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Signed Language Community‐Researcher Collaboration in V iệt N am: Challenging Language Ideologies, Creating Social Change
Author(s) -
Cooper Audrey C.,
Nguyễn Trần Thủy Tiên
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12081
Subject(s) - legitimation , sociology , linguistics , ideology , ethnography , agency (philosophy) , legitimacy , literacy , politics , political science , pedagogy , social science , anthropology , philosophy , law
Examining linguistic practices and description involved in signed language community‐ researcher collaboration in V iệt N am, this article contributes a case supporting analytic efforts to study the ways “people take up literacy for their own purposes” ( B ialostok and W hitman 2006:390). Emerging at the juncture of national speech‐based D eaf education, one signed language–based education project, and D eaf community organizing, these collaborations coalesced in a political climate in which “signs” were construed as a compensatory system for “real” language (Woodward, Nguyễn, and Nguyễn 2004) and as “backward” relative to Vietnamese grammatical structure ( C ooper 2014). Using original ethnographic data, microanalysis of two texts reveals that the ways presenters mobilize stances toward linguistic description and one another accrues legitimacy and authority for D eaf sociolinguistic knowledge and D eaf agency while implicitly challenging prevailing language ideologies and hierarchies. Discussion centers on processes of legitimation of D eaf social voices, language invention/disinvention, interpretation/translation, and the significance of ethnography to the present analysis.