[X] Anthropological Linguistics

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Vol. 48, no. 2 (Summer 2006)


Contents

Articles

Language Maintenance in the Meseta Purépecha Region of Michoacán, Mexico Agnes Ragone and Paul Marr 109

Émérillon Stress: A Phonetic and Phonological Study Matthew Gordon and Françoise Rose 132

Gender Switch in Female Speech of an Urbanized Arabic Dialect in Israel Judith Rosenhouse and Nisreen Dbayyat 169

Book Reviews

Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation (David W. Samuels) M. Eleanor Nevins 187
Hopi Traditional Literature (David Leedom Shaul) Armin W. Geertz 189
A Grammar of Mosetén (Jeanette Sakel) Willem Adelaar 191
A Dictionary of Buin, a Language of Bougainville (Donald C. Laycock) Gary Holton 195
Kommentierter Dialektatlas des Romani. Teil 1: Vergleich der Dialekte; Teil 2: Dialektkarten mit einer CD-ROM (Norbert Boretzky and Birgit Igla) Peter Bakker 197
Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Neil DeVotta) Bernard Bate 203
Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Aaron A. Fox) Alexander Dent 205

Abstracts

Language Maintenance in the Meseta Purépecha Region of Michoacán, Mexico

Agnes Ragone
Shippensburg University

Paul Marr
Shippensburg University

Abstract. Since the conquest of Michoacán, Mexico, in the mid-1500s, the Purépecha (Tarascan) people and language have experienced significant geographic contraction due to the encroachment of Spanish. Today Purépecha speakers are found chiefly in the Meseta Purépecha region, to the exclusion of other areas in Michoacán. While Spanish has become the dominant language in the larger commercial and administrative centers, the Purépecha language remains dominant in the countryside. This research examines Spanish and Purépecha use and maintenance relative to the degree of accessibility or isolation of various towns and to the principle function (commercial, governmental, agricultural, etc.) of these towns. In regard to language use and maintenance, three main types of towns emerge, which have been mapped to show the linguistic patterns of the Meseta Purépecha.

Émérillon Stress: A Phonetic and Phonological Study

Matthew Gordon
University of California, Santa Barbara

Françoise Rose
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France

Abstract. Stress placement in both elicited word list and natural discourse data from Émérillon (Tupi-Guaraní) is examined. Three potential acoustic correlates of stress (fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity) are examined in order to provide quantitative verification of the discovered stress patterns. Results indicate that the domain of stress is the phrase with moraic trochees counted from the right edge of the phrase. The acoustic correlates of stress differ depending on the speaker and on whether the data consist of words uttered in isolation or in connected discourse. The results for Émérillon are discussed within the broader comparative context of stress in Tupi-Guaraní.

Gender Switch in Female Speech of an Urbanized Arabic Dialect in Israel

Judith Rosenhouse
Technion (Israel Institute of Techology), Haifa, and Swantech, Ltd.

Nisreen Dbayyat
Tel-Aviv University

Abstract. We investigate the patterns of and conditions for a special kind of gender switch found in an urbanized Arabic dialect spoken in Israel—the use of masculine instead of feminine forms in women’s speech in the dialects spoken in the towns of Tire and Nazareth. We find that gender switch appears mainly when a speaker of the Tire dialect speaks about herself. Differences in the lexical distribution of this phenomenon and in women’s attitudes to it are also evident. Besides features dependent on geographical dialect rules, the described situation seems to reflect differences in recent patterns of urbanization.


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