Sonia N Da
Biographic Data
| ID | 777675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sonia N Da |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sonia N |
| FAMILY NAME | Da |
| SIGNATURE | DA S N |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7025-1815 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Heritage language, racialization, and (post-)colonialism
This introduction to a double special issue features anti-hegemonic conceptualizations of imagined relationships between heritage and heritage language; race, racism, and racialization; colonialism and coloniality. It considers each set of terms as predominantly shaped by European colonialisms and semiotically configured into metrics of sociolinguistic inequality promulgating and/or resisting white supremacy in its various forms and permutations …
Ritual Language and Police Discretion
The intersection of law enforcement, racial bias, and speech acts has been insightfully explored in the anthropological literature. This chapter examines how the use of ritual language in a police–civilian interaction during a traffic stop, such as when an officer reads civilians their Miranda Rights or asks them to take a sobriety test, functions as an avoidance strategy in response to racist talk. By analyzing speech acts in several video-recor…
To read is to cite
This essay explores the relationship between reading and citing and how journal editors can be involved in encouraging more of both practices in order to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. To explain how adherence to a citational politics will elevate scholarship and ameliorate existing inequalities in the academy, this essay reframes "to read is to cite" as a moral proposition that posits that reading with a purpose is good simp…
Racial Optics of Escalation
Arguments about escalation incite and condone racial violence by denying constitutional rights to critique and protest the government during police-civilian interactions and acts of free assembly. To understand how racial minorities are coerced into giving up these rights to save themselves from being perceived as escalating agents and being at the receiving end of excessive force, one must examine the legacies of slavery and genocide and the rol…
Shadow Conversations and the Citational Practices of a Journal
Drawing on the resonances between Judith T. Irvine's (1996) writings about "shadow conversations" and the broader linguistic anthropological literature on citational practices (Goodman et al. 2014; Nakassis 2013; Rhodes 2020), I explore how the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology has sought to and continues to engage with the politics of inclusion and diversity in the construction of disciplinary knowledge, focusing in particular on publishing in …
Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship
Transliterating Cities
The interdiscursive ethnohistory of outdoor signs and other transliterated graphic artifacts from four urban neighborhoods in Puducherry, Paris, and Montreal is based on linguistic, ethnographic, and archival analyses of disparate sociohistorical contexts in which businesses and organizations promote or devalorize printing in Tamil and Roman scripts. Signs that project the image of a Tamil francophonie depend on structures of addressivity that an…
The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring
This article explores the language practices and language ideologies of maritime technocracy and inquires into the imagined and real gaps involved in sustaining channels of sociable talk aboard cargo ships. Lacking knowledge of the routines, practices, and beliefs impacting seafarers' productivity, shipping industry leaders turn to Christian ministries to identify infrastructural or logistical gaps in the operation of communications media network…
Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics
The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholi…
Une division sociale du travail linguistique
Les politiques nationalistes et internationales exercent des influences diverses sur la valeur économique et le capital social rattachés à des variétés de tamoul, enseignées comme deux langues d'origine différentes dans les écoles des communautés sri-lankaise et indienne et les écoles publiques de langue française et de langue anglaise à Montréal (Québec). En réinterprétant la division locale du travail linguistique en milieu scolaire francophone…
Rewriting the past and reimagining the future
Globally circulating discourses associated with heritage language industries often promote temporally dichotomous views of spoken and written languages that deny coeval status to linguistic minorities. In the multilingual city of Montreal, Quebec, where Sri Lankan refugees work to preserve a classicalist style of Written Tamil and Indian immigrants work to revitalize a modernist style of Spoken Tamil, this division of labor is undermined by elder…
Little India
The Talk of Tamils in Multilingual Montreal
In Montreal, racial, caste, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities are often masked as neutral‐seeming linguistic differences of dialect, register, and accent. These sociolinguistic hierarchies are upheld by intersecting language ideologies, or essentialised beliefs about language use and ethnic identity. Quebec nationalist and multicultural policies endorse language ideologies of linguistic purity and sociolinguistic compartmentalisation to depi…
The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring
This article explores the language practices and language ideologies of maritime technocracy and inquires into the imagined and real gaps involved in sustaining channels of sociable talk aboard cargo ships. Lacking knowledge of the routines, practices, and beliefs impacting seafarers' productivity, shipping industry leaders turn to Christian ministries to identify infrastructural or logistical gaps in the operation of communications media network…
The Talk of Tamils in Multilingual Montreal
In Montreal, racial, caste, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities are often masked as neutral‐seeming linguistic differences of dialect, register, and accent. These sociolinguistic hierarchies are upheld by intersecting language ideologies, or essentialised beliefs about language use and ethnic identity. Quebec nationalist and multicultural policies endorse language ideologies of linguistic purity and sociolinguistic compartmentalisation to depi…
Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics
The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholi…
Shadow Conversations and the Citational Practices of a Journal
Drawing on the resonances between Judith T. Irvine's (1996) writings about "shadow conversations" and the broader linguistic anthropological literature on citational practices (Goodman et al. 2014; Nakassis 2013; Rhodes 2020), I explore how the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology has sought to and continues to engage with the politics of inclusion and diversity in the construction of disciplinary knowledge, focusing in particular on publishing in …
Transliterating Cities
The interdiscursive ethnohistory of outdoor signs and other transliterated graphic artifacts from four urban neighborhoods in Puducherry, Paris, and Montreal is based on linguistic, ethnographic, and archival analyses of disparate sociohistorical contexts in which businesses and organizations promote or devalorize printing in Tamil and Roman scripts. Signs that project the image of a Tamil francophonie depend on structures of addressivity that an…
Rewriting the past and reimagining the future
Globally circulating discourses associated with heritage language industries often promote temporally dichotomous views of spoken and written languages that deny coeval status to linguistic minorities. In the multilingual city of Montreal, Quebec, where Sri Lankan refugees work to preserve a classicalist style of Written Tamil and Indian immigrants work to revitalize a modernist style of Spoken Tamil, this division of labor is undermined by elder…
Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship
Racial Optics of Escalation
Arguments about escalation incite and condone racial violence by denying constitutional rights to critique and protest the government during police-civilian interactions and acts of free assembly. To understand how racial minorities are coerced into giving up these rights to save themselves from being perceived as escalating agents and being at the receiving end of excessive force, one must examine the legacies of slavery and genocide and the rol…
Une division sociale du travail linguistique
Les politiques nationalistes et internationales exercent des influences diverses sur la valeur économique et le capital social rattachés à des variétés de tamoul, enseignées comme deux langues d'origine différentes dans les écoles des communautés sri-lankaise et indienne et les écoles publiques de langue française et de langue anglaise à Montréal (Québec). En réinterprétant la division locale du travail linguistique en milieu scolaire francophone…
The Talk of Tamils in Multilingual Montreal
In Montreal, racial, caste, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities are often masked as neutral‐seeming linguistic differences of dialect, register, and accent. These sociolinguistic hierarchies are upheld by intersecting language ideologies, or essentialised beliefs about language use and ethnic identity. Quebec nationalist and multicultural policies endorse language ideologies of linguistic purity and sociolinguistic compartmentalisation to depi…
Little India
Rewriting the past and reimagining the future
Globally circulating discourses associated with heritage language industries often promote temporally dichotomous views of spoken and written languages that deny coeval status to linguistic minorities. In the multilingual city of Montreal, Quebec, where Sri Lankan refugees work to preserve a classicalist style of Written Tamil and Indian immigrants work to revitalize a modernist style of Spoken Tamil, this division of labor is undermined by elder…
Une division sociale du travail linguistique
Les politiques nationalistes et internationales exercent des influences diverses sur la valeur économique et le capital social rattachés à des variétés de tamoul, enseignées comme deux langues d'origine différentes dans les écoles des communautés sri-lankaise et indienne et les écoles publiques de langue française et de langue anglaise à Montréal (Québec). En réinterprétant la division locale du travail linguistique en milieu scolaire francophone…
Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics
The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholi…
The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring
This article explores the language practices and language ideologies of maritime technocracy and inquires into the imagined and real gaps involved in sustaining channels of sociable talk aboard cargo ships. Lacking knowledge of the routines, practices, and beliefs impacting seafarers' productivity, shipping industry leaders turn to Christian ministries to identify infrastructural or logistical gaps in the operation of communications media network…
Transliterating Cities
The interdiscursive ethnohistory of outdoor signs and other transliterated graphic artifacts from four urban neighborhoods in Puducherry, Paris, and Montreal is based on linguistic, ethnographic, and archival analyses of disparate sociohistorical contexts in which businesses and organizations promote or devalorize printing in Tamil and Roman scripts. Signs that project the image of a Tamil francophonie depend on structures of addressivity that an…
Shadow Conversations and the Citational Practices of a Journal
Drawing on the resonances between Judith T. Irvine's (1996) writings about "shadow conversations" and the broader linguistic anthropological literature on citational practices (Goodman et al. 2014; Nakassis 2013; Rhodes 2020), I explore how the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology has sought to and continues to engage with the politics of inclusion and diversity in the construction of disciplinary knowledge, focusing in particular on publishing in …
Judith T. Irvine and the Social Life of Scholarship
To read is to cite
This essay explores the relationship between reading and citing and how journal editors can be involved in encouraging more of both practices in order to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. To explain how adherence to a citational politics will elevate scholarship and ameliorate existing inequalities in the academy, this essay reframes "to read is to cite" as a moral proposition that posits that reading with a purpose is good simp…
Racial Optics of Escalation
Arguments about escalation incite and condone racial violence by denying constitutional rights to critique and protest the government during police-civilian interactions and acts of free assembly. To understand how racial minorities are coerced into giving up these rights to save themselves from being perceived as escalating agents and being at the receiving end of excessive force, one must examine the legacies of slavery and genocide and the rol…
Ritual Language and Police Discretion
The intersection of law enforcement, racial bias, and speech acts has been insightfully explored in the anthropological literature. This chapter examines how the use of ritual language in a police–civilian interaction during a traffic stop, such as when an officer reads civilians their Miranda Rights or asks them to take a sobriety test, functions as an avoidance strategy in response to racist talk. By analyzing speech acts in several video-recor…
Heritage language, racialization, and (post-)colonialism
This introduction to a double special issue features anti-hegemonic conceptualizations of imagined relationships between heritage and heritage language; race, racism, and racialization; colonialism and coloniality. It considers each set of terms as predominantly shaped by European colonialisms and semiotically configured into metrics of sociolinguistic inequality promulgating and/or resisting white supremacy in its various forms and permutations …
Sociology (9 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · History (4 works)