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All sociolinguistic systems, presumably, provide some means of expressing respect (or disrespect); but only some systems have grammaticalized honorifics. This paper compares several languages Javanese, Wolof, and Zulu, plus a glance at ChiBemba with regard to honorific expressions and the social and cultural frameworks relevant thereto.2 The main question to be explored is whether one can identiff any special cultural concomitants of linguistic systems in which the expression of respect is grammaticalized. Javanese "language levels" are a classic and well-described example of a system for the expression of respect. In the sense in which I shall define "grammaticalized honorifics," Javanese provides an apt illustration. Wolof, on the other hand, does not. Of course, Javanese is only one of several Asian languages well known for honorific constructions, while Wolof, spoken in Senegal, comes from another part of the globe. But the presence or absence of honorifics is not an area characteristic of Asian languages as opposed to African languages. As we shall see, Zulu has a system of lexical alternates bearing a certain typological resemblance to the Javanese system. Moreover, many other Bantu languages (such as ChiBemba) also have grammaticalized honorifics, but in the morphology rather than in the lexicon. Focusing on social structure instead of on geographical area, one might hypothesize that grammaticalized honorifics occur where there are royal courts (Wenger 1982) and in societies whose traditions emphasize social rank and precedence. Honorifics would be a linguistic means of expressing conventionalized differences of rank. The languages I shall compare will make it evident, however, that a hypothesis causally linking honorifics with court life or with entrenched class differences cannot be

One avenue for exploring a concept such as 𠇄politeness” is to look at it relationally: to investigate contrasts and co-occurrences, and to situate usages in time and place. La Politesse, the essay by Henri Bergson that serves as stimulus for this panel, offers a set of contrasts among different possible senses of the term—different possible definitions of “politeness”—rather than with forms of impoliteness (although those are mentioned too). Which is “true” politeness, for him, and why? After a brief look at Bergson’s three types, there follows a discussion of his audience and his historical moment. Then his three types are compared with discourse in some other times and places, such as: European royal courts and a rising bourgeoisie, rural communities in Senegal, an encounter in early nineteenth-century America, seventeenth-century Quakers, youth movements in the 1960’s. What these cases show is the importance of social positioning and differences in point of view, such that “politeness” is entangled in a clash of values. At issue is the relationship among politeness as conventions of manners, sincerity and truth, and the possibilities of critique and social change.

In sub-Saharan West Africa during the nineteenth century, European missionaries and others sought to promote print literacy among local populations, especially to enable Africans to read religious works in their own languages. Print technology was to offer economies of scale, by reaching wide audiences. Seen, moreover, as an instrument of modernity, print was also supposed to stabilise and improve African languages, deemed wildly unstable, variable, and phonetically uncouth. The work of “reducing a language to writing” required devising orthographies, whose specific forms were driven by the needs of European-based printing. Materials, production processes, translations, and decision-making circulated between colony and metropole in complex patterns in which European audiences usually mattered more than the Africans who were the literacy projects’ targets. Comparing British and French areas, Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Muslims, and European scripts and those developed independently by...

“Linguistic ideology,” a field of inquiry opened by Michael Silverstein, has become a major topic in semiotically oriented disciplines. This article focuses on an important aspect of ideolo...

How are peoples' ideas about languages, ways of speaking and expressive styles shaped by their social positions and values? How is difference, in language and in social life, made - and unmade? How and why are some differences persuasive as the basis for action, while other differences are ignored or erased? Written by two recognised authorities on language and culture, this book argues that ideological work of all kinds is fundamentally communicative, and that social positions, projects and historical moments influence, and are influenced by, people's ideas about communicative practices. Neither true nor false, ideologies are positioned and partial visions of the world, relying on comparison and perspective; they exploit differences in expressive features - linguistic and otherwise - to construct convincing stereotypes of people, spaces and activities. Using detailed ethnographic, historical and contemporary examples, this outstanding book shows readers how to analyse ideological work semiotically.

In the indigenous sociolinguistic systems of West Africa, an important way of expressing—and creating—social hierarchy in interaction is through intermediaries: third parties, through whom messages are relayed. The forms of mediation vary by region, by the scale of the social hierarchy, and by the ways hierarchy is locally understood. In larger-scale systems where hierarchy is elaborate, the interacting parties include a high-status person, a mediator who ranks lower, and a third person or group—perhaps another dignitary, but potentially anyone. In smaller-scale, more egalitarian societies, the (putative) interactants could include an authoritative spirit represented by a mask, the mask’s bearer, a “translator,” and an audience. In all these systems, mediated interactions may also involve distinctive registers or vocalizations. Meanwhile, the interactional structure and its characteristic ways of speaking offer tropes and resources for expressing politeness in everyday talk. In the traditions connected with precolonial kingdoms and empires, professional praise orators deliver eulogistic performances for their higher-status patrons. This role is understood as transmission—transmitting a message from the past, or from a group, or from another dignitary—more than as creating a composition from whole cloth. The transmitter amplifies and embellishes the message; he or she does not originate it. In addition to their formal public performances, these orators serve as interpreters and intermediaries between their patrons and their patrons’ visitors. Speech to the patron is relayed through the interpreter, even if the original speaker and the patron are in the same room. Social hierarchy is thus expressed as interactional distance. In the Sahel, these social hierarchies involve a division of labor, including communicative labor, in a complex system of ranked castes and orders. The praise orators, as professional experts in the arts of language and communication, are a separate, low-ranking category (known by the French term griot). Some features of griot performance style, and the contrasting—sometimes even disfluent—verbal conduct of high-ranking aristocrats, carry over into speech registers used by persons of any social category in situations evoking hierarchy (petitioning, for example). In indigenous state systems further south, professional orators are not a separate caste, and chiefs are also supposed to have verbal skills, although still using intermediaries. Special honorific registers, such as the esoteric Akan “palace speech,” are used in the chief’s court. Some politeness forms in everyday Akan usage today echo these practices. An example of a small-scale society is the Bedik (Senegal-Guinea border), among whom masked dancers serve as the visible and auditory representation of spirit beings. The mask spirits, whose speech and conduct contrasts with their bearers’ ordinary behavior, require “translators” to relay their messages to addressees. This too is mediated communication, involving a multi-party interactional structure as well as distinctive vocalizations. Linguistic repertoires in the Sahel have long included Arabic, and Islamic learning is another source of high status, coexisting with other traditional sources and sharing some interactional patterns. The European conquest brought European languages to the top of West African linguistic hierarchies, which have remained largely in place since independence.

Maintenir l'ethnographie a l'etude de la communication Le programme propose par Dell Hymes pour l’ethnographie de la communication est illustre dans ce texte par une etude de cas tiree d’une recherche menee en milieu rural wolof au Senegal dans les annees mille neuf cent soixante dix et quatre vingt. Comme le proposait Hymes, l’etude du langage comme action sociale devait aller au-dela de la linguistique. L’etude decrit ainsi les registres linguistiques wolofs ; elle les met en rapport plus largement avec l’organisation des conduites en tant qu’elles sont des pratiques communicationnelles – ceci pour illustrer ce sur quoi porte le terme de communication dans l’expression ethnographie de la communication. Pour ce qui en est du mot d’ethnographie, l’argument est methodologique ; il montre qu’il faut aller au-dela des seuls entretiens. Les entretiens dans le cas etudie n’auraient pas revele comment l’organisation des pratiques linguistiques wolof diverge des descriptions normatives et metapragmatiques des interlocuteurs consultes. De telles descriptions representent des stereotypes culturels, auxquels ils se referent d’une facon ou d’une autre ; mais les stereotypes ne sont pas un compte rendu (account) de la pratique. Une approche ethnographique impliquant un engagement prolonge est necessaire pour decouvrir les principes qui sous-tendent les pratiques reelles et la maniere dont la conduite de quelqu’un, dans des circonstances concretes, est interpretee par ses semblables. Ces arguments sont en accord avec le projet de Hymes ; mais le texte prend aussi en compte certains points problematiques (par exemple la notion de « communaute » chez Hymes), et les raisons pour depasser l’etude « du langage en situation culturelle et sociale » (language in culture), ce qui caracterisait l’epoque de Hymes, et se tourner vers les conceptualisations nouvelles de l’ideologie langagiere.

The systematic study of African languages emerged in the 19th century as a scientific field along with other European projects of information-gathering, religious proselytizing, and establishing an imperial presence on the continent. This paper considers how the conditions – ideological, social, and material – of linguistic research in the early colonial encounter influenced the resulting descriptions of African languages and the delimitation of linguistic boundaries. Frameworks and precedents from those early projects have remained influential in African linguistics, for example in the identification of ‘ethnolinguistic groups,’ in the shape of grammatical descriptions, and in the politics of orthography.

In the years before the conquest of Alexandria by the Arabs in 642, Alexandrian scholars produced compendia, summaries, and commentaries on Galen's writings and other works in the Hippocratic medical tradition. This paper concerns the identities of those Alexandrian commentators-two in particular, whose names are reported in Arabic texts, but about whom little else is known-and the routes by which Galenic medicine was transmitted to other parts of the Mediterranean world after Alexandria's fall. We review debates over the identity of "Akilaos" and "Anqilaos," and argue that "Akilaos" is not merely a scribal duplication, as some have supposed. Instead, we suggest a connection with the city of Aquileia in northern Italy, as a source for the name "Akilaos" and as a route by which Alexandrian medical texts reached northern Italy (where their Latin versions subsequently were associated with a "Ravenna school" of medicine).