In this article, I examine literacy artifacts placed by students in different locations of a state-run secondary school in the city of Madrid, Spain. The data were gathered as part of a two-year long multilevel ethnography focused on the social and academic trajectories of immigrant students in Spanish compulsory secondary education. The analysis…

From an epistemological perspective, Wilhelm von Humboldt's studies on the Oriental and East Asian languages and writing systems (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit, Chinese, Polynesian) raise the question of his position in the Orientalist discourse of his time. Said [Said, E.W., 1978. "Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient, fourth…

This article explores issues to be addressed in testing the validity of proposed correlations between the rise of a certain class of words and the development of literacy. Possible correlations point not to writing but to the language of law courts, feudal practices, and rhetorical debate in the Middle Ages. (Author/MT)

The article reviews some of the controversial issues regarding macro- and micro-ethnographic approaches and their implications for validity of ethnographic description, discusses the notion of context and its application to various research settings, and gives an account of the various problems encountered by researchers working in bilingual…

Reviews a collection of articles written on Noam Chomsky. The collection consists of four volumes focusing on Linguistics, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Chomsky's impact on contemporary thought relative to disciplines influenced by generative grammar. (36 references) (CK)

Examines some of the social, cultural, and religious factors involved in name changing in Hindi. (AM)

Endangered languages, or languages on the verge of becoming extinct, are discussed in relation to the larger process of loss of cultural and intellectual diversity. This article summarizes essays presented at the 1991 Linguistic Society of America symposium, "Endangered Languages and Their Preservation." (11 references) (LB)

Eight essays in ethnolinguistics were compiled for this monograph. "Functions of Speech: An Evolutionary Approach" represents an introduction to the application of linguistic knowledge to the historical and sociological study of peoples. "Speech and Language: On the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Speakers" expands on the theme of…

Reviews "Approaches to Language," edited by William C. McCormak and Stephen A. Wurm, published by Mouton (1978). The volume contains 29 papers presented to a subsession of the Language in Anthropology general session of the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, held in Chicago in 1973. (AM)

In a brief analysis of Hopi consonant gradation, residual exceptions to Heath's generalizations about i-ablaut in Uto-Aztecan languages from Hopi are examined. In Heath's (1977, 1978) reconstruction of Proto-Uto-Aztecan verb morphophonemics, a consonant gradation is reconstructed when a final vowel of a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) root…

Discusses the importance of uncovering the universal features of proper names and relating them to different naming systems. Suggests that this viewpoint may lead to an appreciation of proper names as a sociolinguistic universal and a cultural variable, beyond the particulars on which most of the literature has focused. (MES)

Highlights similarities and variation in both form and function of English pidgins the world over. It is argued that English pidgins are related more by socio-historical conditions and directions of development than by details of their formal structure. Reference list includes 68 citations. (Author/DJD)

A special word, "naynaa," which occurs in the Jamul dialect of Diegueno, a Yuman language spoken in the San Diego, California, area is described. Jamul has subject-object-verb word order, and its major word classes are noun and verb. Lexical pronouns are not required. Clauses may be connected by means of switch reference marking, and/or…

Argues that the beginnings of language need to be sought not in the universal abstract grammar proposed by Chomsky but in the evolution of the everyday interaction of the human species. Studies indicate that there is no great gulf between spoken language and nonverbal communication. (SED)

Reviews an archaic system of notation using tokens that is the direct progenitor of Sumerian writing. (HOD)