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Corsican bilingual schools serve language revitalization functions for primarily French-dominant children. In this presentation, I describe the teaching of a traditional poetic joust called Chjam'è rispondi (Call and Reponse) in two of these schools. I argue that the practices of collective composition and exchange of written and oral texts that I documented mediate tensions around criteria of linguistic authority and authenticity. Tracing exchanges over the course of a semester, I show how children are apprenticed to a form of socially recognized and valued linguistic expertise with a high affective and collective, cultural content. At the same time, I argue that these practices both presuppose traditional and create new forms of community around the use of Corsican what it means to be a "speaker" of a minority language.
Dr. Alexandra Jaffe is a linguistic anthropologist whose primary fieldsite is the French island of Corsica, where she has studied language shift and revitalization since 1988. She has focused on issues of ideology and identity in bilingual education, minority language literacy and literature, the Corsican media, and in language policy. In addition to her work on bilingualism, multilingualism and minority languages, she has written quite widely on the sociolinguistics of orthographic choice and on the politics of nonstandard orthographies in sociolinguistic transcripts and other texts. She has co-edited a forthcoming book on the sociolinguistics of orthography with Mark Sebba and Jannis Androutsopoulos. Jaffe also works on language in the media, with a particular focus on the representation of sociolinguistic variation in documentaries, mainstream broadcasts and online fora. Both in media and educational contexts, she has made use of the concept of stance to explore how social meanings accrue to ways of speaking and their representations through the active engagement of both producers and interpreters of language and other semiotic resources. She is the incoming editor-in-chief of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.