JSEALS Special Publication No. 6 StudieS in the Anthropology of lAnguAge in MAinlAnd Southeast ASiA Edited by N. J. Enfield Jack Sidnell Charles H. P. Zuckerman i © 2020 University of Hawai’i Press All rights reserved OPEN ACCESS – Semiannual with periodic special publications E-ISSN: 1836-6821 http://hdl.handle.net/10524/52466 Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. JSEALS publishes fully open access content, which means that all articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. Non-commercial use and distribution in any medium are permitted, provided the author and the journal are properly credited. Cover photo N. J. Enfield. i JournalJSEALS of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Editor-in-Chief Mark Alves (Montgomery College, USA) Managing Editors Nathan Hill (University of London, SOAS, UK) Sigrid Lew (Payap University, Thailand) Paul Sidwell (University of Sydney, Australia) Editorial Advisory Committee Luke BRADLEY (University of Freiburg, Germany) Marc BRUNELLE (University of Ottawa, Canada) Christopher BUTTON (Independent researcher) Kamil DEEN (University of Hawaii, USA) Gerard DIFFLOTH (Cambodia) Rikker DOCKUM (Yale University, USA) San San HNIN TUN (INCALCO, France) Kitima INDRAMBARYA (Kasetsart University, Thailand) Peter JENKS (UC Berkeley, USA) Mathias JENNY (University of Zurich, Switzerland) Daniel KAUFMAN (Queens College, City University of New York & Endangered Language Alliance, USA) James KIRBY (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) Hsiu-chuan LIAO (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) Bradley MCDONNELL (University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA) Alexis MICHAUD (CNRS (Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), France) Marc MIYAKE (The British Museum) David MORTENSEN (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Peter NORQUEST (University of Arizona, USA) Christina Joy PAGE (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada) John D. PHAN (Columbia University, USA) Pittayawat PITTAYAPORN (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) Amara PRASITHRATHSINT (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) Alexander D. SMITH (University of North Texas) Joseph (Deth) THACH (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France) Kenneth VAN BIK (California State University, Fullerton, CA) Seth VITRANO-WILSON (Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand) Alice VITTRANT (Aix- Marseille Université / CNRS-DDL, France) Heather WINSKEL (Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia) The Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society publishes articles on a wide range of linguistic topics of the languages and language families of Southeast Asia and surrounding areas. JSEALS has been hosted by the UH Press since the beginning of 2017. ii CONTENTS Introduction from the Volume Editors v Statement from the JSEALS Editor-in-Chief vii Papers First-Language Instruction Benefits Ethnic Minority Students’ Performance in Vietnam: An Empirical Study VU Thi Thanh Huong 1-10 Shifting Referential Perspective in Vietnamese Speech Interaction Hy V. LUONG and Jack SIDNELL 11-22 Reconstructing Language Contact and Social Change on the Boloven Plateau, Laos Paul SIDWELL 23-41 In Need of Daughters of Good Lineage: Placing Gender in Myanmar’s Buddhist Nationalist Discourse Chu PAING 42-52 Talking with the Ancestors: Register and Repair in the Vietnamese Soul-Calling Ritual (G i H n) The Duong NGUYENọ ồ 53-64 On the Division of Intersubjective Labor in Interaction: A Preliminary Study of Other-Initiated Repair in Vietnamese Conversation Jack SIDNELL, An Thùy TR N Thanh 65-84 Ầ , & Hương Thị VŨ Heavy Sound Light Sound: A Nam Noi Metalinguistic Trope Charles H. P. ZUCKERMAN and N. J. ENFIELD 85-92 iii “Khmer Has No Grammar Rules”: Metapragmatic Commentaries and Linguistic Anxiety in Cambodia Cheryl YIN 93-111 Sociolinguistic Variation in Attitudes to Pronoun Use among Couples in Southern Vietnam - A Statistical Analysis Andrea Hoa PHAM & Andrew Anh PHAM 112-123 The Language of the La Chí People in B n Díu Commune, Xín M n District, Hà Giang Province, Vietnam DUONGả Thu Hang , NGUYEN Thuầ Quynh, & NGUYEN Van Loi 124-138 iv INTRODUCTION FROM THE VOLUME EDITORS To understand the nature of languages we need to understand the social histories and contexts of their speakers. This truism certainly holds in Mainland Southeast Asia, where some 600 languages belonging to five distinct language families differ considerably while also sharing broad structural similarities (e.g., analytic morphology, tone, elaborate systems of person reference, elaborate kin term systems, and more—see Enfield 2020). Together, the region’s combination of diversity and similarity points to a long history of contact and socio-linguistic convergence, which continues into the present. The papers in this special issue were first written for a workshop held at the University of Sydney in August 2019, titled The Anthropology of Language in Mainland Southeast Asia. Of special interest in the workshop was the fact that only a tiny fraction of the area’s languages have national language status. These national languages are far better researched and understood than the vast majority of languages spoken in the area. New research on minority languages (mostly in descriptive and historical linguistics) is beginning to redress this imbalance, but much work remains if we are going to achieve a full picture of human language in mainland Southeast Asia. We adopt the mindset of anthropology, in the broadest sense, as the study of humankind with two core questions: (1) In what ways are humans unique as a species? and (2) In what ways do human groups vary, within our species? We contend that these two questions cannot seriously be addressed without applying methods and theories of numerous disciplines, including linguistics, sociocultural anthropology, geography, demography, history, political science, and communications. Contributions to this special issue are mostly from the broadly-defined discipline of linguistic anthropology, one of anthropology’s subfour fields (see Enfield, Kockelman, and Sidnell 2014). Linguistic anthropology looks at language in sociocultural context, and takes the view that language is not just a set of structures and practices, but also a social and political phenomenon. For example, social variation in the forms and structures of languages is always entangled with social norms, social categories such as those related to dialect or accent (including education, origin, and age), and the social actions that language fulfils in context. Usually working against this variation in linguistic forms and functions, and toward linguistic homogeneity, is the arm of the state. State policies affect language structure and use, for example through standardization and establishment of official statuses for selected languages, or through the accompanying suppression and marginalization—or co-option—of ethnic minority languages. Minority language groups are often defined in contrast to dominant ethnicities who hold state power, as is the case for the majority of non-official languages spoken in mainland Southeast Asia. The papers in this collection explore these and related issues. We hope that this collection takes a step toward opening up two directions for further research on Mainland Southeast Asian languages: first, by examining the area’s languages through the lens of anthropologically-oriented disciplines, with special attention to minority languages, and second, by turning the core interdisciplinary questions of linguistic anthropology—a field whose attention has been mostly focussed on other areas of the world—through the lens of what’s unique about the mainland Southeast Asia language area. Much work on the anthropology of language in the area remains to be done, research that will include work illuminating language’s place in the history of the region and language’s relationship to the core issues of the contemporary world, including kinship, social interaction, music, media and technology, semiotic ideology, political power, patterns of thought, social structure, culture, and inter-group contact, among other topics. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for the 2019 workshop and publication production costs from a Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Workshop Grant (2019) and an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (nr. DP170104607). We thank Naomie Nguyen for her editorial and organizational assistance, and Editor-in-Chief of JSEALS, Mark Alves, for his support, expertise, and timely effort throughout. The papers in this collection benefited enormously from discussion and input from the invited participants, and especially from the six invited discussants, all of whom are prominent linguistic anthropologists and most of whom are not Southeast Asianists: Alessandro Duranti (UCLA), Judith Irvine (U Michigan), Hy Van Luong (U Toronto), Elinor Ochs (UCLA), Alan Rumsey (ANU) and James Slotta (UT Austin). We thank these scholars for their generous input and advice. v References Enfield, N. J. 2020. The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enfield, N. J., Paul Kockelman and Jack Sidnell (eds). 2014. The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Editors N. J. Enfield University of Sydney [email protected] Jack Sidnell University of Toronto [email protected] Charles H. P. Zuckerman University of Sydney [email protected] Conference group photo taken by The