Sonia N. Das

Ph.D. 2008, M.A. 2003, Michigan; B.S. and B.A. with Honors 1999, Stanford

Linguistic Anthropology; Semiotics; Language, Technology, and Inequality; Language Politics and Nationalism; Heritage Language and Multilingualism; Colonial Linguistics; Migration; Seafaring; Law Enforcement; Tamil Diaspora; Francophonie; North America

Sonia Das is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at New York University and Co-Editor-In-Chief of the flagship Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. A specialist on language, technology, and inequality in North America, South Asia, and the francophone world, she has conducted fieldwork in Québec and the United States and archival research on colonial French India and French Guiana. She is the author of Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts (Oxford 2016), a study of the migration and diasporic experiences of Tamil-speaking Indians and Sri Lankans navigating through the use of print media technologies language laws and political rivalries between French and English regimes since the 1840s, and recipient of Honorable Mention for the Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Her work also examines how the technocratic and pastoral co-management of commercial seafaring contributes to a language ideology of crisis in sociability ostensibly caused by changing human-machine relations in late capitalism. Currently, she is researching how the big data of body-worn camera and predictive policing perpetuates racial inequities in U.S. law enforcement and the juridical-legal system by reinforcing Enlightenment-era language ideologies about the presumed primacy of sensory evidence and transparency of “linguistic triggers,” read as the intention to inflict harm during face-to-face interactions between police and suspects.

She is a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation’s Programs in Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Sciences, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the University of Michigan Center for South Asian Studies’ Foreign Language and Area Studies, and the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. She was a recent Visiting Professor in South Asian Studies and Linguistics at the Écoles des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).

Faculty Senator, T-FSC (Tenured/Tenure Track Faculty Senators Council)

Department of Linguistics

SouthAsia@NYU

Co-Editor-In-Chief, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

n.d. Correctness/Incorrectness/Correction. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. 

2019. The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring: Language Practice and Ideology in Maritime Technocracy. American Anthropologist.121(1): 62-75.

2017. Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics: Lessons from Tamil Books in French India and French Guiana. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 59(4): 846-883.

2016. Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts. New York: Oxford University Press.

2015. Une division sociale du travail linguistique: Enseigner le tamoul comme langue d’origine à Montréal, Québec. Anthropologie et Sociétés 39, no. 3: 153-172

2012. La Francophonie and beyond: Comparative methods in studies of linguistic minorities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(3): 220-236.

2011. Rewriting the Past and Reimagining the Future: The Social Life of a Tamil Heritage Language Industry. American Ethnologist 38(4): 774-789.



2009. [Book Review] Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius.
 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2): 328-330.

2008. Between Convergence and Divergence: Reformatting Language Purism in the Montreal Tamil Diasporas. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18(1): 1-23.

2008. The Talk of Tamils in Multilingual Montreal: A Study of Intersecting Language Ideologies in Nationalist Quebec. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 8(2): 230-247.   

Updated October 2018

I am on sabbatical for 2018-2019 and working on three projects. One project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (https://rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/fellowships/sofcb/sofcb_2018-20/), focuses on the language policies and standardization practices of colonial agents and Christian missionaries in 19th century French India. This is in continuation of my archival research on colonial linguistics and technologies of printing in the francophone Tamil world. Second, I am advancing my ethnographic research on South Asian seafarers working on cargo ships and by investigating collaborations between Christian missionaries and shipping technocrats in promoting language ideologies about miscommunication and unsociability. The third project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Programs in Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Sciences from 2018-2021, examines practices of video surveillance and language ideologies about miscommunication and cultural difference impacting police-subject interactions in a mid-size city in the U.S. South. The research team includes myself and my Co-PI, Professor Sherina Feliciano-Santos of the University of South Carolina, as well as undergraduate and graduate student assistants at USC and NYU.

I am excited to have been chosen as the incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, along with Professor Chaise LaDousa of Hamilton College. Together we will serve a 3-year term starting in September 2018. (https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15481395).

My first monograph, Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 2016), was awarded Honorable Mention for the Edward Sapir Book Prize by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology in 2017. (http://linguisticanthropology.org/about/prizes/) Focusing on Montréal’s Tamil diaspora, this book examines the language politics and ideologies guiding the formation of national and minority communities in Québec, Tamil Nadu (India), and Jaffna (Sri Lanka). Since the mid-nineteenth century, Anglo-Franco conflicts have informed the documentation, codification, and teaching of minority languages and the constitution of linguistic minority groups in all three regions. In my book, I discuss how colonial and post-colonial nationalist struggles between English and French-speaking powers helped to naturalize and institutionalize the taken-for-granted categories of “ethnolinguistic community” and “linguistic diglossia” informing Tamil heritage language education in Montréal. This book demonstrates the importance of using comparative and historical methods to analyze complex sociolinguistic phenomena attributed to globalization. It also elucidates the dialectic relationship between linguistic typology and geopolitics through the analytic of “scale.” My book has been used to teach classes in linguistic anthropology focusing on politics, multilingualism, globalization, inequality, and identity.