Linguistic Utopias - Mary Louis Pratt

 
2013 "Festival of Languages" signs in Kazakh, Russian, and English in the Kazakh village of Aksu, photo taken by author

 
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Linguistic Utopias.”  The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature.  Ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987.  48-66.

Mary Louis Pratt draws on Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’ and the three features that define such communities to move away from a linguistics of community to describe her model of a linguistics of contact.  ‘Imagined communities’ are seen as ‘limited’ or having boundaries in some way, ‘sovereign’, and ‘fraternal’ or able to create solidarity based on membership.  These communities may or may not represent or be able to deliver these promised features, but they are imagined to be so (Pratt 49).  A linguistics of community assumes homogeneous members and language use (usually also assumed to be a single language) among members as legitimate or divergent language use within that community.  These linguistic forms of analyses are not false, but they are limited.  In contrast, she defines a linguistics of contact  as the following:

Imagine, then, a linguistics that decentered community, that placed at its center the operation of language across lines of social differentiation, a linguistics that focus[es] on modes and zones of contact between dominant and dominated groups, between persons of different and multiple identities, speakers of different languages, that focus[es] on how such speakers constitute each other relationally and in difference, how they enact differences in language (60).

This idea provides a foundation for translingual and transcultural ideologies and also identifies the conditions or dispositions for critical literacy.

#linguistics #empire #race #translingual #transcultural