Living Language. Laura M. Ahearn

From social media, to Zoom meetings, to the implications of technologically mediated interactions for migrants seeking to stay in touch with relatives back home, the chapter engages with some of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent events on linguistic practices. Chapter 9, “Performance, Performativity, and the Constitution of Communities,” the final chapter in the second part of the book, disentangles the various theoretical and ethnographic approaches to performance and performativity and discusses the importance of these themes for understanding how linguistic and social communities come to be formed.

      The final part of the book, “Language, Power, and Social Differentiation,” moves more deeply into the constitution of actual communities by examining various dimensions of social and linguistic differentiation and inequality within particular communities. Chapter 10, “Language and Gender,” explores some common language ideologies concerning the ways in which women and men speak and reviews the research on the complex nature of gendered linguistic practices. Chapter 11, “Language, Race, and Ethnicity,” engages with two other common forms of social and linguistic differentiation, that of racialization and ethnicization, one illustration of which is a multimodal analysis of short videos on the social media platform Vine conveying anti-hegemonic racial humor. Chapter 12, “Language Death and Revitalization,” looks at some of the reasons why so many of the world’s languages are endangered and asks what social inequalities and language ideologies underpin these discourses of endangerment. The concluding chapter, “Language, Power, and Agency,” pulls together the threads of the previous chapters to present a view of linguistic practices as embedded within power dynamics and subject to various forms of agency. This final chapter provides an overview of the social theorists, including Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Sherry Ortner, and Pierre Bourdieu, who are, in my view, the most useful for developing a deeper understanding of language, power, agency, and social action.

      In sum, this book is meant to be an invitation to all readers to explore more fully the notion that to use language is always to engage in a form of social action. Such an exploration is even more timely as this edition comes to print, given the unprecedented global transformations underway as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic and political repercussions. Studying how all of this social change shapes and is shaped by linguistic practices will lead to a better appreciation for what “living language” can mean.

      Acknowledgments

      I have continued to incur debts during the preparation of this third edition and am grateful to have the opportunity to thank at least some of the individuals who helped me during the revision process. First, my wonderful colleagues on the LEARN contract provided many useful and amusing examples of language use, only some of which, such as Eva Schiffer’s “Backpfeifengesicht,” I was able to include in this edition. But all my fellow LEARNers provided encouragement, support, and an intellectually stimulating environment that surpassed anything I have experienced elsewhere. I am also grateful to my former academic colleagues, including Steven Black, Liz Coville, Janina Fenigsen, Lisa Gezon, Debby Keller-Cohen, Jan David Hauck, Tom Kias, Karen Pennesi, Beatriz Reyes-Foster, Rachel Reynolds, Jonathan Rosa, Becky Schulthies, and Mark Sicoli. In addition, I enjoyed very much working with the members of the editorial board for my Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language series; Sandro Duranti, Paul Garrett, and Justin Richland provided me with an incredible amount of intellectual growth (and fun) during the years we worked together, and I am very proud of the books we chose to publish in the series, a number of which have won awards. I would also like to thank Tingting Gao for giving numerous guest lectures on ASL in my classes over the years and for being the source of a great deal of information and inspiration. And finally, I am very grateful to Grzegorz Godlewski in Warsaw for facilitating the publication of a Polish edition of Living Language, and to Kerim Friedman in Taiwan for laying the groundwork for a Chinese translation of the book.

This book was many years in the making, and I could never adequately thank everyone to whom I am indebted in various ways for helping me write it. I owe so much to the scholars who most deeply influenced me during my graduate training: Tom Fricke, Bruce Mannheim, and Sherry Ortner. During and after my years in graduate school, I have continued to be inspired by the work of Alessandro Duranti, Susan Gal, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Jane Hill, Judy Irvine, Paul Kroskrity, Elinor Ochs, Bambi Schieffelin, and Jim Wilce. I was also fortunate to be situated for many years within a cultural anthropology program at Rutgers, Critical Interventions in Theory and Ethnography, that took seriously the need to integrate a close analysis of language into any study of social or cultural practices. My colleagues at Rutgers, especially Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Daniel Goldstein, Angelique Haugerud, Dorothy Hodgson, David Hughes, and Becky Schulthies, were all extremely supportive of this project. Other colleagues, including Janina Fenigsen, Bridget Hayden (who also caught my initial misspelling of “purl” in the knitting analogy), Kathy Hunt, Dillon Mahoney, Ryne Palombit, Gary Rendsburg, Heidi Swank, Suzanne Wertheim, Jim Wilce, and John Zimmerman, have also read and commented on some or all of these chapters, or have even “test driven” them in their own linguistic anthropology classes, and for all their feedback I am enormously grateful. Jim Wilce, in particular, has been a most consistently encouraging and patient supporter throughout this long process, and his belief in this book helped me move forward at several critical periods when I was unsure of how to proceed.

      My students have also provided me with inspiration and concrete advice on how to improve the book. Students in my undergraduate linguistic anthropology classes, including Liane Alves, Chris Correa, Tingting Gao, Mickey Hennessey, Christina Le, Eugene Leytin, Erika Varga, and Alysis Vasquez, were amazingly patient with me as I turned them into guinea pigs in this process; they offered extremely perceptive comments on how to make the book more accessible to college students. My brilliant graduate students were equally generous with their advice. I am particularly grateful to all the students who took my Language as Social Action and Theories of Agency seminars over the years, especially Chelsea Booth, Assaf Harel, Meghana Joshi, Noelle Molé, and Kartikeya Saboo, for pushing me to think in new ways about the material presented in this book.

I am also thankful to Jane Huber, the editor at Wiley-Blackwell who got me interested in this project. Eric Richardson wisely urged a more user-friendly title, and Ayala Fader and Liliana Sanchez offered helpful feedback. Peter Laipson, my loyal critic, read the first four chapters of this book and dictated copious comments for me using Dragon Naturally Speaking, thereby providing an excellent demonstration of the limitations of the early versions of speech recognition software (but also of course improving my eloquence quotient enormously for those chapters). The anonymous readers of the book proposal for the third edition buoyed me with their wonderful comments and feedback, and the five anonymous reviewers of the entire manuscript humbled me with their close readings and wise advice. I only wish I had had the time and intellectual capacity to implement more of their suggestions.

      Finally, I am indebted beyond words to my family. My parents, Eileen and Fred Ahearn, have always encouraged me with loving support and intellectual stimulation. My sisters, Peggy Schroeder and Kerry Ahearn, remain my dearest friends. My husband (also known as my in-house editor and favorite correspondent), Rick Black, has offered me more guidance, inspiration, and constant encouragement than I could ever enumerate or reciprocate. I am so, so lucky to have him as my “life friend.”

      And to my daughter, Melanie Anne Ahearn Black, I dedicate this book, which has been in the making in one form or another for the entire sixteen years of her life. From helping with the Japanese example in Chapter 8 to providing valuable data on teen linguistic practices, Mellie has been extremely helpful in the revisions for this third edition. So much of what has come to fascinate me about language and what I have come to value in life can be traced to her.

      Laura M. Ahearn

Part I Language: Some Basic Questions

1 The Socially Charged Life of Language

      All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged