Language and place are intimately connected: depending on where we are, what the context is and what our aims are, we will adjust our language accordingly. Yet linguistics defines itself by a framework that determines which kind of language is worth investigating. Within that framework, linguistics constructs both language and place in multiple ways: language as a sequestered thing belongs to the field site or the classroom; language as fluid practice is associated with the street; language as reconstruction belongs to migration corridors. What about the places that tend to fall between the cracks? This volume explores language in strange and familiar places, from Europe to Africa, Amazonia, Australia and the Pacific, in order to shed light on them.
Liminality can be made productive for linguistics in two ways: on the one hand, we aim to explore liminal uses of language by explicitly turning the gaze to the familiar, the seemingly banal, and the average, demonstrating that liminality in language practice is common and usual. On the other hand, we intend to highlight the importance of previously marginalized language concepts and theories, focusing on the aspects of linguistics, and specifically, anthropological linguistics, as a science of liminality. By bringing together contributions on language in strange and familiar places, a collection of articles emerges in this volume that will be of interest to a wide audience, reaching beyond linguistics.
At the intersection of language and place there is much to overlook. Found too trivial in its everyday contexts to be of any import for further explorations, and being half forgotten in the dusty corners of our existences, language located at mundane, banal, and sometimes almost invisible places often gets ignored in the ways we study its social and cultural roles. And thus in a vibrant field such as anthropological linguistics, the impact of path-breaking work such asAugé’s (1992) introduction to supermodernity with its plea for an anthropology of proximity remained relatively modest. Rather than turning to our own immediate environments, to the banal and trivial of everyday life, where we could critically examine our assumptions about what “language” (other than its named, fixated, and normed representations) might actually be, we rather tended to focus on other projects. Yet, we can learn from research on the traces language leaves behind in the strange and familiar places everywhere around us that these places are the locations of amazement, play, liminality. They are the sites where language is contingent and magical, and where we can thrive in the liminal realm in-between. In this volume, we set out to explore language in strange and familiar places from a perspective in anthropological linguistics in order to illustrate the close relationship between what we deem to be “under control” and what is surpris
