Native Tongue Title

Literary critics and scholars have written extensively on the demise of the "utopian spirit" in the (post-)modern novel. What has been overlooked is the emergence of a new subgenre which has emerged since the late 1970s.  Mohr terms this subgenre "transgressive utopian dystopias". The study analyzes how anglophone female dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s incorporate utopian strategies within the dystopian narrative. These utopian strategies criticize, undermine, and transgress the dualisms that originally caused and then rule dystopia. The study suggests that these novels are neither dystopias since they describe the ongoing process of building utopia that is never achieved but also never intended, as these texts reject the classical notion of utopia, the perfect blueprint.

Part One provides a brief delineation of the generic developments and postmodern genre mergings, a concise overview of definitions and classifications of each subgenre, and details the theoretical background of the study. Using Lucy Sargisson's take on transgressive utopianism, the study views transgression as a description for fluid moments of suspended binary logic, when distinctions between either/or are nullified. Without dissolving binary order, transgression contests the notions of unambiguity and authenticity. Exactly these transgressive moves beyond dualisms can be found in the feminist dystopias examined.
Drawing on postmodern, postcolonial, feminist as well as on linguistic theories and paying particular attention to the intersection of the categories of gender, race, and class, this book offers the first full-length study of both Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy and of Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast tetralogy. In the last part the study reads Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale not as a classical dystopia, but as a 'transgressive utopian dystopia', contesting standard readings of this well-canonized text.

Featuring an interview with Suzy McKee Charnas.

Winner of the Margaret Atwood Society Award 2005.

CALL FOR PAPERS AUSTRALEX Australasian Association for Lexicography Australex 2013: Endangered Words, and Signs of RevivalThe University of Adelaide, AustraliaOrganizers: Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann and Dr Julia MillerWHEN:  Thursday-Saturday 25-27 July 2013WHERE: The University of Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide City Centre, AustraliaWebpage: http://www.australex.org/Deadline for Abstract Submissions: 1 December 2012Notification of Acceptance: 1 February 2013 Keynote Speakers:Dr Luise Hercus, Australian National University: A Fifty Year Perspective on Endangered Words and Revival: A Golden Jubilee?Professor Christopher Hutton, The University of Hong Kong: Reclaiming Socio-Cultural Memory: Creating a Reference Dictionary of Hong Kong Cantonese Slogans and Quotations. Focus Speakers:Professor Peter Mühlhäusler, The University of Adelaide: Producing a Dictionary for an Unfocused Language: The Case of Pitkern and Norf’k.Dr Michael Walsh, The University of Sydney: Endangered Words in the Archive: The Rio Tinto / Mitchell Library Project.Australex 2013 will feature scholarly and emotional celebrations, marking for example Dr Luise Hercus’s 50-year work on Aboriginal languages and Professor Peter Mühlhäusler’s 20-year scholarship at the University of Adelaide. On Saturday 27 July 2013 we shall explore the beauty of the Adelaide Hills.Call for PapersThe theme for Australex 2013 is ‘Endangered Words, and Signs of Revival’. Papers may address a wide range of areas associated with lexicography, lexicology, endangered languages, Revival Linguistics, semantics, endangered meanings, extinct concepts, contact linguistics, social empowerment through language, and words, culture and identity. Topics may include dictionaries in Indigenous, minority and other endangered communities, dialectal lexicons, the educational and cultural roles of dictionaries, talknological dictionaries, dictionaries and Native Tongue Title, lexical engineering, and language policy and lexicography. Papers can address controversies such as the ‘Give us authenticity or give us death’ argument and the descriptive/prescriptive debate. Other topics may include learners’ dictionaries, specialist dictionaries, phraseology, proverbs, onomastics and terminology. All welcome.If you would like to propose a panel or submit a paper or a poster, would you please email an abstract of no more than 400 words in a Word document to [email protected] by 1 December 2012. Abstracts may include up to 5 references. Notification of acceptance will be sent out BY 1 February 2013.Up to two student bursaries are available to assist full-time students from Australia and New Zealand to attend the conference and present a paper.Please see http://www.australex.org/bursary.htm for further details. Yours respectfully, Ghil'ad Professor Ghil'ad ZuckermannD.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (Cambridge) (titular), M.A. (Tel Aviv) (summa cum laude) Chair of Linguistics / Endangered Languages School of HumanitiesThe University of AdelaideAdelaide SA [email protected]: +61 8 8313 5247 Mobile: +61 423 901 808  http://www.zuckermann.org/http://adelaide.academia.edu/zuckermann/http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/ghilad.zuckermannhttp://www.facebook.com/ProfessorZuckermannAuthor of Revival Linguistics, Oxford University Press, forthcoming Author of Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli - A Beautiful Language), Am Oved, 2008 http://www.zuckermann.org/israelit.html Author of Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 http://www.zuckermann.org/enrichment.html"

Stop, revive and survive
Ghil'ad Zuckermann
6 June 2012
The Australian
Higher Education

LINGUICIDE (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating) have made Australia the unlucky country. With globalisation, homogenisation and Coca-colonisation there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples.

Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve wellbeing.

There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival - for example, historical justice, diversity and employability, respectively. There is an urgent need to offer perspicacious insights relevant to language reclamation.

Revival linguistics is a new discipline, being established at Adelaide, studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints, global mechanisms and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world. Revival linguistics combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning. After all, language reclamation is the most extreme case of second-language learning.

Revival linguistics complements the established area of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep.

There is a need to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, we should avoid highfalutin, often Latin-based grammatical terminology.

We should also offer communities a user-friendly spelling. Juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schurmann's 1844 user-unfriendly spelling "nunyara" for the Barngarla (Parnkalla) word for "recovery". Ignoring the English environment, this spelling resulted in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara. While nunyara suits documentary linguistics, NOONyara would be preferred from a revival linguistic perspective.

For linguists, the first stage of any language revival must involve a long period of observation and careful listening while learning, mapping and characterising the specific needs, desires and potentials of an indigenous or minority or culturally endangered community. Only then can one inspire and assist.

That said, there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and first nations' leaders to work more efficiently. For example, it is easier to resurrect basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than sounds and word order.
Revivalists should be realistic and abandon discouraging, counter-productive slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!"

Closely related to contact linguistics, revival linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics by, for instance, weakening the family tree-model, which implies that a language has only one parent.

One day we may invent devices to "inject" a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target sleeping language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

Native tongue title and language rights should be promoted. The government ought to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages of Australia. We must change the linguistic landscape of Whyalla and elsewhere. Signs should be in both English and the local indigenous language. We ought to acknowledge intellectual property of indigenous knowledge including language, music and dance.

Furthermore, in the future the very insights offered by revival linguistics will become part of Aboriginal intellectual property, when Slovenes or Estonians come to Australia to ask indigenous Australians to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

The punchline? One, if your language is endangered, do not allow it to fall asleep. Two, if your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive! Three, if you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue. Four, if your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide.