Resisting Boundedness As A Way To Push Against Essentialism In Linguistics

Recent approaches to language contact/multilingualism question boundedness and emphasize structured heterogeneity when it comes to the linguistic knowledge and practices of multilingual individuals (e.g., Otheguy, Garcia, & Reid 2015; Höder 2012; Namboodiripad 2021). This talk considers how such "bottom-up" approaches to language might not only be useful for linguistic analysis or characterizing individuals' language use, but also as a way of transcending potentially harmful, essentialist constructs such as "native speaker" (Cheng et al. 2021; Bonfiglio 2010). In addition, I discuss some methodological challenges which arise when rejecting such constructs, and potential ways forward.

Savithry Namboodiripad is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the director of the Contact, Cognition, & Change Lab. Her research focuses on how language ideologies and use interact in multilingual contexts to shape patterns of language change, and she uses experimental methods to study contact and variation in flexible constituent order.