Ethnolinguistic Groups Research Articles

Professional Identities of French Lx Economic Immigrants: Perceptions from a Local French-Speaking Community

Communicative expertise in the host society’s dominant language is central to newcomers’ socio-professional integration. To date, SLA research has largely ignored laypeople’s perspectives about Lx communicative expertise, though they are the ultimate judges of real-life interactional success. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that laypeople may base their judgments of Lx speech not only on linguistic criteria, but also on extralinguistic factors such as gender and language background. To document laypeople perspectives, we investigated the professional characteristics attributed to four ethnolinguistic groups of French Lx economic immigrants (Spanish, Chinese, English and Farsi) who were nearing completion of the government-funded French language training program in Quebec City, Canada. We asked L1 naïve listeners (N = 49) to evaluate spontaneous speech excerpts, similar in terms of content and speech qualities, produced by a man and a woman from each target group. After they listened to each audio excerpt, we asked listeners to select the characteristics they associated with that person from a list of the most frequent professional qualities found in job advertisements. Data analysis showed that few Lx users were perceived as having strong communication skills in French. Logistic regression revealed no significant relationships between language group, gender, communicative effectiveness, and professional characteristics. However, there were significant associations between communicative effectiveness with the following characteristics: can work independently, can relate to others, is dynamic, has a sense of initiative, and shows leadership skills.

Estimating the EQ-5D-5L value set for the Philippines

BackgroundThe Philippines has recommended the use of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) in government health technology assessments (HTA). We aimed to develop a value set for the EQ-5D-5L based on health preferences of the healthy general adult population in the Philippines.MethodsHealthy, literate adults were recruited from the Philippine general population with quota targets based on age, sex, administrative region, type of residence, education, income, and ethnolinguistic groups. Each participant’s preference was elicited by completing Composite Time Trade-Off (C-TTO) and Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) tasks. Tasks were computer-assisted using the EuroQol Valuation Technology 2.0. To estimate the value set, we explored 20- and 8-parameter models that either use c-TTO-only data or both c-TTO and DCE (also called hybrid models). Final model choice was guided by principles of monotonicity, out-of-sample likelihood, model fit, and parsimony.ResultsWe recruited 1000 respondents with demographic characteristics that approximate the general population such as 49.6% Female, 82% Roman Catholic, 40% in urban areas, and 55% finished high school. None of the 20-parameter models demonstrated monotonicity (logical worsening of coefficients with increasing severity). From the 8-parameter models, the homoscedastic TTO-only model exhibited the best fit. From this model, mobility and pain/ discomfort had the highest effect on utilities.ConclusionThe selected model for representing the Philippine general population preferences for EQ-5D-5L health states was an 8-parameter homoscedastic TTO-only model. This value set is recommended for use in QALY calculations in support of HTA-informed coverage decisions in the Philippines.

Genomic analysis reveals geography rather than culture as the predominant factor shaping genetic variation in northern Kenyan human populations.

The aim of this study was to characterize the genetic relationships within and among four neighboring ethnolinguistic groups in northern Kenya in light of cultural relationships to understand the extent to which geography and culture shape patterns of genetic variation. We collected DNA and demographic information pertaining to aspects of social identity and heritage from 572 individuals across the Turkana, Samburu, Waso Borana, and Rendille of northern Kenya. We sampled individuals across a total of nine clans from these four groups and, additionally, three territorial sections within the Turkana and successfully genotyped 376 individuals. Here we report that geography predominately shapes genetic variation within and among human groups in northern Kenya. We observed a clinal pattern of genetic variation that mirrors the overall geographic distribution of the individuals we sampled. We also found relatively higher rates of intermarriage between the Rendille and Samburu and evidence of gene flow between them that reflect these higher rates of intermarriage. Among the Turkana, we observed strong recent genetic substructuring based on territorial section affiliation. Within ethnolinguistic groups, we found that Y chromosome haplotypes do not consistently cluster by natal clan affiliation. Finally, we found that sampled populations that are geographically closer have lower genetic differentiation, and that cultural similarity does not predict genetic similarity as a whole across these northern Kenyan populations. Overall, the results from this study highlight the importance of geography, even on a local geographic scale, in shaping observed patterns of genetic variation in human populations.

An ethnoarchaeological study of styles of dental modification in the Karrayyu Oromo and the Issa Somali, Central Ethiopia

ABSTRACT Modified human dentition could help archaeologists interpret past human culture for its potentials of surviving better than bone in archaeological records. It is also an essential source for the study of inter and intra-societal differentiation and the nature of a given society’s belief system. Dental modification in Ethiopia is known to be a cultural norm among the Karrayyu Oromo and Issa Somali ethnicities. Albeit its widespread occurrence in these ethic groups, its scientific exposition is yet to be explored. This ethnoarchaeological study targets the unraveling of the technical styles, procedures, motives and implications of dental modification from a social identity perspective, with special focuses on Karrayyu Oromo and Issa Somali. The study reveals that both adult males and females in Karrayyu and Issa undergo dental modification for aesthetics, rites of passage, and as emblems of identity. It also showed that variations in technical styles currently seen among aforementioned ethno-linguistic groups would also show variations in the archeological records, which will help to highlight the potential in dental archaeology for identity indicators and cultural markers of past human behavior in archeological dental remains. This exploration is important for developing a model that addresses social identity in archeological assemblages based on specific dental modification style.

Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9–13th Centuries. The Indispensable Role of the Arabs, Chinese, Germans, Iranians, Slavs and Turks by Paul Wexler

Reviewed by: Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9–13th Centuries. The Indispensable Role of the Arabs, Chinese, Germans, Iranians, Slavs and Turks by Paul Wexler Tomasz Kamusella Wexler, Paul. Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9–13th Centuries. The Indispensable Role of the Arabs, Chinese, Germans, Iranians, Slavs and Turks. Studies in Arabic Language and Literature, 10. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2021. Notes. References. Bibliography. Glossary. Indexes. Addenda. xvi + 1412 pp. €198.00 (2-volume hardback and e-book). This ground-breaking, encyclopaedic monograph is a fitting crown to interdisciplinary historical sociolinguist Paul Wexler’s research career of over six decades that brought him from the United States to Peru and Bolivia, Israel, Central and Eastern Europe, Nigeria, Japan, and recently to Australia. Traditionally-minded historians and linguists consider Wexler an iconoclast, because he dares to cross disciplinary lines and proposes novel hypotheses on the basis of new evidence and critical re-examinations of earlier finds. Thus far, his main claim to fame has been the theory that Yiddish is a Slavic language (Knaanic, or Judeo-Slavic), that in the late medieval and early modern periods was relexicalized with Germanic words (Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics, Leiden 1987), not unlike academic English, which is a Germanic tongue heavily relexicalized with Romance (that is, French and Latin) words. On this basis, Wexler came to the conclusion that Ivrit (Modern Hebrew) is none other than Yiddish relexicalized with Semitic words. As such, Ivrit is also a Slavic language, but twice removed from the medieval Knaanic’s dialectal (Sorbian) base in Lusatia (or today’s eastern Germany) (see Paul Wexler, The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past, Wiesbaden, 1990). What prevented a calm discussion of Wexler’s theory are the two socio-political norms, developed in Europe, that currently underlie the state and intellectual structures of Western-style modernity. The conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) yielded the model of the confessionally homogenous territorial state, which in turn spawned the nation-state. In Central Europe, especially, following the Great War (1918), the ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state became the standard model of legitimate statehood. Until the Holocaust, most of the world’s Jews lived in this region. Under these normative influences, they began to see themselves as a mono-ethnic people (nation) created and confessionally united by Judaism. The Nazi genocide of Jews imbued this understanding with a racialized (biologizing) undertone which brushed off onto the new secular definition of Jewishness, as adopted in Israel. In addition, the polity is none other than a Central European ethnolinguistic nation-state located in the Middle East, with Ivrit having the function of its national language. Wexler’s theories and findings roam freely across the length and breadth of Eurasia and North Africa and often contradict these recent political norms, [End Page 355] much to various ideologues’ displeasure. The opus magnum under review emerged late during the first decade of the twenty-first century from Wexler’s attempt to plug the gap in scholarship with a sorely missing etymological dictionary of Yiddish (p. 21). He soon realized that such a dictionary had not been attempted earlier because the origins of common Yiddish words push lexicographers toward Slavic and other languages, well beyond German, with which Yiddish is traditionally coupled on cultural and ideological grounds (despite the fact that the Holocaust was planned and carried out by Germans). Early into the project, Wexler realized that he would not be able to do justice to the task because influences, be it on Knaanic, Yiddish or other Jewish languages that then fed into modern Yiddish (and Ivrit), touch upon too many ethnolinguistic and confessional groups strewn across Eurasia (including North Africa) during the past two millennia. Each linguistically-and historiographically-evidenced answer to an etymological issue tended to generate more questions that also needed to be looked into. In turn, his expansive work centres on the discussion and dictionary-style presentation of the origins and relations of almost 300 lexemes (or their groups), termed ‘Afro-Eurasian elements in Yiddish’ (pp...

Cross-ethnic analysis of common gene variants in hemostasis show lopsided representation of global populations in genetic databases

A majority of studies reporting human genetic variants were performed in populations of European ancestry whereas other global populations, and particularly many ethnolinguistic groups in other continents, are heavily underrepresented in these studies. To investigate the extent of this disproportionate representation of global populations concerning variants of significance to thrombosis and hemostasis, 845 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in and around 34 genes associated with thrombosis and hemostasis and included in the commercial Axiom Precision Medicine Research Array (PMRA) were evaluated, using gene frequencies in 3 African (Somali and Luhya in East Africa, and Yoruba in West Africa) and 14 non-African (admixed American, East Asian, European, South Asian, and sub-groups) populations. Among the populations studied, Europeans were observed to be the best represented population by the hemostatic SNPs included in the PMRA. The European population also presented the largest number of common pharmacogenetic and pathogenic hemostatic variants reported in the ClinVar database. The number of such variants decreased the farther the genetic distance a population was from Europeans, with Yoruba and East Asians presenting the least number of clinically significant hemostatic SNPs in ClinVar while also being the two genetically most distinct populations from Europeans among the populations compared. Current study shows the lopsided representation of global populations as regards to hemostatic genetic variants listed in different commercial SNP arrays, such as the PMRA, and reported in genetic databases while also underlining the importance of inclusion of non-European ethnolinguistic populations in genomics studies designed to discover variants of significance to bleeding and thrombotic disorders.

The vitality of Angolar

Abstract This article examines Santomeans’ attitudes toward Angolares, a minority creole-speaking community descendant of maroons on São Tomé Island, and their language. The status of Angolar varies from vigorous to shifting, depending on the source, and according to Maurer (2013), it is unclear whether Angolar is being passed on to new generations. In this article, it is argued that Angolares are shifting toward Portuguese, a process that has already commenced among Santomeans living in the capital. Since prevailing attitudes regarding a language are important for its use and maintenance, this study investigates the transmission of attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes as a possible explanation for the actual shift toward Portuguese in the country. Based on ethnography, analysis of interview excerpts, and questionnaires, an account of the attitudes held by Santomeans is provided, showing how different attitudes toward Angolares are intertwined and point toward rural, creole-speaking Angolares as being the lowest on the social scale of the island. This article demonstrates how attitudes held by Forros, the dominant ethnolinguistic group on São Tomé Island, as well as by Angolares themselves, may negatively impact the maintenance of Angolar Creole.

Fine-Scale Genetic Profile and Admixture History of Two Hmong-Mien-Speaking Miao Tribes from Southwest China Inferred from Genome-Wide Data.

As the dominant indigenous minority in southern China, Hmong-Mien-speaking Miao people were thought to be the descendants of Neolithic Yangtze rice farmers. However, the fine-scale population structure and genetic profile of the Miao populations remain unclear due to the limited Miao samples from southern China and Southeast Asia. We genotyped 19 individuals from the two largest Miao tribes in Guizhou Province (Southwest China) via SNP chips and co-analyzed the data with published modern and ancient East Asians. The Guizhou Miao displayed a closer genomic affinity with present-day and Neolithic to Iron Age southern East Asians (SEAs) than with most northern East Asians (NEAs). The genetic substructure within Miao groups was driven by different levels of genetic interaction with other ethnolinguistic groups: Hunan Miao (Central China) harbored higher proportions of NEA-related ancestry; Guizhou Miao (Southwest China) and Vietnam Miao (mainland Southeast Asia) received additional gene flow mainly from surrounding groups with Tai-Kadai-related ancestry. There were also more complex admixture events in the newly studied groups between Guizhou Xijiang Miao and surrounding populations compared with Guizhou Congjiang Miao. The qpAdm model further demonstrated that the primary ancestry of Hunan Miao, Guizhou Miao studied here, and Vietnam Miao derived from ancient SEA-related ancestry (represented by coastal early Neolithic SEA Liangdao2), with the additional gene flow from ancient NEA-related ancestry (represented by spatiotemporally inland Yellow River farmers), with slightly different proportions. Our genomic evidence reveals the complex and distinct demographic history of different Miao tribes.

Extralinguistic features of the development of modern English in New Zealand

The purpose of the study is to determine the trends of linguistic development in the territory of the New Zealand region within the framework of the redistribution of ethnosociogroups, as well as to assess the linguistic prospects of the southern and northern island parts in a comparative analysis. The article reveals the main extralinguistic factors influencing the linguistic space of the south and north of New Zealand, which provoke evolutionary linguistic shifts with the formation of new variations of the language. The most important comparative characteristics of ethnolinguistic groups are identified and described on the basis of a statistical assessment of their redistribution over the past few years, taking into account covid realities. The subject of the study is the New Zealand language space at the present stage of development. The scientific novelty of the study is to present the current language situation in New Zealand based on a comparison of the changing ethnic and sociolinguistic conjuncture of the southern and northern islands. Official statistical data on the New Zealand region, as well as a socio-ethnic atlas with forecasting up to and including 2038, were used as materials. The study provides a justification for the linguistic shift in the territory of New Zealand, and also presents a summary table of comparative data on the ethnic composition and linguistic groups of the southern and northern regions with an assessment of possible scenarios for future language development in the context of ethnosociolinguistics.

The Matrix of Ethnic Federalism in Ethiopia in Protecting Internal Minority Rights: Examining Perceptions in Oromia Regional State

This study aimed to analyze the matrix of ethnic federalism in protecting internal minority rights in Ethiopia via Goba and Robe towns as a case study at Oromia regional state. The post-1990s political formula of Ethiopia was designed considering all ethnolinguistic groups as inhabitants of their own defined territory. It seems that in the architecture of the constitution, there will be ethnic homogeneous states. But, the reality in the ground has shown that none of the units is purely homogenous due to economic migration, (re)settlement, villagization programs, and freedom of movement granted in the constitution. A mixed approach with a cross-sectional survey was used. Questionnaires, interviewees, focused group discussion, and document analyses were used as a primary data. Snowball and purposive sampling were used to select survey respondents. In both town administrations, a kin situation exists; there are constitutional and other legal frameworks gaps, inducing mistrust and tension between minorities and dominant groups, systematic segregation, denying fair and effective representation at levels of government. Therefore, adequately recognizing and legalizing the rights of internal minorities should be the prime duty of the region, establishing particular institutions mandated to protect internal minorities, and government should work on fostering people-to-people integration to reverse the looming mistrust.

The genetic landscape of South African males: A Y-STR perspective

The profiles of 2188 SA males obtained with 10 Y-STR highly informative markers were analyzed for their information content for forensic and population studies. The samples comprised a total of 16 populations, represented by Bantu-speaking groups, KhoeSan descendants, out-of-Africa descendants and admixed groups. The country hosts approximately 58 million inhabitants, 80% native and the remaining with ancestry external to Africa and admixed. The forensic parameters indicated high levels of diversity in all populations and lower in the Nguni, who showed elevated number of repeated haplotypes, thus displaying the lowest DC values. Population comparative analysis with MDS showed concordant results with the historical record. Non-hierarchical and hierarchical AMOVA over ethnolinguistic groups and administrative divisions showed significant variation in all cases, with higher differences due to ethnicity than to geopolitical subdivision. The haplotypes were further analyzed by hierarchical kmeans clustering. The identified clusters differed in their relative contribution to the gene pool of the 16 analyzed populations. Geostatistical analysis of the clusters evidenced areas of higher density for some clusters in correspondence with language, while other clusters were more homogeneously distributed. In addition, a few rare microvariants were identified with very restricted geographic occurrence. The results emphasize the forensic value of a highly informative set of markers in a country with high genetic diversity and complex population history.

African Genomic Medicine Portal: A Web Portal for Biomedical Applications.

Genomics data are currently being produced at unprecedented rates, resulting in increased knowledge discovery and submission to public data repositories. Despite these advances, genomic information on African-ancestry populations remains significantly low compared with European- and Asian-ancestry populations. This information is typically segmented across several different biomedical data repositories, which often lack sufficient fine-grained structure and annotation to account for the diversity of African populations, leading to many challenges related to the retrieval, representation and findability of such information. To overcome these challenges, we developed the African Genomic Medicine Portal (AGMP), a database that contains metadata on genomic medicine studies conducted on African-ancestry populations. The metadata is curated from two public databases related to genomic medicine, PharmGKB and DisGeNET. The metadata retrieved from these source databases were limited to genomic variants that were associated with disease aetiology or treatment in the context of African-ancestry populations. Over 2000 variants relevant to populations of African ancestry were retrieved. Subsequently, domain experts curated and annotated additional information associated with the studies that reported the variants, including geographical origin, ethnolinguistic group, level of association significance and other relevant study information, such as study design and sample size, where available. The AGMP functions as a dedicated resource through which to access African-specific information on genomics as applied to health research, through querying variants, genes, diseases and drugs. The portal and its corresponding technical documentation, implementation code and content are publicly available.

Weaponizing Language: Linguistic Vectors of Ethnic Oppression

AbstractAs part of a larger project studying language conflict, this paper documents ways in which the oppression of language use on the part of a dominant language/ethnic group is instrumentalized as a tool to inflict gratuitous societal pain and punishment upon nondominant ethnolinguistic groups and their individual members. Our arguments will be illustrated primarily by three contemporary cases: (1) the Uyghur minority in the PRC, (2) the Kurdish minority in Turkey, and (3) the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. This article also seeks to provide an example of ways in which important empirical questions in the political science/international relations literature might be more fully addressed with the help of linguistics, which is a focus of our ongoing language conflict project.

Bacterial Communities in Lanna Phak-Gard-Dong (Pickled Mustard Green) from Three Different Ethnolinguistic Groups in Northern Thailand.

The Lanna region, the main part of northern Thailand, is a place of ethnic diversity. In this study, we investigated phak-gard-dong (PGD), or pickled mustard green (Brassica juncea L. Czern.), for its beneficial bacteria content and to analyse the variations in bacterial compositions among the PGD of three different ethnolinguistic groups, the Karen, Lawa, and Shan. DNA was extracted from the PGD pickled brine, and 16S rRNA gene Illumina sequencing was performed. Metagenomic data were analysed and the results demonstrated that the dominant bacterial species were Weissella (54.2%, 65.0%, and 10.0%) and Lactobacillus (17.5%, 5.6%, and 79.1%) in the PGD of the Karen, Lawa, and Shan, respectively. Pediococcus was found only in the PGD of the Karen and Shan. Bacterial communities in PGD of the Lawa were distinctive from the other ethnic groups, both in the alpha and beta diversity, as well as the predicted functions of the bacterial communities. In addition, overall network analysis results were correlated to bacterial proportions in every ethnic PGD. We suggest that all ethnic PGDs have the potential to be a good source of beneficial bacteria, warranting its conservation and further development into health food products.

Beliefs on the causes of birth defects as perceived by mothers of children with birth defects in a tertiary care hospital in the Philippines.

There are several ethnolinguistic groups or ethnicities in the Philippines, and genetic counselors may encounter clients with diverse beliefs, inscribed by their culture, about health conditions. Thus, clients may attribute the cause of a birth defect to a socio-culturally based health belief. The present study aimed to explore the beliefs on the causes of birth defects held by mothers of children diagnosed to have birth defects. The study was conducted as a qualitative descriptive pilot study in Baguio General Hospital and Medical Health Center (BGHMC), a birth defect surveillance site tertiary care hospital in the Philippines. Participants were mothers of children diagnosed to have birth defects at the BGHMC. In-depth interviews were used to collect data from 18 participants aged 18-46years. Birth defect conditions of the participants' children included congenital heart defect, cleft lip and palate, hydrocephalus, imperforate anus, hypospadias, and microcephaly. When the participants were asked about their views on the causes of birth defects in their children, they perceived that genetics or heredity, stress, a fall during pregnancy, maternal sickness, teenage pregnancy, thin uterine lining, twin-twin transfusion syndrome, and God's will have caused it. Findings also showed that mothers of children with the birth defect have both biomedically and socio-culturally based health beliefs. Awareness of these health belief systems will help the genetic counselor provide appropriate genetics education and psychosocial support to their clients.

Language Policy and Language Situation in Dynamics: Pomaks of Northern Greece

The paper comes up with a synchronous-diachronic analysis of the linguistic situation in one of the isolated cultural and linguistic enclaves of the Balkan Peninsula: the district of Xanthi in the region of Thrace in Northern Greece, on the Bulgarian-Greek border. Here, in a remote mountainous area, live Muslim Slavs, ethnic Bulgarians, representing a minority ethnolinguistic and cultural-confessional group that has existed for a long time in a foreign language and other religious environment among Orthodox Greeks. In the historical past, this community formed a single whole with the Muslim Bulgarians who now live within the boundaries of the Republic of Bulgaria. This minority is the object of the language and cultural policy of three states: Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. Note that the Greek authorities for a long time 1920s–1990s (excluding the period of Bulgarian rule in 1941–1944) pursued a policy of de-Bulgarization of this population. As a result, today the degree of its Turkicization (due to the influence of Islam, the study of the Koran in Turkish and the active position of Turkey) is quite high. It should be noted that the Bulgarian-speaking communities in Northern Greece are not the object of the Bulgarian language policy, which is carried out by disinterested officials and politicians who ignore the opinions and assessments of Bulgarian dialectologists and sociolinguists. The study focuses on ethnonyms and exonyms as important factors in the formation of the Pomaks' linguistic identity: the self-name of the speakers of these dialects is Pomaks, Ahryans. The ethnonym Pomaks was introduced and continues to be actively used to discuss the new Greek policy towards the Bulgarian-speaking population of Greece; the linguonym Pomaks was also formed from it. Earlier in Greece, the term Slavophones ('speakers of the Slavic language') was used, cf. new pomakophones. In the 90s of the 20th century and early 21th century a number of scientists (V. Friedman, A. D. Dulichenko, A. Ioannidou, K. Voss, M. Nomati, M. Henzelmann, K. Steinke) considered Pomak to be one of the literary microlanguages of the southern Slavia, noting that it is characterized by the diversity of the script used and poor functionality. There were appropriate grounds for this (codification, publication of dictionaries and grammar, textbooks, etc.). But the impetus for the “creation” of the literary language of the Pomaks was the political task of the country's leadership. At present, Pomak (Southern Rodhopian, Bulgarian) dialects in Greece have an unwritten character (they are used exclusively for oral communication in the family and village, microsociety). Despite the presence of certain signs of the formation of the literary language among the Pomaks, the modern language situation and language policy do not contribute to its existence and functioning. We rely on both published sources and our own field materials collected during two ethnolinguistic expeditions carried out in 2018 and 2019, as well as online in 2021, and will try to present preliminary results of the study of the current state of the language and language policy. Let us note the importance of modern interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the phenomenon of intercultural communication, which are based on the dialogue of languages and cultures, and which necessitated the description of new linguistic conditions and consideration of the importance of not so much Greek as Turkish as a means of intra — and interethnic communication in the specific genre.

Assessing Key Factors in the Making Afan Oromo One of the Federal Working Languages

In mosaic countries, choice of a language as lingua franka needs careful scrutiny; since language has more meaning than as a mare communication means. It is related with identity, cultural, political, social, and economic affairs of speakers. In Ethiopia, there are nearly 80 ethno-linguistic groups speaking their respective languages. In such scenario choosing one or more language as federal working language is difficult task. Ethiopia doesn’t have a single policy document yet. However, the country has legally recognized only one language (Amharic) as federal working language. The choice of federal working language in Ethiopia seems arbitrary and also deviates from working language choice in multilingual states. The research is based on integrative literature review that synthesizes and critiques of secondary data. Objective principles for choice of working language; experiences three multilingual federal states having similarity with our country were reviewed. Based on these principles as well as experience countries, the finding claims Afan Oromo is not given the place it deserves in Ethiopia; which in fact is major causes for instabilities in the country. The article recommends Ethiopian government should make Afan Oromo additional federal working language as a part of responding to demands of Oromo people as well as a panacea for instabilities. Moreover, making it additional federal working language is reaching more population in the HoA which facilitate social integration. Keywords: Afan Oromo, Federal Working Language, Horn of Africa, Language Policy DOI: 10.7176/IAGS/93-01 Publication date: January 31 st 2022

Challenges in Ethiopia’s Post-1991 Ethnic Federalism Entwined with Ethnic-based Political Parties

For about two and a half decades (1991-2018) it was propagated that Ethiopia’s ethno-linguistic federalism was primarily meant to unify the state and build the nation. However, competing perspectives on whether ethnic-based federalism would preserve unity in diversity in the country as a whole and in regional states in particular have proliferated. This article examines the outcome of post-1995 Ethiopian federalism in ethnic conflict management. It focuses on why Ethiopia has remained deeply divided and prone to ethno-cultural conflicts despite the ethno-linguistic federal political system, which was adopted as a mechanism for building unity in diversity in the context of peaceful coexistence among various ethno-linguistic groups. Although ethnic-federalism alone may not exacerbate ethnic conflicts, ethnic-federalism entwined with the existence of ethnic-based political parties and the rapid proliferation of narrow ethno-nationalist politics constitute major impediments to peaceful co-existence among the country's ethnic groups. Furthermore, the land ownership questions raised by various ethno-linguistic political elites are among the causes of violent ethnic conflicts in contemporary Ethiopia. Mistreatment of ethnic minorities in all regional states is also a source of ethnic conflict. I argue that the current government at the federal and regional levels should work hard to ensure that identity-based politics will incrementally dissolve like salt in water.

Mountain Turtles and Giant Crabs: Cosmological Implications and Supernatural Understandings of Rare Creatures on an Eastern Indonesian Island

ABSTRACT On the eastern Indonesian island of Flores, the Lio and neighboring ethno-linguistic groups report rare encounters with freshwater turtles and giant land crabs. Though neither species has yet to be scientifically documented for Flores, local descriptions of these animals closely correspond to Cuora amboinensis, a species of box turtle found elsewhere in eastern Indonesia, and the Coconut crab, Birgus latro, the world’s largest terrestrial arthropod. At the same time, Lio and other Florenese attribute supernatural powers to the creatures and identify both as embodiments of forest spirits. This paper shows how this dual ontological status is explicable by reference to features of Florenese cosmology and folk ecology, particularly the value islanders place on the opposition of “land” and “sea.” According to academic zoology, the turtles and crabs are both terrestrial creatures. But because of their extreme rarity, and because Florenese are normally familiar only with marine turtles and marine and small land or freshwater crabs, they identify all turtles and crabs as, essentially, creatures of the sea. So on those rare occasions when someone sees a freshwater turtle or Coconut crab, typically far inland and often in mountain forests, their phenomenal occurrence is experienced as a radical and frightening contravention of the fundamental cosmological opposition of sea and land. Also facilitated by the species’ rarity – locally understood as a quality of being normally invisible or hidden – encounters with both creatures, considered anomalous within the framework of folk zoogeography, are further experienced as dangerous manifestations of supernatural powers identical to those possessed by normally invisible forest spirits. Even so, there is one context in which the rare turtles and crabs are beneficial to humans – just as are the forest spirits themselves, a nice illustration of how otherwise negative supernatural power can contextually be turned to human use. The case thus raises questions concerning the ubiquitous anthropological trichotomy of “animal,” “human,” and “spirit” while demonstrating how people can conceive of creatures of particular sorts as participating in both categories simultaneously – indeed, in ways comparable to aspects of Christian theology.

When Language Contact Says Nothing: A Contrastive Analysis of Queísta Structures in Two Varieties of Peninsular Spanish

Abstract Based on the existence of some structural conflict between Spanish and Catalan in certain points of the syntax, this study tests the hypothesis about the influence of the latter on the distribution of queísmo uses (‘Me alegro que vengas’ [‘I’m glad you come’]) in the Spanish spoken in an eastern peninsular variety in contact with Catalan. Using the tools of comparative sociolinguistics, and the analysis of three corpora of contemporary Spanish, the study exhaustively examines the conditioning of this variable. The starting hypothesis is that the influence of the contact can be inferred from the comparison between different magnitudes derived from a multivariable statistical analysis. In addition to several linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors previously analysed in the literature, we also take into account other factor groups that may be particularly informative about that potential influence. Thus, from a structural point of view, we consider the contrast between: a) conjunctive queísmo in verbal structures, in which the structural conflict with Spanish is more evident (‘me acuerdo (de) que vino con su mujer/em recorde Ø que va vindre amb la seua dona’ [‘I remember that he came with his wife’]; and b) pronominal queísmo in relative sentences, in which the coincidence between both languages is greater (‘el día (en) que nos conocimos / el día (en) què ens vam conéixer’). From an extralinguistic perspective, the incidence of two additional factors is also examined: a) the speech community (without contact (Madrid/Alcalá) vs. in contact (Castellón), and b) the main language of the speakers (Spanish/Catalan-Valencian). The results of several mixed-effect regression analyses performed do not support the hypothesis of contact. The distributional differences between the above-mentioned groups are minimal, and in no case significant. On the other hand, the variation is basically affected by the same structural and non-structural predictors, regardless of the speech community or the ethnolinguistic group examined. Even the few divergences that are observed point in a direction contrary to that expected by the contact hypothesis. The study concludes with some potential explanations about these results and the contrast with other cases of syntactic convergence with Catalan.