To Our Readers
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.
During these years of writing, we have endeavored to stretch intellectually as far beyond our own experiences as possible. Nevertheless, our personal experiences are clearly reflected in the pages of our book. The most obvious example is that we have written about the languages we know and have studied, which include English, French, German, Mongolian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, and Vietnamese. In addition to being professional linguists, we are committed to language learning, and our knowledge of other languages has given us wide canvases to paint on. For instance, the Language Profiles on Vietnamese in Chapter 8 and Mongolian in Chapter 11 are the direct result of Julie's experience living and studying in Vietnam and Mongolia during the writing of this book.
We are also committed to interdisciplinarity, and our approach to linguistics is informed by a range of disciplines, all of which figure in Languages in the World: anthropology and anthropological linguistics, evolutionary theory, historical linguistics, history and philosophy of linguistics, genetics, language variation and change, poststructuralist approaches to critical theory, race and gender studies, and sociolinguistics. Our interdisciplinary commitment is reflected in our diverse intellectual interlocutors. Though you will not find explicit reference to all of the following names in our book, ripples of their thinking are nevertheless evident in our writing: anthropologist Stuart Hall; general scientists Jared Diamond, Charles Darwin, Francisco Varela, William James, and Humberto Maturana; historian Benedict Anderson; linguists (dialectologists, historical linguists, sociolinguists, and psycholinguists) Norman Faircloth, Charles Ferguson, Joshua Fishman, Joseph Greenberg, Jacob Grimm, Roman Jakobson, William Labov, Stephen Levinson, Johanna Nichols, Michael Silverstein, Michael Tomasello, Uriel and Max Weinreich, Walt Wolfram, and William Dwight Whitney; philosophers Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Julia Kristéva, and Giyathri Spivak; and sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Irving Goffman. All of these researchers share a general commitment to understanding the context, the situatedness, of humans in their psychosocial and sociopolitical worlds. In an effort to unburden our readers from excessive citations, we have tried to minimize references to these scholars throughout the book and acknowledge our debt to them here.
The familiar questions of a book addressing languages of the world are: What are the language families of the world? and What are the major structural characteristics of the languages in those families? These are, indeed, significant questions. We, too, want to address them here, and we also ask two more questions: Why does the current map of the languages of the world look the way it does? and How did it get to be that way? In order to answer these further questions, we need not only to broaden our perspective but also to create a new organizational framework. First, we acknowledge that the linguistic world goes around on the day-to-day interactions between individuals. Second, we see that the answers to the additional questions we are asking require our approach to focus less on the microdynamics of individual interactions and more on macroconcerns organized by the topics of power, movement, and time. Our extralinguistic attention in t...
