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postcolonial realitiesin language, culture, and cognition
outline
• Intro to Cognitive-linguistic perspectives on colonialism
• Shapshots of postcolonial cognitive realities
• Danish and/in the postcolonial perspective
Language as unconscious art
”Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations”. —Edward Sapir
postcolonial blurbs
Cognitive v. Critical
Cognitive - Representational• Everyday language• Folk models• Folk theory• Experience-near• Naïve picture of the world• The insider perspective
Critical - Descriptive• Terminology• Expert models• Expert theories• Experience-distant• Sophisticated picture of the world• Outsider perspective
Exercise
Mexico and Mexicans• The Euro-Spanish folk
model of meaning
Greenland and Greenlanders• The Danish folk model of
meaning
Cultural cognition
and linguistic worldviews
Different languages, different interpretations of the world
• In natural language, meaning consists in human interpretation of the world. It is subjective, it is anthropocentric, it reflects predominant cultural concerns and culture-specific modes of social interaction as much as any objective features of the world ‘as such’. (Wierzbicka 1988:2)
Linguistic worldviews as socialization
• “As a young child is acquiring language, she or he is simultaneously developing a repertoire of social skills and a culturally specific world view. In learning how to use the language(s) of their community, children also learn to think, how to comport themselves, even how to feel in particular situations and how to express (or otherwise manage) those feelings.” (Garrett 2006:605)
Linguistic-conceptual flexibility and change
“All languages are fit to express the concepts of those who use them, and if they should chance not to be, they make them so”(Hall 1966:90).
• Anger, sadness, happiness, …• Mind, heart, soul, …• Colour, black, white, …• Costums, countries, colonies, …• Experience, evidence, sense• Politeness, fairness, honesty, … • Cannibals, slaves, missionaries, …• God, the Devil, ghosts,…
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ENGLISH (COLONIAL) WORLDVIEW
Tanna Island, Vanuatu
The Arctic
Greenland
• A classical Danish school yard riddle
– Question: • Hvad var den største ø i verden før Grønland blev
opdaget?
– Answer:• Grønland!!!
Danish in greenlandicGreenlandic DanishglossGuuti Gud
‘God’juulli jul
‘Christmas’tupak tobak
‘tobacco’eertat ærter
‘peas’grønlangkåli grønlangkål ‘stewed kale’
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GREENLAND (DISCUSSION based on JENSEN)
• Why has Greenland been largely absent from Danish postcolonial discourses?
• What is the linguistic folk view of Greenland and Greenlanders?
The story of Negerhollands
17
• -
CONTEXT for Negerhollands
– 1666 Danish West Indies– 1673-1803 Atlantic slave trade:
85.000 West Africans– 1732 Herrnhut missions– 1733-34 St. John Slave Rebellion– 1916 Danish West Indies -> US
Virgin Islands– 1987 Last speaker of
Negerhollands dies
St. Thomas, 1688
• Households– 66 Dutch – 32 English– 20 Danish– 8 French– 3 German– 3 Swedish– 1 Holstein– 1 Portuguese
Fragments of a rebel song
Adjo my Mester Neeger, e-SamjaDa lob my lo lob, e-SamjaMy nöy kan hau di uit mer, e-SamjaDi Blanco no frey, e-Samja
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Lexical input in Negerhollands
21
Dutch English, FrenchDanish, German, etc.
Twi? Papiamento?
New Worlds, New Concepts
The concept of caníbales in colonial Spanish
Diego Garcia, The Indian Ocean
The sagren concept in Chagossian Creole
• An older man told of how his father died of sagren in 1970 when he was prevented from returning to Diego Garcia. I asked him to define sagren. The man replied: it is not having work, lacking food, drink, education for yourself and your children, and not becoming abitye – being unable to adjust – to life in Mauritius (Singer & Hotch 2010)
Singapore
Singlish
The Singlish discourse particle lah
Her price is too high for me lah Dun worry, he can one lahGo and die lah!Drink lah!
• What’s the story of lah?– What does it mean?– How does it work?
Human social categories: Exercise
• Chaperone (Colonial English)• Conquistador (Colonial Spanish)• Raskol (Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea)• Moko Jumbie (Trinidadian Creole English)
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