Applied Linguistics and Language Minorities

Abstract

Editorial Applied Linguistics and Language Minorities I The United sometimes to India or States is lets itself admit. more interesting than it One does not have to go Dell New Guinea for diversity of language. Hymes does one 'apply' linguistics? More specifically, how does one apply language minorities?' As the articles and interviews in this issue demonstrate, applying linguistics to language minorities involves examining not only the structure of the language being used, but also the ways that language is put to use within a particular speech community. Thus, while this issue includes discussion of Hmong, Lakhota, Spanish, Chicano English, and African American English speakers, the authors go beyond examining these languages and dialects as systems detached from the community in which they are used; each researcher analyzes the necessarily situated use of language. In this way, these scholars 'apply linguistics' to a particular communicative situation in order to understand more implicit linguistic subtleties or underlying social patterns. The analysis of situated language frequently reveals that generalizations of theoretical linguistics fail to do justice to language as it is used in authentic interaction. As Sara Trechter's article on Lakhota gendered clitics makes clear, looking at both the structure of Lakhota as well as its particular communicative setting can greatly expand an understanding of the Lakhota language. In this way, Trechter's work goes beyond the stereotypical assumptions about the use of gendered forms in Native American languages. By applying linguistic analysis to recordings of speech from a variety of settings, this article presents non- typical speech examples which display the inherent creativity behind the use of forms previously considered to be categorically gendered. The variety of ways in which languages are used adds a new level of meaning to the phrase language diversity. As Michael Findlay's article on Hmong students in monolingual classrooms demonstrates, even if everyone in a classroom is speaking English, there is a difference in the kinds of English being spoken. While Hmong students may understand the words the teacher is speaking, they frequently do not share the cultural assumptions behind those words, and as a result, Hmong students may fail to achieve their academic linguistics to How Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 5. No. 2