Abstract:Language variation in the Greater Burma Zone—particularly Burma—remains under-described and under-theorized. Descriptions of language variation are caught up in taking language as a marker of ethnicity. Language variation, including the development of dialects, has come about in part through language contact, but the effects of language cannot be seen through the usual practices of historical or comparative linguistics and their projects to classify languages and ethnicities. Burmese dialect speakers tend to live in more highly multilingual contexts than do the majority of Standard Burmese speakers. Recognizing the unusual features of Tavoyan—especially aspects of its sound system—as the result of language contact sheds light on a history of linguistic, hence social, contact with speakers of Karen languages. This past of contact with Karen speakers and widespread multilingualism are precisely the aspects of social history that historical sources do not capture. Tavoyan epitomizes the situation in countless other speech communities in the Greater Burma Zone, whose pasts are largely absent from history. In its sounds and syntax, the Tavoyan dialect tells us of the social history of the speech community: Tavoyans tend to think of themselves as a local embodiment of the supra-regional Bamā identity. Despite such ties, the Tavoyan community is much like other groups in the Greater Burma Zone who "lack" history in the sense of written records. In such a context, the study of language itself can serve as a proxy for other kinds of history and can reveal something of the social past of a community.
Patrick McCormick· Journal of Burma Studies· 0 citations
Abstract:This essay starts an engagement between recent streams of scholarship in linguistics and the study of Mainland Southeast Asia. Language is crucial to the study of Southeast Asia, although it tends to be neglected as fewer people learn local languages, and earlier philological approaches have fallen out of favor. The study of language can reveal aspects of the past and the present through the sounds, syntax, and vocabularies of the region. Linguistic scholarship often does not communicate in ways that let scholars of other disciplines make use of its insights, despite so much scholarship having great potential to contribute to the study of Southeast Asia, such as the work on contact linguistics and multilingualism. Our focus is on the "Greater Burma Zone," an area of linguistic, cultural, religious, and political contact and interaction that has existed probably since the middle of the first millennium AD. This concept rescues the study of the western Mainland and environs from Burma/Myanmar, which some non-majority groups in the region object to, or whose nationalist discourses seek distance from the modern country and its realities. Our conception also loosens the grip of the present and allows a view of an understudied and undertheorized region of Southeast Asia in greater historical depth. Each essay in this special issue may have a narrow focus on a particular language and place but lead to a wider consideration of the usefulness of language as a way to understand Southeast Asia.
Patrick McCormick· Journal of Burma Studies· 0 citations
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