ELAN’s mission is to support research and teaching in linguistic anthropology across European academic institutions and to facilitate community building among linguistic anthropologists and allied scholars who work, study, research, or are otherwise interested in Europe. The network was founded in 2018 by Dr Laura Siragusa and Dr Jenanne K Ferguson at the EASA biennial meeting in Stockholm.
Linguistic anthropology combines insights from sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology and semiotics into a broader study of language-in-use. Common topics within contemporary linguistic anthropology include work on: linguistic relativity, performance and performativity, language ideologies, linguistic landscapes, language standardization, superdiversity, language and political economy, language and gender, language and race, language and colonialism, media circulation, discourse across encounters, and so on. Although linguistic anthropology first emerged as a subdiscipline in North America in the 1970s and 80s, the field has long been in dialogue with European thinkers, from Ferdinand de Saussure to Mikhail Bakhtin. Furthermore, linguistic anthropology shares a lineage with disciplines such as critical discourse analysis and semiotics that have a longer institutional history in many European institutions. ELAN thus creates a unique space to discuss different scholarly traditions on language and society and to elaborate synergies between them. We also welcome social anthropologists hoping to incorporate new approaches to language in their work.
ELAN’s activities are member driven. At present, we coordinate a monthly online seminar in which participants read and discuss a work-in-progress shared by a colleague. All are welcome to participate. The current schedule is available here. We have also hosted online reading groups, meet-the-author book discussions, and teaching workshops. We encourage new ideas for network events. ELAN also publishes a regular newsletter featuring information on linguistic anthropology related events, job openings and publications. You can also follow us on Facebook.
