Hospitable Linguistics

Alternative, Indigenous and Critical Approaches to Language Research and Language Encounters

Nicholas G. Faraclas, Anne Storch, Viveka Velupillai

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781788929691
• eBook ISBN: 9781788929974
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

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. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1: Language as a Gift
• 2 Sunset at a Place Visited for No Ordinary Reason
• 3 The Decline of Hospitality and the Rise of Linguistic Imperialism
• 4 Linguistics and Nigerian Language Studies in Nigeria: Building Bridges for a More Viable and Hospitable Linguistics
• 5 The Trans-Atlantic Shipment of Romanies (‘Gypsies’) to the Americas: Discursive Silencing, Erasure and Inhospitableness
• 6 (Not) Speaking to a German Africanist in Namibia in 1954: On Refusal and Hospitality as Responses to Linguistic Research
• 7 The Pew Inscriptions at First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia
• Part 2: Language and Sharing
• 8 The Art and Role of Listening and Verbal Gestures in Tobagonian: Returning to the Oral/Aural
• 9 Dagaaba Travel Experience Names
• 10 La carta que te escribo sobre festivales de cine y hospitalidad
• 11 ‘Paradise’, ‘Hospitality’ and the Transformative Power of Environmental Music: When the Island Sings
• 12 Pluri-living in the ‘In’ Hospitable Deep South of the US
• Part 3: Language, Resisting and Undoing Enclosures
• 13 Shetland Stories in Knitting
• 14 The Fieldworker as a Human Being
• 15 Résistance et Hospitalité
• 16 Pastiche: A Conversation Between Kenyan Sheng and South African Tsotsitaal Youth Language Speakers
• 17 Women: The Hospitable ‘Race’ Who Were ‘Already There’
• 18 On Strike on Mother Language Day: Critical Reflections, Toilet Signs and Language Geneaologies
• Part 4: Language and Reassuming Sovereignty
• 19 Narratives of Reciprocity and Envy in a Digo Community in Tiwi, Kenya
• 20 Au?ur the Deep Minded
• 21 Childhood Memories and the Call to Being Hospitable in the
• 22 Giving Voice to the Victims of the Orkney Witchcraft Trials: ‘Answered, She Spoke it for Weakness of Her Owne Flesh, and for Feare of Her Lyfe’
• 23 A World Glasgow Minding on the International Day of Peace
• Afterword: Hospitable Linguistics – Thoughts on Current Directions