CALLL : Felix AMEKA

Dans le cadre de CALLL, une conférence est prévue pour le jeudi 24 octobre 2024 de 14h00 à 16h00 sur le site Tanneurs. Pour cela, nous avons invité Professeur Felix AMEKA dont la communication est intitulée « Documenting and describing grammars of linguistic practices ».

Résumé :

In their survey of language revitalization or reclamation practices, Perez Baes et. al (2018) note that
for the majority of ethnolinguistic groups engaged in such practices, the main objectives centre around
the teaching and learning of the languages. The focus of these groups include getting more people to
speak the language; incorporating the language into the school system; building capacity of teachers;
producing pedagogical materials and, for some communities, preparing phrase books for
communicative use. If these are the concerns of language users, then we should ask the question what
kinds of records of languages should be preserved that can facilitate the revitalization activities? We
should also ask how should such optimal records of linguistic practices be created? I would argue that
this calls for a reexamination of documentation and archiving practices. Descendants of users of
“sleeping” languages and communities involved in reclamation have challenged the usefulness of
records based on the Boasian trilogy in their attempt to imagine the communicative interactions of
their ancestors. At the same time the desire for pedagogical materials and the use of school contexts
for language learning and knowledge transmission brings with it a standardization bias and the
imposition of literacy practices based on the primacy of writing as “the [old] technology of the
intellect”. I want to advocate that we shift our methodologies and practices to align with desires for
records that focus on communicative uses of languages. This means that the records of linguistic
practices to be preserved should be those that document the communicative ecologies of the language
communities and users (Woodbury 2011; Di Carlo et al. 2021); and their communicative practices
based on culturally defined activity types (Levinson 1979). I will illustrate the approach by exploring
the grammars of use of some cultural activity types such as “counting “, head loading and the linguistic,
physical and cultural activities of cultivating oil palm in some Ghanaian lingua-cultures.