Caboclos, Cabocos, Caboquice, and Caboquês: A Sociolinguistic Look at Nostalgia and Authenticity in Urban Identity Markers in Manaus, Brazil
Dr. Marnie K. Watson – Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Missouri State University
Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 12-1 p.m.
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Please contact Dr. Antoinette Barffour with any questions.
Among anthropologists working in the Brazilian Amazon, it was long established that the term “caboclo,” historically referred to rural residents, was a slur best avoided. When Dr. Marnie Watson began research in and around the city of Manaus, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, she was surprised to find that “caboclo” not only was commonly used by residents, but it was often a badge of pride. In this talk, Watson discusses the complexities of the term, and how it became a popular regional local label indicating rural authenticity among urban dwellers in Manaus.
Code-switching in Spoken Indian English: A Case Study of Sociopolitical Talk
Dr. Suneeta Thomas – Assistant Professor of English & Applied Linguistics, Missouri State University
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
12:00-1:00 p.m.
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Please contact Dr. Antoinette Barffour with any questions.
In the case of multilingual India, code-switching (CS) is an everyday practice among speakers who share or know more than one code or language (Verma 1976: 156). Indian English (IE), which is largely a lingua franca in the region among speakers with zero shared languages, has also shown code-switching characteristics (Gargesh and Sharma 2019). Previous code-switching studies on Indian English have largely focused on speakers who code-switch and code-mix to English, the borrowed code, within their first or other regional language (Kachru 1983g, 1986d; Sridhar 1978; Verma 1976). However, in what authentic spoken contexts do Indian speakers of English code switch to an Indian language or dialect? What are the forms, motivations, and functions of these code-switches? Can observations of code-switching in spoken Indian English relate with code-switching observations found in Hindi or other regional languages? To address these questions, the current study explores the genre of sociopolitical talk and qualitatively examines an episode of an Indian English TV talk show employing conversation analysis methodology, and a World Englishes framework to discover the forms, functions, and motivations of CS in an English matrix context. As a part of a larger longitudinal study, the goal of the project is to map how code-switching patterns and forms in spoken Indian English may change over time in sociopolitical talk.
The Missouri State University Linguistics Colloquium Series is sponsored by the Missouri State University Linguistics Program.