Language Sciences Talks - Dr. Shannon Ward

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Join us at Dodson 302, Irving K. Barber, UBC Point Grey on Thursday, November 21, 2024, from 12:30pm - 1:30pm for the next Language Science Talk featuring Dr. Shannon Ward of Anthropology in the Department of Community, Culture, and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She will be presenting her book "Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau".

This talk is hybrid; Zoom details and venue address are below. 

Location: 

302 Dodson Room, Irving K Barber
University of British Columbia
Point Grey, V6T 1Z1

Click here to RSVP!

Please use the Zoom details below to attend virtually:

Zoom Link: https://ubc.zoom.us/j/65563561336?pwd=Xg2ijKDHbqvqyMhoOqD3TmqM49T4N0.1 
Meeting ID: 655 6356 1336
Passcode: 024716 

Title: Book Talk: Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract:

In Amdo, a region of eastern Tibet incorporated into mainland China, young children are being raised in a time of social change. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Chinese state development policies are catalysing rural to urban migration, consolidating schooling in urban centres, and leading Tibetan farmers and nomads to give up their traditional livelihoods. As a result, children face increasing pressure to adopt the state’s official language of Mandarin.

Amdo Lullaby charts the contrasting language socialization trajectories of rural and urban children from one extended family, who are native speakers of a Tibetan language known locally as “Farmer Talk.” By integrating a fine-grained analysis of everyday conversations and oral history interviews, linguistic anthropologist Shannon M. Ward examines the forms of migration and resulting language contact that contribute to Farmer Talk’s unique grammatical structures, and that shape Amdo Tibetan children’s language choices. This analysis reveals that young children are not passively abandoning their mother tongue for standard Mandarin, but instead are reformatting traditional Amdo Tibetan cultural associations among language, place, and kinship as they build their peer relationships in everyday play.

Speaker bio:

Dr. Shannon Ward is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, in the Department of Community, Culture, and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is trained as a linguistic anthropologist (Ph.D. New York University 2019), and specializes in the study of language acquisition and socialization, multilingualism, language shift, and language documentation. Her research program addresses how children acquire languages alongside cultural practices, especially in situations of social change and language shift. Over the past ten years, she has been investigating the relationships among migration, urbanization, and language shift in multilingual Tibetan families living in western China and North America.

RESEARCH SUMMARY: 
Linguistic Anthropology; language acquisition and socialization; language shift; language endangerment; heritage language education; language documentation; oral history; Tibet and the Himalayas; modern China; South Asian diasporas; migration