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Linguistic anthropology is the study of language in use, focused on how humans make meaning together. Its basic premise is that language use is both utterly mundane and incredibly powerful, and that linguistic and other meaning-making practices (from gestures to social media posts) are systematic, patterned, and important. Our work focuses on these systems and patterns, as well as disruptions, innovations, and exceptions to them; we also analyze how people reflect on language, their own and others (what we call language ideologies). Our work reveals the force and impacts of language: to connect, to control, to educate, to impress, to persuade, to entertain.
Linguistic anthropology is both deeply empirical and inherently reflexive. These are mutually reinforcing, not conflicting, elements of our work. We work from evidence to portray what people say they do, but also what they are doing, and always from the perspectives we inhabit as particular people and scholars. The authors of the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences argue that scholarship must return to “disinterested inquiry,” and accuse those who question its coherence and value of suffering from “philosophical confusion.” But what does “disinterested” mean? What can it mean when scholarship is done by particular scholars, and emerges out of intellectual and methodological traditions that are inherently iterative, based in continual discussion and debate about what we do and why? Doesn’t “disinterested” itself imply an experiencing subject (someone who is disinterested), and thus a positionality, a site from which scholarship is necessarily undertaken?
To prioritize “disinterest” is disingenuous and willfully misleading about the nature of intellectual pursuit, scholarship, and research. We are, as scholars, all of us, interested: in people, in our world, in what is happening now and what lies ahead, in all the specificities and generalities these entail. Our scholarly interests—that which absorbs us and to which we are committed—lead us to research sites and research questions; they guide us in how we select the audiences we write for and where we aim to publish. They also shape the methods we select to answer those questions, as we align our research goals with how best to address and achieve them.
Linguistic anthropologists, as with all anthropologists, engage in research methods that produce data. For linguistic anthropologists, our methods include participant observation (the informed experience-near hanging out that anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and other social scientists embrace as a key qualitative research method), audio- and video-recording, transcribing, interviewing, photographing, and collecting various types of documents and mediated texts. The data these methods produce include fieldnotes, photographs, and documents; audio- and video-recordings; transcriptions of those recordings; as well as screenshots, websites, and various other mediated forms. We analyze these data to produce findings, findings that tell us and others about the world, but also, of course, respond to the questions with which we set out, an inherently iterative and interested process.
For instance, in my 1999-2000 research project in the northern Italian town and province of Bergamo (funded by the National Science Foundation, among others), I wanted to understand how people used their two languages (Italian and the local language, Bergamasco), and why. Working from data, which included both what people did and their reflections on these practices, I participated in the iterative process of developing better analytical tools to understand what people do and why, using speakers’ interests to guide my own.Extensive, systematic audio recordings across a variety of settings revealed that many people used both languages, often in tightly interwoven ways. For example, they switched from one to the other within an utterance, or recruited grammatical forms of one to structure the utterance of words in the other.
Scholarship on multilingualism at that time maintained a distinction between codeswitching (moving from one language to another in orderly fashion) and codemixing (using two languages together, resulting in varieties like “Spanglish”). “Interference” was the term used to describe mixing, an evaluative term that cast those who mixed as doing language wrong, and certain languages as disrupting the continuity of others. Scholars like Kathryn A. Woolard reframed this conversation by adopting terms such as “bivalent” to describe the same practices. This reframing recognized that there was nothing inherently good or bad, right or wrong, about using two or more languages together. Moreover, it left analytical room for scholars to recognize that it is language users who make these judgments, and that such judgments impact people and their practices, from raising children to picking spouses to hiring workers.
In my research, local people often claimed that mixing Italian and Bergamasco was ugly and undesirable—not calling it “interference” but still critical of the idea of it. However, they still did it, a lot, and to multiple interactional effects: to sound more authentic, make a joke funnier, enact respect to older people, and connect themselves to their place and its past. Placing bivalence at the heart of my analysis, and not characterizing these practices as inherently “interfering” with some imagined desirable monolingual purity, allowed me to reconcile both the patterns and contradictions that had emerged in my different types of data, to place speakers’ judgments ahead of my field’s. Mixing languages was both bad and good for the people with whom I worked; it served distinct purposes in different moments. If we seek to preserve retrograde ideas about objectivity, we stand to miss out on essential discoveries.
The study of multilingualism has continued to develop in the two decades since I did this research, now embracing translanguaging (the recognition that using more than one linguistic system at the same time can be socially and cognitively advantageous), for instance, as an analytical frame that inherently values multilingual practices and abilities. As with any analytical concept, translanguaging has its limits. Interested linguistic anthropology—in which we reflect on what we do, how we do it, and why—helps us develop new concepts to explain and capture what people do with language, as the conditions of language use continue to shift technologically, socially, politically, and culturally. Our interests keep us coming back to attend to what people do and what they say about it, because we know that all language use, including scholarly language, shapes what is possible.