12 May: Rachel Lehr (UChicago)

Monday, May 12th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104

Linguistics in a Challenging Environment

Linguists choose to work on languages and in environments for a variety of reasons.   Choices may be determined by locations of interest, funding, mentors, prior experience, and urgent need. The choice to work in a conflict zone poses unique challenges. When attention is focused on a minority language community in a high conflict area, the stakes are raised for all involved.  Both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors influence the success and safety of the researcher, as well as the speech community. Because of the difficulty of working in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, little work has been done on minority regional languages.

This talk will focus on my work with Pashai speakers in Afghanistan and the diaspora.  My non-linguistic work with Pashai women led to linguistic work in their community.  I will discuss the ways in which long-term participant-observation provided access and insights into women’s language practices and how gender and geography play an increasingly significant role in language transmission and vitality. I will illustrate these practices with examples from the use of digital media and the different ways that men and women use the Pashai vigesimal counting system.

NGOs, individuals, and the Afghan government have recently undertaken efforts to provide an orthography, texts and teaching materials for Pashai. This discussion looks at how these efforts are met in the community, at the regional and national levels. Data from the pronominal system and verbal morphology illustrating the dialectal differences between three close villages will be used to show some of the challenges to native linguists developing curriculum and a standardized orthography.

Minority language promotion raises a community’s awareness of their own identity and prestige. In an attempt to sort out ‘ethno’ from ‘linguistic’ I will detail the association between language and ethnicity for Pashai speakers whose claim to ethno-linguistic identity reflects more outsider than insider influence. Afghanistan has been embroiled in a multi-ethnic identity crisis for more than thirty years. As policies evolve with each successive government Pashai speakers express a range of opinions on how Pashai they are, as the relationship between language and identity is continually contested.