Ethnolinguistic infusion: Community language socialization and reclamation without proficiency
Sarah Bunin Benor, Ph.D., Director, Jewish Language Project; Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics
This article theorizes the concept ‘ethnolinguistic infusion’ as a language socialization and language management practice. Infusion involves community members incorporating fragments of their group language, in which most members have little or no competence, in the context of a different dominant language, with the potential effect of fostering ideological links among the individual, group, and language. Dr. Benor explains the metaphor, enumerates several characteristics, and offers a categorization of different types of infusion. She contextualizes ethnolinguistic infusion among related constructs in language contact, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, including translanguaging, postvernacularity, and metalinguistic communities, and explain its relationship to ethnolinguistic repertoire. She distinguishes it from out-group-initiated phenomena like crossing and mock language. Dr. Benor demonstrates how ethnolinguistic infusion plays out in her research on American Jewish summer camps. She offers empirical questions for future research, and concludes by arguing for the utility of ethnolinguistic infusion, both for academic analysis and for language activism.