Ethnolinguistic Minority

This article presents a longue durée genealogy of Soqotrans' representations by successive cohorts of cognitive flâneurssurrogate intellectual envoys of the West sojourning through peripheral communities for social data mining. This genealogical excavation is divided into five historical periods, spanning from antiquity to the present, chronicling Soqotra's role as a crucible for invasive mediations by external actors and its conscription into an exoticizing and primitivizing discursive tradition. The genealogy is framed by the persistent affliction of hermeneutical pestilence, an endemic epistemic bigotry in cross-cultural research that leads to the symbolic dispossession of those represented. This epistemic bigotry is a vestige of centuries-long antagonistic relations between the West and its others, based on presumed relational asymmetry, agential disparity, and racial hierarchy within a global regime of intellectual clientelism framed within a paradigm of mimesis. The article identifies five epistemic practicestraveling theory, cognitive flâneurism, imperialist exoticism, unhinged interpretivism, and a frontier's complexthat engender the epistemic annexation of communities through representational malpractice and interpretive misdemeanors. These practices' negative consequences are exacerbated by the "add and stir" approach being used to "study" Soqotra by a new wave of practitioners of academic tourism. Finally, the article highlights the emergence of a widespread incommensurability in societal aspirations generated by an "abyssal line," signifying the demise of the hegemonic West-centric global ideoscape and the rise of a liminal ideosphere where knowledge production is freed from the reflexive symbolic dispossession of others.

British-Yemenis have received little attention, scholarly or otherwise, in the contemporary context of the UK. Similarly, there are few ethnographically-informed studies focusing on contemporary Liverpool despite the region’s rich histories of migration and its numerous diaspora groups. Addressing these gaps, this thesis presents an ethnographic study of contemporary Liverpool-Yemeni life based on fifteen months of fieldwork during 2017 and 2018. The focus is primarily upon the constructions and performances of everyday Liverpool-Yemeni identities among the post-migration generation who continuously negotiate the diasporic tension of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. Adapting Gerd Baumann’s framework of ‘the multicultural triangle’ to account for dimensions of translocality, Liverpool-Yemenis’ multiple belongings are explored along ethnic, national/local, and religious lines. The key finding of the thesis is that while second-generation Liverpool-Yemenis largely do not mobilise politically as a...

The present paper is concerned with the oral tradition of Al-Mahra, a governorate of Yemen situated in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, where tribes known as Mehris live. Taking an old narrative Mehri poem as a literary artifact, the paper analyses the linguistic specificities as well as the composition techniques presiding over its creation. Narrated by a woman, the study particularly explores the linguistic choices made by the female narrative agent as well as the discursive strategies she develops in this folk poem orally collected from Mehri informants in Qishn, a district of Al-Mahra. The poem, which relates a true story based on tribal feuds that happened in the region about a century ago, clearly reflects prominent aspects of the cultural, traditional, historical and linguistic heritage of South Arabia.

The present paper is concerned with the oral tradition of Al-Mahra, a governorate of Yemen situated in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, where tribes known as Mehris live. Taking an old narrative Mehri poem as a literary artifact, the paper analyses the linguistic specificities as well as the composition techniques presiding over its creation. Narrated by a woman, the study particularly explores the linguistic choices made by the female narrative agent as well as the discursive strategies she develops in this folk poem orally collected from Mehri informants in Qishn, a district of Al-Mahra. The poem, which relates a true story based on tribal feuds that happened in the region about a century ago, clearly reflects prominent aspects of the cultural, traditional, historical and linguistic heritage of South Arabia.

This study investigates ‘Little Europe’, the rural, mountainous Italian region of the quadrilingual Valcanale, bordering Austria and Slovenia. The combined analysis of cultural landscape, linguistic landscape (LL) and symbolic ethnicity provides a new concept to examine multilingual regions. In this once Austrian valley, where German was the official language before WWI, Italian now dominates over minority languages, as exemplified by official signs. However, elements of the area's cultural and linguistic landscape reveal unexpected linguistic practices and visible, locatable artefacts of the Valcanale's ethnolinguistic heritage, which we assume to play a key role in the preservation of symbolic ethnicity.

Together with the other Modern South Arabian languages, Soqotri is related to the most ancient languages spoken in the Arabian peninsula. The study of Soqotri dialects has allowed to confirm or infirm many hypotheses concerning the evolution of the Semitic languages, and it has underlined the originality of Soqotri within the Modern South Arabian set. Moreover, the study of the dialectal situation, and its development are relevant to evaluate the degree of liveliness of the language today. First, I shall present a brief overview of the sociolinguistic situation on the island of Soqotra, and the geographic distribution of the different Soqotri dialects. Then, in the light of data collected during my surveys (1985-2001) on the island, I shall try to describe the process of the erasing of dialectal characteristics, not only in vocabulary, but in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Even though Soqotri people still speak in Soqotri to each other, their language is affected by contacts with Arabic. Only some women and old men, in remote settlements, keep the use of their original dialectal variety. Because this process speeded up during the last years, Soqotri must be considered as an endangered language. The developing strategy of the Soqotra Archipelago needs also to include the language which is the means of passing on to future generations the traditions, arts and technics. It is a matter of urgency to go on collecting more linguistic data concerning Soqotri, to enrich the corpus of traditional literature, to set up technical lexicons, in order to save a part of the Human patrimony in Southern Arabia. M.-Cl. SIMEONE-SENELLE Soqotri Dialectology (Aden, Dec. 2003) 2 Data and acknowledgements The data quoted without author's name have been collected during my surveys on the Soqotri language, on the island of Soqotra (and for few of them on the mainland, in Aden and in the Hadramawt). I want to express my sincere gratitude to the Yemenite authorities, and specially to the Universty of Aden, for having given a very efficient assistance and support to my work, since 1985. All my linguistic research on Soqotri is above all deeply indebted to the Soqotri native speakers, women, men and children, who welcomed me, gave their time and shared their knowledge with kindness and patience. I would like to thank

Exile and Globalization are two postcolonial terms that reflect the reality of the communities and the influence of such terms on the lives of the people inside or outside their communities. Exile and globalization have gained special concern in the poetry of Abdullah Al Baraduni, a Yemeni poet. The article traces the influence of such terms upon the lives of Yemenis through two selected poems of Al Baraduni. Both terms would lead one of them to the other; in exile, the person would be distanced from his culture, language, tradition, religion and separated from his community, as a result, the person will be permeated by the global cultures that do not recognize any cultural or social restrictions on the other aspects of lives. Al Baraduni reflects a live picture of the Yemeni community in particular and the Arab community in general and how the person feels exiled in his/her country. Globalization makes the international communities get smaller and establishes many crossroads in their daily lives. Through these two postcolonial terms and through two poems of Al Baraduni, the article addresses these two concepts in Al Baraduni's poetry and how he depicts their influence upon the community in very attractive image, using brilliantly metaphorical images and interesting expressions that make exile and globalization as unavoidable terms in the lives of Arab people. Al Baraduni explicates the influence of exile and globalization upon the Yemeni lives in particular and the Arab world in general. It is inescapable influence reflected in all aspects of daily lives.

Jack Goody was born near London in 1919. Formative experiences during the Second World War led him to switch from studies of literature to social anthropology. He undertook fieldwork in Northern Ghana during the last decade of British colonial rule and taught anthropology at Cambridge University alongside Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach. Ghana remained important in Goody's work for some years after independence but, particularly after succeeding Fortes as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in 1972, he began to explore long-term historical contrasts between sub-Saharan African societies and those of Europe and Asia. Goody views the Old World as a unified entity since the urban revolution of the Bronze Age; numerous publications have highlighted developments in East Asia and criticised the eurocentric bias of Western historians and social theorists. His many books engage with productive systems, the transmission of property and class inequality in global history; with kinship, marriage and the "domestic domain"; with technologies of communication, especially writing, the transmission of myth and of knowledge generally; and with various realms of consumption, including cuisine and flowers. These fields are not approached in isolation but in their interconnections. Ethnographic insights are essential, but they are just one component of Goody's comparative, world-historical agenda. His best known works include

I shall begin by paying respect to the place Jack Goody accords the 'Near East' in his long argument against historical readings which pit the West against the East in Eurasia. Over the years Goody has written anthropological histories of the longue duree concerning institutions, technologies and substances but never wavered in his central opposition to this dichotomy. His output has been daunting. Yet arguments for fundamental difference flourish anew in institutional economics and history. I shall briefly describe both these ideological revivals and the formidable methodological difficulties that history of such a longue duree entails even for Goody. I shall then turn to what is not spoken about in present debates: recent agrarian history, and legal and administrative history, in the glaring light of the present.

The present paper is concerned with the oral tradition of Al-Mahra, a governorate of Yemen situated in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, where tribes known as Mehris live. Taking an old narrative Mehri poem as a literary artifact, the paper analyses the linguistic specificities as well as the composition techniques presiding over its creation. Narrated by a woman, the study particularly explores the linguistic choices made by the female narrative agent as well as the discursive strategies she develops in this folk poem orally collected from Mehri informants in Qishn, a district of Al-Mahra. The poem, which relates a true story based on tribal feuds that happened in the region about a century ago, clearly reflects prominent aspects of the cultural, traditional, historical and linguistic heritage of South Arabia.

Exile and Globalization are two postcolonial terms that reflect the reality of the communities and the influence of such terms on the lives of the people inside or outside their communities. Exile and globalization have gained special concern in the poetry of Abdullah Al Baraduni, a Yemeni poet. The article traces the influence of such terms upon the lives of Yemenis through two selected poems of Al Baraduni. Both terms would lead one of them to the other; in exile, the person would be distanced from his culture, language, tradition, religion and separated from his community, as a result, the person will be permeated by the global cultures that do not recognize any cultural or social restrictions on the other aspects of lives. Al Baraduni reflects a live picture of the Yemeni community in particular and the Arab community in general and how the person feels exiled in his/her country. Globalization makes the international communities get smaller and establishes many crossroads in their daily lives. Through these two postcolonial terms and through two poems of Al Baraduni, the article addresses these two concepts in Al Baraduni's poetry and how he depicts their influence upon the community in very attractive image, using brilliantly metaphorical images and interesting expressions that make exile and globalization as unavoidable terms in the lives of Arab people. Al Baraduni explicates the influence of exile and globalization upon the Yemeni lives in particular and the Arab world in general. It is inescapable influence reflected in all aspects of daily lives.

This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ experiences of language choice in communication with people of different ages and in different relations to them in their family and ethnolinguistic community. Concepts of power, solidarity and marked and unmarked choices are adapted to examine the students’ strategies of language choice. Interviews with a group of students are used as the main data source. Findings suggest that the mainstream language was set up as the generational solidarity code among young members while the L1 was considered the power code associated with older members of the family and community. These emerging patterns of language choice may result in disruption of everyday in-group language practices among different generations and perpetuate language shift. It is suggested that explicit L1-promotion policies in the community and minority language support in public domains may encourage young people to engage in language management efforts and empower minority languages in the polity.

Authors: Trang Thi Thuy Nguyen & M. Obaidul Hamid

In recent years, the topic of water has become more and more central to landscape and environmental studies. Water is indeed essential to human survival and its management is of critical importance for every human group. This chapter will examine the relationship between the indigenous MSAL-speaking people of Dhofar and water from both an anthropological and a linguistic point of view. The linguistic coding of water sources and traditional strategies for water fetching will be discussed in order to show the profound entanglement between culture and environment. Furthermore, the poetic use of water-related images among different people of Arabia will be examined in order to further investigate related cultural and social aspects.

Drawing on the positioning theory and the conditions for language use, this article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language choice in interactions with their same-ethnicity and majority peers, focusing particularly on their communication motives underlying this choice. Findings suggest that in regulating their language alternation practices across peer groups in different contexts, the students shifted their participation status – from aligning (being alike) to disaligning (being distinct) – to (re)position themselves in relation to their peers. As their desires for alignment or disalignment were either supported or disrupted by their peers, peer attitudes played a critical role in providing opportunities and encouraging minority students’ willingness to use their L1 in school and ethnic community spaces. Implications are suggested for engaging peer support as a resource for maintaining or widening L1 use among young minority people in both of the domains.

Authors: Trang Thi Thuy Nguyen & M. Obaidul Hamid

This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language practices under the influence of external interventions from a language management perspective. It focuses on the ways the students engage with various levels of interventions in their language practices. The study mainly draws on a group of college-age minority students’ experiences and perspectives collected through semistructured interviews. Findings suggest that the students, in making decisions to use their ethnic language and Vietnamese, the mainstream language, responded to interventions by the school and the ethnic community by adapting to the latter's language policy, while reinterpreting to conform to/deviate from interventions by other individuals such as their parents, their teachers, or their peers. In that process of managing their language practices, they reframed their identity in which both maintenance and transformation orientations were active. Implications related to minority language policy and language maintenance are then suggested. (Language management, individual language management, language practices, language choice, language policy, language maintenance, ethnic minority)*

Exile and Globalization are two postcolonial terms that reflect the reality of the communities and the influence of such terms on the lives of the people inside or outside their communities. Exile and globalization have gained special concern in the poetry of Abdullah Al Baraduni, a Yemeni poet. The article traces the influence of such terms upon the lives of Yemenis through two selected poems of Al Baraduni. Both terms would lead one of them to the other; in exile, the person would be distanced from his culture, language, tradition, religion and separated from his community, as a result, the person will be permeated by the global cultures that do not recognize any cultural or social restrictions on the other aspects of lives. Al Baraduni reflects a live picture of the Yemeni community in particular and the Arab community in general and how the person feels exiled in his/her country. Globalization makes the international communities get smaller and establishes many crossroads in their daily lives. Through these two postcolonial terms and through two poems of Al Baraduni, the article addresses these two concepts in Al Baraduni's poetry and how he depicts their influence upon the community in very attractive image, using brilliantly metaphorical images and interesting expressions that make exile and globalization as unavoidable terms in the lives of Arab people. Al Baraduni explicates the influence of exile and globalization upon the Yemeni lives in particular and the Arab world in general. It is inescapable influence reflected in all aspects of daily lives.

Exile and Globalization are two postcolonial terms that reflect the reality of the communities and the influence of such terms on the lives of the people inside or outside their communities. Exile and globalization have gained special concern in the poetry of Abdullah Al Baraduni, a Yemeni poet. The article traces the influence of such terms upon the lives of Yemenis through two selected poems of Al Baraduni. Both terms would lead one of them to the other; in exile, the person would be distanced from his culture, language, tradition, religion and separated from his community, as a result, the person will be permeated by the global cultures that do not recognize any cultural or social restrictions on the other aspects of lives. Al Baraduni reflects a live picture of the Yemeni community in particular and the Arab community in general and how the person feels exiled in his/her country. Globalization makes the international communities get smaller and establishes many crossroads in their daily lives. Through these two postcolonial terms and through two poems of Al Baraduni, the article addresses these two concepts in Al Baraduni's poetry and how he depicts their influence upon the community in very attractive image, using brilliantly metaphorical images and interesting expressions that make exile and globalization as unavoidable terms in the lives of Arab people. Al Baraduni explicates the influence of exile and globalization upon the Yemeni lives in particular and the Arab world in general. It is inescapable influence reflected in all aspects of daily lives.

Together with the other Modern South Arabian languages, Soqotri is related to the most ancient languages spoken in the Arabian peninsula. The study of Soqotri dialects has allowed to confirm or infirm many hypotheses concerning the evolution of the Semitic languages, and it has underlined the originality of Soqotri within the Modern South Arabian set. Moreover, the study of the dialectal situation, and its development are relevant to evaluate the degree of liveliness of the language today. First, I shall present a brief overview of the sociolinguistic situation on the island of Soqotra, and the geographic distribution of the different Soqotri dialects. Then, in the light of data collected during my surveys (1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001) on the island, I shall try to describe the process of the erasing of dialectal characteristics, not only in vocabulary, but in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Even though Soqotri people still speak in Soqotri to each other, their language is affected by contacts with Arabic. Only some women and old men, in remote settlements, keep the use of their original dialectal variety. Because this process speeded up during the last years, Soqotri must be considered as an endangered language. The developing strategy of the Soqotra Archipelago needs also to include the language which is the means of passing on to future generations the traditions, arts and technics.

Deux faits historiques qui ont eu pour théâtre l'île yéménite de Suqu †ra -à savoir la conquête de l'île par des « chrétiens » au IX e siècle et l'exécution de membres de l'élite suqu †rie en 1974 -trouvent aujourd'hui un sens comme élément des joutes poétiques entre insulaires et expatriés suqu †ris dans les pays du Golfe. À travers ces poèmes et le contexte de leur diffusion transnationale, la Diaspora suqu †rie rivalise pour démontrer son aptitude à définir un patrimoine suqu †ri au moment même où des acteurs locaux, nationaux et internationaux font valoir ce même droit par des revendications rivales. Cet article traite de quelques-unes des manières par lesquelles un héritage suqu †ri est revendiqué et ce que cela implique dans la définition d'une identité suqu †rie.

Soqotra Island, the Arab Middle East largest island, is home to 50 000 speakers of Soqoṭri, which is a non-Arabic Semitic pre-literate language. Soqotrans are undergoing a dual incorporation process: The Yemeni government’s consolidation of the islanders’ politico-cultural integration into the national society, and the United Nations-led internationalization of the island’s economy through an environmental conservation and ecotourism development regime. This dual incorporation process has engendered the gradual replacement of the Soqoṭri language through a combination of involuntary and voluntary inducements: The political push of Arabic and the economic pull of English. The article focuses on the state induced dilemmas of language choice through a discussion of the typological spectrum of polarized linguistic allegiances that are engendering a process of communal cultural disaffiliation.