ERIC Number: EJ1300154
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Jul
Pages: 29
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0167-8507
EISSN: N/A
How Words Make the World: Language Materialities and the Circulation of the Sakha Algys
Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, v40 n4 p433-461 Jul 2021
This article investigates contemporary uses of the Sakha language algys (blessing poems) and reveals the "old" and "new" types of language materiality present in this genre of ritual poetry. Focusing primarily on one example of algys shared online in 2018, I discuss how performing algys has always involved close interconnection between language and the material world and present the changing contexts and forms of algys transmission that highlight both fixity and fluidity in the way speakers conceive of language and materiality. Despite the new mobilities and technologies that build upon the previously established written textual forms of this poetry--and contribute to its continued circulation and transmission--certain elements of traditional algys remains salient for speakers, reinforced by ideologies or ontologies of language that foreground the power of the (spoken) word. This is connected to the production of qualia and the invocation of chronotopes. Thus, while textual forms further enable processes of citationality as they are circulated online; the written words alone do not constitute an algys. Rather, here the importance of embodied, spoken language materiality is at the fore.
Descriptors: Poetry, Folk Culture, Language Variation, Literary Genres, Language Attitudes, Oral Language, Language Maintenance, Turkic Languages, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Russia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A