Download or read book The Language Encounter in the Americas 1492 1800 written by Edward G. Gray and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.
Download or read book Language in the Americas written by Joseph Harold Greenberg and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned primarily with the evidence for the validity of a genetic unit, Amerind, embracing the vast majority of New World languages. The only languages excluded are those belonging to the Na-Dene and Eskimo- Aleut families. It examines the now widely held view that Haida, the most distant language genetically, is not to be included in Na-Dene. It confined itself to Sapir's data, although the evidence could have been buttressed considerably by the use of more recent materials. What survives is a body of evidence superior to that which could be adduced under similar restrictions for the affinity of Albanian, Celtic, and Armenian, all three universally recognized as valid members of the Indo-European family of languages. A considerable number of historical hypotheses emerge from the present and the forthcoming volumes. Of these, the most fundamental bears on the question of the peopling of the Americas. If the results presented in this volume and in the companion volume on Eurasiatic are valid, the classification of the world's languages based on genetic criteria undergoes considerable simplification.
Download or read book An American Language written by Rosina Lozano and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read about the use of Spanish in the U.S. Incredible research. Read it to understand our country. Spanish is, indeed, an American language."—Jorge Ramos An American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.
Download or read book A Key Into the Language of America written by Roger Williams and published by Applewood Books. This book was released on 1997 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discourse on the languages of Native Americans encountered by the early settlers. This early linguistic treatise gives rare insight into the early contact between Europeans and Native Americans.
Download or read book The Language of the American South written by Cleanth Brooks and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume Cleanth Brooks pays tribute to the language and literature of the American South. He writes of the language's unique syntax and its celebrated languorous rhythms; of the classical allusions and Addisonian locutions once favored by the gentry; and of the more earthbound eloquence, rooted in the dialect of England's southern lowlands, that is still heard in the speech of the region's plain folk. It is this rich spoken language, Brooks suggests, that has always been the life blood of southern writing. The strong tradition of storytelling in the South is reflected in the tales told by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and in the obsessive retellings that structure William Faulkner's novels and stories. But even more crucially, the language of the South--firmly rooted in the land but with a tendency to reach for the heavens above--has shaped the literary concerns and molded the complex visions to be found in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom; the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor, and Eudora Welty; and the novels of Warren, Allen Tate, and Walker Percy.
Download or read book Language Contact and Change in the Americas written by Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection of articles in honor of Marianne Mithun represents the very latest in research on language contact and language change in the Indigenous languages of the Americas. The book aims to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into how and why languages change, especially with regard to contact phenomena in languages of North America, Meso-America and South America. The individual chapters cover a broad range of topics, including sound change, morphosyntactic change, lexical semantics, grammaticalization, language endangerment, and discourse-pragmatic change. With chapters from distinguished scholars and talented newcomers alike, this book will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in internally- and externally-motivated language change.
Download or read book Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas written by Serafín M. Coronel-Molina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Americas – home to 40 to 50 million Indigenous people – this book explores the history and current state of Indigenous language revitalization across this vast region. Complementary chapters on the USA and Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean, offer a panoramic view while tracing nuanced trajectories of "top down" (official) and "bottom up" (grass roots) language planning and policy initiatives. Authored by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, the book is organized around seven overarching themes: Policy and Politics; Processes of Language Shift and Revitalization; The Home-School-Community Interface; Local and Global Perspectives; Linguistic Human Rights; Revitalization Programs and Impacts; New Domains for Indigenous Languages Providing a comprehensive, hemisphere-wide scholarly and practical source, this singular collection simultaneously fills a gap in the language revitalization literature and contributes to Indigenous language revitalization efforts.
Download or read book The Indigenous Languages of the Americas written by Lyle Campbell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indigenous Languages of the Americas is a comprehensive assessment of what is known about their history and classification. It identifies gaps in knowledge and resolves controversial issues while making new contributions of its own. The book deals with the major themes involving these languages: classification and history of the Indigenous languages of the Americas; issues involving language names; origins of the languages of the New World; unclassified and spurious languages; hypotheses of distant linguistic relationships; linguistic areas; contact languages (pidgins, lingua francas, mixed languages); and loanwords and neologisms.
Download or read book Native American Language Ideologies written by Paul V. Kroskrity and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2009-04-15 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beliefs and feelings about language vary dramatically within and across Native American cultural groups and are an acknowledged part of the processes of language shift and language death. This volume samples the language ideologies of a wide range of Native American communities--from the Canadian Yukon to Guatemala--to show their role in sociocultural transformation. These studies take up such active issues as "insiderness" in Cherokee language ideologies, contradictions of space-time for the Northern Arapaho, language socialization and Paiute identity, and orthography choices and language renewal among the Kiowa. The authors--including members of indigenous speech communities who participate in language renewal efforts--discuss not only Native Americans' conscious language ideologies but also the often-revealing relationship between these beliefs and other more implicit realizations of language use as embedded in community practice. The chapters discuss the impact of contemporary language issues related to grammar, language use, the relation between language and social identity, and emergent language ideologies themselves in Native American speech communities. And although they portray obvious variation in attitudes toward language across communities, they also reveal commonalities--notably the emergent ideological process of iconization between a language and various national, ethnic, and tribal identities. As fewer Native Americans continue to speak their own language, this timely volume provides valuable grounded studies of language ideologies in action--those indigenous to Native communities as well as those imposed by outside institutions or language researchers. It considers the emergent interaction of indigenous and imported ideologies and the resulting effect on language beliefs, practices, and struggles in today's Indian Country as it demonstrates the practical implications of recognizing a multiplicity of indigenous language ideologies and their impact on heritage language maintenance and renewal.
Download or read book The English Language in America written by George Philip Krapp and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Language in Immigrant America written by Dominika Baran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1. Whose America?; 2. The alien specter then and now; 3. Hyphenated identity; 4. Foreign accents and immigrant Englishes; 5. Multilingual practices; 6. Immigrant children and language; 7. American becomings
Download or read book Native Languages of the Americas written by Thomas Sebeok and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen of the chapters that comprise the contents of this first volume of Native Languages of the A mericas were originally commissioned by the undersigned in his capacity as Editor of the fourteen volume series (1963-1976), Current Trends in Linguistics. All appeared, in 1973, under Part Three of the quadripartite Vol. 10, subtitled Linguistics in North America. Two additional chaplers are being held over for the volume to follow shortly, devoted to Central and South American lan guages and linguistics, where they more appropriately belong. A fourteenth chapter, on the" Historiography of native North A merican linguistics," was written similarly by invitation, for Vol. 13, subtitled Historiography of Linguistics, published in 1975. Both Volumes 10 and 13 were jointly financed by the United States National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, with an enhancing contribution to the former by the Canada Council. The generosity of these funding agencies was, of course, previously acknowledged in my respective Editor's Introductions to the two books mentioned, but cannot be repeated too often: without their welcome and timely assistance, the global project could scarcely have been realized on so comprehensive a scale. The Current Trends in Linguistics series was a long-term venture of Mouton Publishers, of The Hague, under the imaginative in-house direction of Peter de Rid der. Various spin-offs were foreseen, and some of them happily realized.
Download or read book Native Languages of the Americas written by Thomas Sebeok and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publishing history of the eleven chapters that comprise the contents of this second volume of Native Languages of the Americas is rather different from that of the thirteen that appeared in Volume I of this twin set late last year. Original ver sions of five articles, respectively, by Barthel, Grimes, Longacre, Mayers, and Suarez, were first published in Part II of Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 4, subtitled lbero-A merican and Caribbean Linguistics (1968), having been com missioned by the undersigned in his capacity as editor of the fourteen volume series which was distributed in twenty-one tomes between 1963 and 1976. McClaran's article is reprinted from Part III of Vol. 10. Linguistics in North America (1973) and the two by Kaufman and Rensch were in Part I I of Vol. 11, Diachronic, A real. and Typological Linguistics (1973 ). There are three contributions by Landar: earlier versions of two appeared in Vol. 10 ("North American Indian Languages. " accompanied by William Sorsby's maps of tribal groups of North and Central America), and in Vol. 13, Historiography of Linguistics (1975); however, his checklist of South and Central American Indian languages was freshly compiled for this book. Generous financial support for preparing the materials included in this project came from several agencies of the United States government, to wit: the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, for Vols. 10 and 13, and the Office of Education, for Vols. 4 and 11; in addition.
Download or read book Language in the USA written by Charles A. Ferguson and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1981-08-31 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grouped under four headings -- American English, Languages before English, Languages after English and Language in use -- these essays lay to rest some myths about the monolingual nature of language in America and set forth the problems that must be confronted as a consequence of language and cultural pluralism. The essays of the first group range from U.S. language heritage to black American language. The second group deals with American Indian languages and New World Spanish. The last two groups deal with ethnic language varieties and various other topics.
Download or read book Language Documentation and Revitalization in Latin American Contexts written by Gabriela Pérez Báez and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up to now, the focus in the field of language documentation has been predominantly on North American and Australian languages. However, the greatest genetic diversity in languages is found in Latin America, home to over 100 distinct language families. This book gives the Latin American context the attention it requires by consolidating the work of field researchers experienced in the region into one volume for the first time.
Download or read book America s Bilingual Century written by Steve Leveen and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can Americans make our country stronger, kinder, smarter? By marshaling our enviable can-do ethic and learning another language. We can do it, no matter what our age: author Steve Leveen chose Spanish as his adopted language in midlife. America's Bilingual Century is filled with tips for learning a language, some mechanical--like changing your phone and laptop settings to your adopted language--and some philosophical. For instance, start by having a place in your life where you'll use the language, Steve says. The "where" makes the "how" more attainable. And recognize that, as with any adoption, you do it for love, and for life--so don't fret when you're not fluent in five months. If you have kids, start them young. You'll be glad you did when you read about the explosive growth of dual language schools across the country and the significant, measurable advantages they give our young people. Steve also takes us to the top summer language immersion camps, for both children and adults. And he shares his findings from leading language scholars, teachers, sociolinguists, app creators, and bilinguals of all stripes that he discovered during his dozen years of research. Then he topples 12 myths about Americans and languages that no longer hold in this century. Like thinking the whole world speaks English (it doesn't), that being monolingual is natural (it isn't), and that Americans suck at language (quite the opposite, as he demonstrates). Here and now in the 21st century, America is embracing its many ethnic and cultural heritages. How natural, then, that we enfold the many languages that these heritages thrive on as part of that quintessentially American pursuit of happiness. If you've never thought of bilingualism as being a patriotic act, America's Bilingual Century may persuade you otherwise. Knowing a second language changes the way we perceive the world, and the way the world perceives us. "English is what unites us," Steve says. "Our other languages are what define and strengthen us." And even if becoming bilingual leans more toward aspiration than arrival, that's okay. The journey is as rewarding as the destination.
Download or read book Language in America written by Charlton Laird and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1970 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author examines the evolution of language as ... "the impact of man upon language, and of language upon man, as language has been used on this continent from prehistoric times to the present"--Cover 1.
