8 juin 2026, 9h00 à 17h30 │ Salle Margaret Maruani (ancienne Salle de Thèses), Université Paris Cité, Campus Saint-Germain-des-Prés

 

DESCRIPTION DE LA JOURNÉE d'ÉTUDE

The focus of this conference is on langue, langues, langage. As linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and – always, necessarily – translators, we perpetually confront the facts of history, domination, and culture that shape the boundaries of different langues (languages as spoken at our ethnographic field sites) and the mutual comprehensibility of langage (language-in-use; see Calvet & Varela 1999; Boutet 2010; Gal & Irvine 2019; Canut 2021; Leblic & Masquelier 2021; Silverstein 2023; Nair & Masquelier 2025; Masquelier forthcoming; also Sakai 1997). Simultaneously,  to understand these phenomena, we inevitably work with some conception of langue (linguistic structure and systematicity; Saussure 1916) – whether bracketed, de facto, implicit, or explicit (see Silverstein 2003; Nair 2023). The conference marks a moment in our ongoing collective interrogation of these three notions, an interrogation that we have been pursuing over the past year in the context of the Paris Linguistic-Anthropological Circle’s monthly seminar on Language Games, conducted under the aegis of LACITO.

 

Bibliographie

 

Calvet, L-J. and Varela, L. 1999.De l’analogique au digital. À propos de sociologie du langage et/ou sociolinguistique et/ou linguistique. Langage et société 89 : 125-137. Gal, Susan and Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

 Boutet, J. 2010. Le Pouvoir des Mots. Paris : La Dispute.

Canut, Cécile. 2021. Provincialiser la langue – langage et colonialisme. Paris : Editions Amsterdam.

Gal, Susan and Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Leblic, Isabelle & Bertrand Masquelier (eds.). 2021. Énonciation métaphorique et iconicité en contexte. Villejuif: Lacito Publications.

Masquelier, Bertrand. forthcoming. Poétique et Politique des Signes. Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux.

Nair, Urmila. 2023. « Can the Native Know Language? Viewing Linguistic Anthropology through Signs of Difference », L’Homme 1 (245): 113-132.

 Nair, Urmila & Bertrand Masquelier (eds.). Cryptotypes, ou l’anthropologie de l’inévident. L’Homme 2025/2(254).

 Sakai, N. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 Saussure de, Ferdinand, 2002, Ecrits de linguistique générale, Paris, Editions Gallimard.

 Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating ‘Glossando’ on Thin Semiotic Ice”, in Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman, eds, Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology. New York, Berg: 75-105.

Silverstein, Michael. 2023. Language in Culture. Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.