Reflections on Linguistic Cartography: Insights from Language Practices of African Marginals in Australia
2014 Linguistics Seminar Series
Presented by Dr FINEX NDHLOVU, Linguistics UNE
12-1pm Wednesday 23rd July 2014
UNE Oorala Lecture Theatre
All Welcome
This paper uses data on the language practices of African refugees in Australia (hereafter African marginals) to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into linkages between linguistic cartography and the interests of human geography. It considers the extremely diverse linguistic profiles, cultural practices, histories and life journeys of African marginals and their meanings for our understanding of language maps.
The paper argues for a paradigm shift in the discourse and praxis of mapping and interpreting linguistic cartographies of immigrant communities. By recourse to the concepts of cartography, margins and marginality, this paper provides compelling empirical and theoretical points announcing a radical departure from current understandings of marginal communities to new ways of thinking about our engagement with what it means to exist on the fringes of mainstream society. The geographical concepts of margins, marginality and that of linguistic cartography are taken into a new direction focusing on mental and social spaces – those complex and mixed language maps reflected in everyday life experiences of African marginals.
Linguistic cartographies are not conceived here as physical maps but as psycho-social maps imprinted in the hearts and minds and in everyday social transactions of individuals. Such conceptualisation is akin to Doreen Massey's (2003 and 2005) idea of space as an open-ended, unfinished and indeterminate simultaneity and not as a surface with clearly demarcated physical boundaries. In conclusion, a more refined and nuanced conception of the linguistic cartography/human geography interface is suggested – one that takes into account such issues as dialect continua, cultural practices, discursive practices, social relationships, and migration histories – and above all, one that conceives spaces and margins as always under construction because they are products of interrelations.
