Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - 1:00pm
William L. Harkness Hall, Room 117
100 Wall St
New Haven, CT
“Multilingualism on the Silk Road: A Diachronic Look and the Origins of 20th/21st C. Xinjiang Language Use and Policy”
1:00 - 2:15 pm
Wednesday, April 12
Room 117, William L. Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street
Arienne M. Dwyer
Professor of Linguistic Anthropology and Co-Director of the Institute of Digital Research, University of Kansas
Multilingualism and cultural contact have characterized the area today known as Chinese Turkestan for at least for the last 3000 years. Indo-European languages were replaced mostly by Turkic, and now Turkic is being replaced by Chinese. The linguistic suppletion is not without a cultural cost and occurs within a regional geopolitical calculus. This talk discusses how Mandarin and Uyghur came to be dominant in the region; how linguistic territory is negotiated between Uyghur and Mandarin, not only within Xinjiang but worldwide; and how this negotiation reflects nationalist and geopolitical aspirations of all of the stakeholders. Critical discourse analysis of radio broadcasts informs this analysis.