Building bridges across the Oxus: language, development, and globalization at the Tajik-Afghan frontier

• Mostowlansky, Till ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Hong Kong

     University of Hong Kong

     RAE de Hong Kong (China)

     
• Localización: International journal of the sociology of language, ISSN 0165-2516, Nº. 247, 2017 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Language and globalization in South and Central Asian spaces, Issue Editors: Brook Bolander and Till Mostowlansky), págs. 49-70
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this article I set out to explore the Tajik-Afghan frontier in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan region as a “contact zone” in which different actors engage in communicative encounters. Against this backdrop I take the construction of bridges across the Tajik-Afghan border river as a point of departure to analyse how these actors envisage processes of globalization. Following Pennycook, I argue that a focus on language as local practice reveals that the Tajik-Afghan frontier is marked by a high degree of different languages, but also by multiple meanings within and beyond these languages. As a result I maintain that highlighting the locality of languages at the Tajik-Afghan frontier provides an opportunity to frame language as tied to specific communicative encounters in semiotized time and space.