The Department of Anthropology is proud to present
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia series

"Decentering the Colonial Native Speaker"
By Anna Babel, Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics, The Ohio State University
Joined by Devin Grammon, University of Oregon

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/phut9Aeu6n2MdnLk6
Light refreshments provided

ABOUT THE LECTURE
In this talk, we contrast Eurocentric definitions of the “native speaker” with those of speakers of Quechua, an indigenous language of the Andes that is highly heteroglossic and typically centered on orality rather than written language. The native speaker construct has been thoroughly critiqued in fields such as second language acquisition and language policy and planning by demonstrating the ways in which this concept is racialized, reductionist, and used to validate the hegemony of powerful ethnic and political interests (e.g. Davies, 2003; Paikeday, 1985; Slavkov et al., 2022). Nonetheless, these critiques have tended to rely on implicit assumptions that connect an idealized native speaker to proficiency in a standardized national language via standard language ideologies (Bonfiglio, 2010; Bylin & Tingsell, 2022; Hackert, 2012; Lippi-Green, 1994). Recent critiques in linguistics have advanced the discussion of native speakerism by highlighting the construct’s links to colonialism and essentializing discourses, and advocating for a more specific, and less reductionist approach to the concept (e.g. Chen et al 2021; Birkeland et al forthcoming; Grammon & Babel 2021). Our research builds on these ideas and moves to decenter the colonial native speaker by investigating speakerhood beyond the western European nationalist tradition. We consider data from Peru and Bolivia to explore the concept of the native speaker in Quechua. In our data, drawn from recent interviews as well as long-term ethnographic fieldwork, family connections, place of birth, and language use play an important role in defining a “[native] speaker of Quechua.” Perhaps most strikingly, a Quechua speaker is centrally defined as bilingual or multilingual, and monolingual speakers are characterized as lacking something, objects of pity, and ultimately not fully competent human beings. We argue that it is important to consider - indeed, to center - approaches to speakerhood in multilingual, transnational indigenous communities that offer a contrast to discourses centered on language purism, nationalism and standard language ideologies. These differences point to important critiques that have so far been implicit in the literature on native speakerism. The ways that Quechua speakers define speakerhood lead us to question the naturalized linkages between idealized notions of racial and cultural purity, literacy, language standardization, and a modern national identity that are implicit in much of the academic literature in our fields.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Anna Babel is a sociolinguist and a linguistic anthropologist. Her research focuses on the relationship between language and social categories, particularly in settings of language contact. She has carried out long-term research in the Santa Cruz valleys of Bolivia, the setting of her ethnography, Between the Andes and Amazon. Her most recent work considers how we become aware of different ways of speaking, and conversely how our knowledge and beliefs about language influence the way that we speak. In addition to these areas of expertise, she teaches on the role of language in the construction of US and Latino/a/x identities.