and Media program. We went to work on a book proposal. The next summer, we found ourselves in a part of the world inspiring to both of us: Eastern Europe, with Julie in Romania and Phillip in Poland. We began to outline the book in Krakow, Poland where Phillip was attending Polish Language School, and we began writing the manuscript in Ukraine on a long train ride from Kiev to L'viv. Our research and writing continued nonstop for the next two and a half years, and our project went where we went: Bucharest, Romania; Durham, North Carolina; Los Angeles; Miami; Madrid, Spain; New York City; Saigon, Vietnam; Ulan Baatar, Mongolia.