On This Earth Here: Mapping the Universe Across Time, Space, and Languages

For several millennia, humans have given substantial attention to situating themselves within the known universe and depictions of Earth’s place in the universe have received substantial attention by many different cultures. An examination of circular renditions of the universe and the translation of this image in a variety of languages and visual formats allows us to understand the interaction between various cultures, languages, and visual traditions.

Impacts of (il)literacy on language revitalization: The case of Haitian Creole in Cuba

Haitian Creole (Kreyòl), the national language of Haiti, was first brought to neighboring Cuba after the Haitian Revolution of 1804. This initial wave of immigration was followed by subsequent migrations of Haitian sugarcane laborers who moved to Eastern Cuba in the early 19th century. The language has been maintained over generations by the descendants of these Haitian migrants, making it the second most widely spoken language in Cuba, after Spanish. However, recent economic and political challenges have complicated language maintenance efforts.

This paper explores contemporary efforts to preserve and promote Kreyòl amidst demographic shifts. Based on ethnographic interviews conducted in Cuba in 2024, I show how issues of literacy are central to the planning efforts of community members in order to successfully revitalize the language on a large scale. I argue that a lack of community literacy in Kreyòl, coupled with the dearth of physical materials in resource-scare Cuba, has severely complicated community efforts to revitalize and promote the language. Despite desires to learn the language amongst younger generations, without physical materials to use or instructors who are literate in the language, efforts have not been successful.

Variations in Pseudoglyphs Across the Lowlands of Mesoamerica 

Over the course of the history of Classic Period (250-800ce) Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, there emerged a type of writing which emulated that of the conventional, semantically salient hieroglyphic script. This writing has become known to epigraphers as pseudoglyphs, or glyph-like signs which may resemble, in part or whole, conventional Mayan hieroglyphs. This paper will seek to examine such pseudoglyphs in the various contexts in which they appear, both within and without what is considered the Maya region. This will include a study of polychrome vessels from the Ulua Valley, Honduras housed in Tulane’s MARI collections as well as address other examples from across the Maya Lowlands. The temporal span of the study reaches from roughly the 500s to the 900’s ce and will seek to better understand why, when, and how pseudoglyphic script appears on many ceramic polychrome artifacts from this region during this time period. The materials discussed will include ceramic vases and murals with pseudoglyphic text incorporated into the design and explore temporal, economic, political, and aesthetic implications that the presence of pseudoglyphs indicates.

The use of American school aids in Guyanese literacy instruction

The heterogeneity of English in Guyana was established from its outset, with early influences from the British Isles and the anglophone Caribbean. However, the most enduring influence on Guyanese English has been British English in its role as the standard language throughout the colonial period, ending in 1961, and a British-influenced English existing to this day as the language of education, government, newspapers, and formal purposes. Due to globalization and the common circular migration between Guyana and other English dominant nations like the UK, Canada and the USA, there are influences from other dialects and changing language attitudes towards English dialects. Guyana has its own patterns of English, which do not follow either American or British norms, or mix the two, as with the variable use of ‘zee’ and ‘zed’ or ‘chips’ and ‘fries’. In my recent research in Guyanese primary schools one of the strongest influences of the American accent in schools was the use of American-influenced English literacy videos in Guyanese classrooms. This addition of American media in the school setting and particularly in literacy, which has traditionally been reserved for the British-influenced English, may result in a shift in the exonormative dialect preferences of Guyanese school children. This study looks at a small sample of interviews with primary school students and teachers to explore their attitudes towards American English and their preference for the use of American or British English terms.

Spanish in the Southern Louisiana Linguistic Landscape

The study of the linguistic landscape explores the use of signage in public spaces, often focusing on how non-majority languages are used. This sociolinguistic study extends the analysis of the Southern linguistic landscape (Cipria & O’Rourke 2024) to Louisiana. We examine the impact of the growing Hispanic population in southern Louisiana on the region’s linguistic landscape. Focusing on Lake Charles, Sulphur, Westlake, Hammond, and New Orleans, we map, quantify, and explore signage to investigate how language and visuals cater to the Hispanic community while appealing to the mainstream population, i.e., English speakers. Key elements include the use of slang, official and unofficial signage, and linguistic idiosyncrasies that reveal the influx and vitality of the Spanish language. Our findings highlight how Spanish manifests in public spaces, reflecting the social and cultural dynamics of the Hispanic community. Special attention is given to the linguistic landscape of Hammond, situated between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Surrounded by rural areas, Hammond serves as a focal point for understanding how Spanish integrates into public and private signage. Moreover, our analysis offers insights into the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Latino population and sheds light on broader sociolinguistic trends in the region. This study contributes to understanding the role of language in shaping cultural identity and community interactions in southern Louisiana. Furthermore, by documenting and analyzing the linguistic landscape, our study contributes to understanding the role of language in shaping cultural identity and community interactions in southern Louisiana.

Reference

Cipria, Alicia, and Erin O’Rourke. 2024. "Multimodal Analysis of the Spanish Linguistic Landscape in Alabama" Languages 9, no. 8: 264.

Muy señor mío: Address formulae and power dynamics in Colonial Louisiana Spanish

Despite its importance in the history of the American continent, Spanish colonial Louisiana has received scarce attention in scholarly work, particularly in the linguistics literature. During the 40 years of Spanish rule in 18th-century Louisiana, innumerable business letters were circulated within the colony with a multitude of different aims. One seldom-studied aspect of colonial Louisiana is that of the power relationships between different members of Spanish society. Given the tumultuous transition between French and Spanish rule in the territory, relationships between government officials, and those between officials and settlers, were defined in practice.

The current study seeks to examine popular assumptions about the connection between institutional power and linguistic behavior at a micro-level with data from this historical North American speech community. The corpus for the study consists of 200 business letters from two settlements of the Louisiana territory between 1778 and 1802. The linguistic focus of the study is the address formulae in these letters – both in the salutations used to open the letters, as well as the nominal and pronominal address forms (both explicit and implicit) utilized. While reverential address forms (Vuestra señoría ‘Your Lordship’) are the norm employed by those in positions of inferior power (relative to their interlocutor) and ‘standard’ forms (Vuestra merced ‘Your Grace’) are most commonly issued by superiors, these patterns of the time do not necessarily imply strategic language usage. Given the exhortations of conduct and letter-writing manuals of the time (such as the Nuovo Galateo (1802) and Cooke’s Universal Letter Writer (1850)), it is clear that this period represented a transition between traditional “ritualistic” and modern “other-face orientation” (O’Driscoll 2010: 273-74) in writing norms.

Attitudes Towards Writing in an AI World

This talk will argue that AI will reshape the social significance of writing just as past technological developments have done. If machines can produce complex writing, writing itself will no longer appear to be a special creation of human minds and ingenuity. There will be less impetus to learn to write well. AI will generate much more writing than society can digest, and so people will read less carefully because there is so much. People will not be inclined to evaluate writing that they believe to be AI-generated the same way they evaluate writing they believe to be human-generated. AI will be used to navigate complexity and information overload, but that also entails treating writing instrumentally rather than meaningfully. The earliest known writing is the Sumerian cuneiform of the Middle East circa 3400 BCE and discovered in the ancient city of Uruk (Gnandesikan 2009). It was primarily used to store information for commercial purposes and not for such purposes as great literature or thought, the kind of writing that has been prized in our society. Ironically, the success of AI may take us back to an era where writing is primarily used instrumentally and valued and read as information storage.

The Lost Language of the Classic Mayan Inscriptions

For some decades now, scholars have been aware that Classic Mayan texts were written in a language belonging to the Ch’olan branch of the Mayan language family (e.g., Thompson 1938). More recently, using phonological and morphological criteria, Houston et al (2000) demonstrate that most texts were written in a prestige language from the Eastern Ch’olan branch, most closely related to modern Ch’orti’ and the now-extinct Ch’olti’ (recorded in the 17th century). This claim has been debated for the past quarter-century, and we are now in a position to revisit the precise identification of the prestigious, conservative language of hieroglyphic texts written across the Maya lowlands. Using several lengthy and well-documented Late Classic texts (ca. 600-850 CE), this paper will show that while there can no longer be any doubt that these were written in a language most similar to Ch’orti’ and, secondarily, to the historically-attested Ch’olti’, the Classic language nonetheless attests numerous phonological, morphological, and syntactic innovations which are not shared with either of its closest relatives. In other words, it must be identified as a distinct language in its own right: a language which developed from a shared common ancestor with Ch’orti’ and Ch’olti’, but which nonetheless diverged from them. Further, according to the best evidence now available to us, this language later became extinct during the tumultuous years attendant to the Terminal Classic period collapse of Southern Lowland Maya Civilization in the mid-ninth century.

Washing, Eating, or Planting? The Classic Maya Sjoom "Months"

As recognized since the late nineteenth century, the complex Classic Maya Calendar Round consists of a 260-day ritual calendar and a 365-day civil calendar. The latter was not only a reasonably close approximation to the solar year but also seems to have been deeply intertwined with agricultural practices. It is divided into 18 “months” of 20 days each, concluding with a final 5-day period. Continuing progress in the decipherment of the Classic Maya script and its relationship to various lowland Mayan languages has uncovered the phonetic readings of almost all of these months. Unfortunately, cultural explanations for most of these names remain obscure. This paper proposes an interpretation for the four months appearing in sequence as the 9th through 12th. These months are united in modifying a core term spelled sijoom with a variable color term: ihk’ ‘black’, yax ‘green’, sak ‘white’, and chak ‘red’. The core term, sijoom, has been recognized in recent work as tornamilpa: the planting of a second maize crop. Based on recent ethnographic work in the Ch’orti’ region, we propose that the Classic Maya sijoom months tracked the stages of development of this second crop over an 80-day period, culminating in the harvest of a particular kind of maize known as chakna’r. Although this variety is now scarcely planted, cultural traditions surrounding it continue in some hamlets.

The paper also showcases the value of collaborative work with communities when applying the direct historical approach in the decipherment process.

A Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish Intensifiers across two Dialects

Intensifiers are adverbs that magnify meaning, scaling a quality up (Ito & Tagliamonte 2003). They also hold significance in sociolinguistic variation due to their role as markers of social identity and their capacity to change quickly and recycle in usage (Tagliamonte 2008). This variationist study examines intensifier usage by comparing two Spanish-speaking cohorts: Tunja, Colombia and Puerto Ricans residents of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. These fall into the Continental and Caribbean Spanish macro dialectal zones, respectively. We analyzed 1859 tokens that were coded for social (age, gender, education) and linguistic (adjective, verb, lexical category) constraints that could condition intensifier usage.

Our analysis uncovers many interesting differences between the two communities. Our findings corroborate quantitatively that while Continental Spanish primarily uses muy ‘very’ as the default intensifier, Caribbean Spanish uses bien ‘well.’ Moreover, the English-borrowed intensifier súper ‘super’ reveals distinct age-based distribution patterns, with speakers in Tunja adopting it after 1945 and Baton Rouge Puerto Ricans after 1965. Moreover, concurring with sociolinguistic theory (Chambers 2009, Tagliamonte 2024), both corpora show a higher intensification rate among women than men. College educated speakers from Tunja also reflect a significant increase in the usage of bastante ‘quite,’ implying that education level is an important predictor to be further explored in future studies of intensification. This comparative analysis highlights dialectal variation in intensifier usage, suggesting potential links to other sociolinguistic phenomena and providing a foundation for future interdisciplinary research collaborations to further explore the social and linguistic predictors conditioning intensification and language variation in general.

Mapping the bilingual vowel space: Tracking variation in Shreveport Spanish and English

Spanish phonetic research has historically focused on consonants, as vowels are seen as stable (Díaz-Campos, 2014; Lipski, 2011). However, research has begun to challenge this notion by examining the vowel spaces of monolingual (Scrivner, 2014), bilingual (Willis, 2005), and heritage speakers of Spanish (Ronquest, 2016). Natural speech norms tend to diverge significantly from invariant laboratory ones (Quilis & Esgueva, 1983). The current study examines vowel production in Shreveport, Louisiana, comparing monolingual English speakers with Spanish-English bilinguals. Following Willis (2005), who examined Spanish in New Mexico and Texas, this study tracks F1 and F2 norms of vowel production across the two languages.

Census data shows at least 5000+ individuals in Shreveport identify as Hispanic. In the current analysis, sociolinguistic interviews were used to examine the vowel spaces of 6 English and 6 Spanish-English speakers in the Shreveport area. Formant information was collected in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2024) and normalized using the Lobanov (1971) method. As others have found, the vowel spaces of these speakers were markedly different from the laboratory results established by Quilis and Esgueva (1983). Rather than exclusively contracting or expanding, vowel spaces varied for individual vowels and due to English influence. Overall, these results point to heretofore unexamined variation in the language systems of monolingual and bilingual speakers of northwestern Louisiana Spanish and English. Examining these two understudied varieties offers insight not only into the vowel systems of these speakers, but also sheds light on the broader field of sociophonetic resources in Northwestern Louisiana Spanish.

References

Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2022). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.3.03, retrieved from http://www.praat.org/

Díaz-Campos, M. (2014). Introducción a la sociolingüística hispánica. John Wiley & Sons. Lipski, J. (2011). Socio-phonological variation in Latin American Spanish. In M. Díaz-Campos(Ed.) The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, pp. 72–97. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley- Blackwell.

Lobanov, B. M. (1971). Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 49, 606–608. 

Quilis, A., & Esgueva, M. (1983). Realización de los fonemas vocálicos españoles en posición fonética normal [Production of vowel phonemes in normal phonetic position]. In M. Esgueva & M. Cantarero (Eds.), Estudios de fonética [Phonetics studies], pp. 159–252. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

Ronquest, R. (2016). Stylistic Variation in Heritage Spanish Vowel Production. Heritage Language Journal 13(2), 275–298.

Scrivner, O. (2014). Vowel Variation in the Context of /s/: A Study of a Caracas Corpus. In R. Orozco (Ed.) New Directions in Hispanic Linguistics, pp. 165–187. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Willis, E. (2005). An initial examination of Southwest Spanish vowels. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 24, 185–198.