Negotiating Bain While Learning Ilocano in the Field

"Tisay! Ania ti Madamag?": Negotiating Bain While Learning Ilocano in the Field

This session, led by Dr. Dana Osborne, who spent 18 months in I locos Sur, Philippines for anthropological fieldwork learning llocano, will reflect on the inevitability of persistent embarrassment experienced while learning a language in the field, and the strategies used to help negotiate these complicated feelings. Through a series of vignettes, Dr. O will talk students through some key moments of bain (deep shame/embarrassment) experienced while completing doctoral dissertation work in a small community in I locos Sur where the majority language is llocano, which is used for virtually every social interaction, except for key elements of school, work, interactions with administrative bodies, and outsiders who do not speak I locano.

By the end of the session, students will reflect on their own experiences learning and speaking llocano (or any other language they are learning as a new or heritage learner) and have some tools to be able to think through and negotiate what often feels like deep physical, psychological, and spiritual assaults to "face" (in Goffman's sense) when faced with the spectre of producing a language in which they do not yet have full command.

The central aims of Dr. Dana Osborne's academic research is to focus on understanding the ways in which speakers in the Philippines have grappled with language contact and change in light of 450 years of colonial and imperial occupation, with a special focus on the last century.

Focusing on historical as well as contemporary analyses of language, her research traces an archaeology of largescale discourses forged in the crucible of the burgeoning Philippine nation at the turn of the 20th century, critical moves by the newly sovereign state at mid-century, and contemporary orientations to language in everyday practices across the archipelago.

With a focus on multilingual speakers in the provincial minority-language region of llocandia in the northernmost part of the big island of Luzon, her research sheds light onto the ways in which processes of coloniality and imperialism can be understood in new ways through the lens of language.