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Article published In: Meaning Making in the Periphery:
Edited by Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes and Mike Baynham
[AILA Review 30] 2017
► pp. 120–143

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Challenge from the margins

New uses and meanings of written practices in Wichi

 | CIFMA, Argentina
 | CONICET-CIFMA-UNSAM, Argentina
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 15 January 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00006.bal
Abstract
This paper explores the production of new meanings linked to written practices in the Wichi language in the Impenetrable Chaqueño (Argentina). Through collaborative ethnography examining different collective experiences and points of view, we study changes in writing in connection with changes in the access, distribution and availability of written practices in the Wichi language, and particularly in connection with social processes that position the Wichi people as key agents. Voice and agency are considered in order to explain meaning-making of language practices that are central but at the same time peripheral, and which seem to challenge, from the margins, social relationships between languages and people that hitherto seemed to be immovable.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Languages and/ as territories
  • Writing in Wichi
  • Writing Wichi
  • Writing Wichi on Facebook
  • Final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus of regulations
References (42)
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