Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies

Among the practices that produce the social identifications that get called “ethnolinguistic,” some practices are spatially situated and engaged with formulations of place. They are also historically contingent, varying over time and relative to the position of the persons doing the identifying. My particular concern in this paper is with how languages have been identified and seen as bounded off from one another. Case materials come from Africa, mainly from the colonial (and immediately precolonial) periods when African languages began to be codified and regimented. Under what circumstances were ways of speaking considered “the same,” and when were they considered to be different? Who was asking these questions, how have they been contested, and who gets to decide? How are these practices distributed in space and time? I explore some ways in which the practices of identifying languages have been affected by closeness and distance – the positioning of speakers and codifiers, within wider regimes of language politics.