Representing and regimenting languages in a transnational setting: the case of the Haitian-Dominican border
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Juan R. Valdez
Abstract
My analysis focuses on linguistic representations in order to shed light on the political, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries of the two nation-states that share the island of Hispaniola. In the context of the 20th century, Dominican politicians and philologists converged, creating a concentrated network of schools with Spanish as the language of instruction, prohibiting the use of Haitian Creole (Kreyòl), renaming numerous places from French or Kreyòl to Spanish, and producing a corpus of texts which described and represented the Dominican linguistic landscape proper. Literacy practices and speech practices were engaged for the purpose of Hispanizing border communities. I approach the sociopolitical transformation of this region by analyzing the representations of speech practices and the related linguistic policies of the Dominican state which targeted bilingual and multicultural communities in the 1930s and 1940s. To these interrelated issues, I apply the analytical tools from research on linguistic discourse and language ideologies (Arnoux and del Valle 2010; Irvine and Gal 2000; Woolard 2008) and insights from border studies (Wilson and Donnan 2012; Houtum and Naerssen 2002). My guiding question is whether, in the case of the Dominican-Haitian border in the 20th century, linguistic difference was represented in metalinguistic discourse in order to create a Dominican identity particularly through dissimilarity.
©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Transnacionalidad e identidades lingüísticas en la frontera dominico-haitiana
- Representing and regimenting languages in a transnational setting: the case of the Haitian-Dominican border
- Ethnic difference and language ideologies in popular Dominican literature: the case of Haitianized speech
- The Haitian language: defying odds and opening possibilities
- Research Notes
- Challenges and opportunities for Haitian Creole in the educational system of post-earthquake Haiti
- Reflections inspired by a scholarly book on the Haitian Creole language and a good old-fashioned language debate
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- New insights into the emergence of whiteness in Dominican national discourse
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Transnacionalidad e identidades lingüísticas en la frontera dominico-haitiana
- Representing and regimenting languages in a transnational setting: the case of the Haitian-Dominican border
- Ethnic difference and language ideologies in popular Dominican literature: the case of Haitianized speech
- The Haitian language: defying odds and opening possibilities
- Research Notes
- Challenges and opportunities for Haitian Creole in the educational system of post-earthquake Haiti
- Reflections inspired by a scholarly book on the Haitian Creole language and a good old-fashioned language debate
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- New insights into the emergence of whiteness in Dominican national discourse
