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New Directions
in Linguistic
Geography
Exploring Articulations
of Space

Edited by Greg Niedt

New Directions in Linguistic Geography
 Greg Niedt
Editor

New Directions in
Linguistic Geography
Exploring Articulations of Space
Editor
Greg Niedt
Department of Liberal Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Philadelphia, PA, USA

ISBN 978-981-19-3662-3    ISBN 978-981-19-3663-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3663-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2022
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 Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Joshua Pitt at Palgrave for encouraging the creation and
development of this book; Mathilde Dissing Christiansen, Julia
Hildebrand, and Rachel R. Reynolds for their input on the manuscript;
the participants in the Linguistic Geography sessions at the annual meet-
ings for the American Association of Geographers; and especially
Catherine E. Lee, for getting us all together there in the first place.

v
 Contents

1 I ntroduction  1
Greg Niedt

Part I Reconceptualizing the Landscape  21

2 Southeast
 Asian Island City-State, Singapore: Multi-Scalar
Spatial Fictions and the Hinterland within 23
Joshua Babcock

3 The
 Geographic Sides of Small-Scale Multilingualism:
New Challenges in Linguistic Cartography 49
Pierpaolo Di Carlo

4 Border
 Texts: Border-Crossing Narratives and Local
Myths in the Russian-Chinese Border Areas of Russia 87
Kapitolina Fedorova

vii
viii Contents

Part II Decolonize This Space 113

 Wahi Pana I Hoʻonalowale ʻIa…Ā Loaʻa Hou:

5 Nā
Hawaiian Place Name Loss and Recovery in “Paradise”115
M. Kawēlau Wright

6 Place
 Names and their Places: Considering Layers of
Language, Landscape, and Relief139
Sophie Brown

7 “Often
 Confused as”: Contestations of Colonial Place
Making in the Yukon Territory, Canada167
Martina Volfová

Part III Speaking of the Environment 195

8 What
 Role Does Language Play in Conserving Forests
and Culture? Multi-lingual Ethnobotanical Booklets in
the African Savanna197
Maria Fadiman and Grace Gobbo

9 “Trolls
 Had Been Moving Your Tongues:” Language,
Landscape, and Folklore in Iceland221
Sarah L. Feder

Part IV Grassroots Linguistic Geography 251

10 Toponymic
 Ambiguity and Plural Toponymies on Private
Property253
Lorato Mokwena

11 Ancestral
 Centers and Bureaucratic Boundaries:
Sociolinguistic Scaling in an Eastern Indonesian Polity277
Adam Harr
 Contents ix

12 Participatory
 Urban Planning Rituals in Brazil: Technical
Language as a Challenge to the Democratic Production of
Space299
Thaís Nassif

13 Between
 Toponymy and Cartography: An Evolving
Geography of Heritage in George Town, Malaysia327
Napong Tao Rugkhapan

I ndex355
 Notes on Contributors

Joshua Babcock is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist at the

University of Chicago. His dissertation research examines the racial and
linguistic ordering of public life in multiracial, multilingual, multicul-
tural Singapore.
Sophie Brown is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Science at SUNY
Environmental Science and Forestry. She grew up in and resides on
unceded Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ land in Hodino̱hsho:nih territory, near what is
called Ithaca, New York, where she lives on a small farm with her family
and many friendly animals. She holds a Master’s degree in Environmental
Science from SUNY ESF and a Certificate in Iroquois Linguistics from
Syracuse University. Her work as a researcher centers around decolonial
studies of place and forces of language, home, and belonging within
landscape.
Pierpaolo di Carlo is a postdoctoral associate at the Department of
Linguistics, University at Buffalo (USA). His current areas of interest
include language documentation, African sociolinguistics, and the study
of traditional forms of multilingualism in rural Africa—the latter being a
topic he has addressed also in multidisciplinary projects with geographers.
He has done extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and Cameroon and, since
2014, coordinates KPAAM-CAM (PI Jeff Good, http://ubwp.buffalo.

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

edu/kpaamcam) which is a longitudinal research project focused on

African multilingualism and led in collaboration with several Cameroonian
universities.
Maria Fadiman is a professor in the Department of Geosciences at
Florida Atlantic University, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer,
two times TEDx speaker and a fellow in the Explorers Club. She researches
the human/environmental aspect of conservation, focusing on ethnobot-
any, the study of the relationship between people and plants. She earned
her PhD from The University of Texas at Austin, her MA from Tulane
University and her BA from Vassar College. She works primarily in rural
areas throughout the globe, particularly in the rainforests of Latin America
and the savannas of Africa.
Sarah L. Feder is a geographer working in climate resilience and biodi-
versity conservation in the UK. Her work has previously focused on forest
governance and immigration in Spain, and sustainable livelihoods in the
Andean Amazon. Sarah’s research explores the power and potential of
place-based knowledge, as well as the importance of understanding
human connections to the landscape, to improve peoples’ lives and face
urgent global challenges.
Kapitolina Fedorova graduated from St. Petersburg State University
(Department of Russian and Department of General Linguistics), 1999,
and European University at St. Petersburg (Department of Ethnology),
2001. PhD in philology (2002). In 2003–2018 worked at European
University at St. Petersburg and then at Hankuk University of Foreign
Studies in Seoul, South Korea. Since 2020, she is Professor of Russian
Studies at Tallinn University, Estonia. Research interests: sociolinguistics,
language contacts, migration studies, border studies, linguistic landscape.
Grace Gobbo has worked with the Jane Goodall Institute’s Gombe
Stream Research Center with various projects, one of which was to gather
information about traditional healers and the medicinal plants around
Gombe. She has also worked with the USAID-funded Gombe-Masito-­
Ugalla ecosystem program to reintroduce sustainable agricultural
 Notes on Contributors xiii

t­echniques, developed and co-led workshops on fire management train-

ings with villagers around the Greater Gombe Ecosystem, has been recog-
nized by National Geographic as an Emerging Explorer (2009) and by
Women Wings for her cultural and conservation work with the commu-
nities in the Kigoma region.
Adam Harr received a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the
University of Virginia and is Associate Professor of Anthropology at St.
Lawrence University (Canton, NY, USA). His ethnographic research in
the central highlands of Flores, Indonesia is concerned with how social
changes are both reflected in and precipitated by people’s use of different
kinds of language. His work has appeared in the journals Language and
Communication, Reviews in Anthropology, and Tilburg Papers in Culture
Studies, and in the edited volumes Contact Talk: The Discursive Construction
of Contact and Boundaries and Rapport and the Discursive Co-Construction
of Social Relations in Fieldwork Settings.
Lorato Mokwena is a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Language
and the Global South/s. Her main research interests include orality, indig-
enous knowledge(s), toponymic inscriptions and the linguistic landscape
of sparsely populated areas. She is the founder of an annual colloquium
titled Dit is ‘n Noord-Kaap ding (“It is a Northern Cape thing”) and cur-
rently serves as a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape.
Thais Nassif has a bachelor’s (2011) and a master’s (2016) degree in
Architecture from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), in
Brazil. In 2017 her master’s thesis was awarded the X Prêmio Brasileiro
“Política e Planejamento Urbano e Regional” by the Associação Nacional de
pós Graduação em Planejamento Urbano e Regional (ANPUR). She has
worked in multiple research projects within UFMG and in the public
sector concerning urban planing and development, as well as social hous-
ing. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the Geography Department
and an affiliated researcher at Praxis and Observatório das Metrópoles research
groups at UFMG.
xiv Notes on Contributors

Greg Niedt received a PhD in Communication, Culture, and Media

from Drexel University, with a focus on the linguistic landscape of South
Philadelphia and its occupants’ experience of neighborhood change.
Currently, when not working on research, Greg is a lecturer in Liberal
Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a nonprofit proj-
ect manager.
Napong Tao Rugkhapan is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at
the Department of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.
His research interests include critical cartography, comparative urbanism,
and urban cultural heritage in Southeast Asia.
Martina Volfová holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of
British Columbia, Vancouver. Since 2014, she has been working with
Kaska (Dene) communities in the Yukon Territory in northwestern
Canada, where she has been involved in several Kaska language and cul-
tural projects. Her primary research interests include issues concerning
the revitalization, maintenance, and most recently, documentation of
Indigenous languages. She uses film, photography, and audio and video
recording to carry out a community-based, collaborative research, which
aims to produce innovative, culturally appropriate, and visually engaging
language and cultural materials and resources.
M. Kawēlau Wright is a Native Hawaiian PhD Candidate in the
Geography & Environment department at the University of Hawaiʻi at
Mānoa. She is also an instructional faculty member at the Kamakakūokalani
Center for Hawaiian Studies in the Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian
Knowledge, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Areas of Kawēlau’s research
include land tenure, land laws, Indigenous studies, and archival research.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 (a) Distribution of speakers of Arabic, Urdu, and Bengali in

the Detroit Metropolitan Area; (b) Number of house owner
occupants and Greenberg’s linguistic diversity index in the
Detroit Metropolitan Area 53
Fig. 3.2 (a) Map of the languages of intercultural communication
in Central Asia (Baskakov et al., 1996); (b) Map of the
languages of intercultural communication in north-western
China (Wurm, 1996) 56
Fig. 3.3 Distribution of speakers of Welsh who use the language in
“public” and “institutional” situations 59
Fig. 3.4 (a) Language map of Lower Fungom according to Di Carlo
et al. 2019; (b) Language map of Lower Fungom according
to Eberhard et al. 2021 (detail) 64
Fig. 3.5 Visualizations of language networks of (clockwise from top
left) Abar, Ajumbu, Koshin, and Kung obtained from
survey data 70
Fig. 3.6 Spatial distributions of the multilingual repertoires of
individuals in the family of ego=ID075 (KPAAM-CAM
database)71
Fig. 4.1 The map of the studied area 93
Fig. 4.2 Zabaikalsk and Manzhouli on a satellite map 94
Fig. 4.3 Soviet period war memorial in Zabaikalsk 97

xv
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 4.4 Monuments alongside the road to the border checkpoint,

Manzhouli102
Fig. 5.1 Photo of taro patches in Waikīkī, circa 1900. (Davey, 1900) 119
Fig. 5.2 Hawaiian Government Survey Map, Bishop (1881) 120
Fig. 5.3 Waikiki Magic Sends Lure World Over. (October 17, 1928).
The Honolulu Advertiser, Pg. 19 129
Fig. 5.4 Future Street And Park Plan Of Waikiki. (October 17,
1928). The Honolulu Advertiser, Pg. 16 130
Fig. 5.5 Map showing location of Apuakehau stream that no longer
runs133
Fig. 6.1 Settler Place Names in [what is called] New York State
(Illustration by author, 2020) 151
Fig. 6.2 First Example of Place Name Restoration Work: According
to the map “Haudenosaunee Country in Mohawk”
(Delaronde & Engel, 2015), one Mohawk name for [what is
called] Skaneatales Lake is Skaniá:tares, translated in that
source as ‘a long lake.’ We can break down this name as
follows. S – ka – niatar – es; S – 3NA – lake – be long; ‘the
lake is long, being long, or in the state of being long’157
Fig. 6.3 Second Example of Place Name Restoration Work:
According to the map “Haudenosaunee Country in
Mohawk” (Delaronde & Engel, 2015), one Mohawk name
for [what is called] Lake Ontario is Kaniatarí:io. According to
the Cayuga Dictionary (Froman et al., 2002), the Cayuga
name of the lake is Ganyadaiyo’, translated in that source as
‘beautiful lake.’ We can break down these names as follows:
Ka – niatar – i:io (Mohawk); 3NA – lake – nice and Ga -
nyada: - iyo –’ (Cayuga); 3Z/NA – lake – be nice/good – incho-
ative; ‘the lake that is good/great’158
Fig. 7.1 Ross River Dena Council notice 168
Fig. 7.2 Source: https://www.kaskadenacouncil.com 172
Fig. 7.3 Source: https://www.cyfn.ca/history/our-­languages 176
Fig. 8.1 Example pages from the ethnobotanical book (Bubango and
Mwamgongo)208
Fig. 8.2 A child’s drawing of a useful plant with the name written in
Kiha211
 List of Figures xvii

Fig. 8.3 Village child writing the ethnobotanical information in the

mini-herbaria212
Fig. 8.4 Plant experts discussing their information at the ceremony 213
Fig. 8.5 Children gathering around to see the plant information
written in Kiha, and their contributions 214
Fig. 9.1 Álfhólsvegur, or “elf hill road”, in Kópavogur where two
lanes condense to one in order to avoid an elf residence 224
Fig. 9.2 Agricultural pasture and sheep in the Westfjords 230
Fig. 9.3 Grassy hillock near Vik 233
Fig. 9.4 Map of known folkloric sites across Iceland, created by Terry
Gunnell and Trausti Dagsson from the University of Iceland.
Interactive map found here: https://sagnagrunnur.com/
en/#map236
Fig. 9.5 Two bulldozers for road construction parked by a rocky hill
in Selfoss 241
Fig. 10.1 Ulco-West signage 258
Fig. 10.2 Direction signage at Ulco-Central 259
Fig. 10.3 Where is ‘One Mile’? 269
Fig. 10.4 One Mile—a distance indicator or a hitchhiking spot? 271
Fig. 12.1 The OUC ACLO and the Vila Mantiqueira PGE urban
plan’s intervention areas in the municipality of Belo
Horizonte (Brazil) 311
Fig. 12.2 Interference made by technicians to one of the maps used in
the event “Suggestion of Proposals” (part of the PGE Vila
Mantiqueira participatory agenda) * In order: “sewage”,
“drainage”, “urban planning”, “water” and “geological risk” 317
Fig. 13.1 Map of five conservation zones, according to the Design
Guidelines for Conservation Areas in the Inner City Area
of George Town, Penang 336
Fig. 13.2 Top: the inlaid, shaded area is the ‘redefined historic enclave’
of Aceh Street, Armenian Street, and Kapitan Keling Street
proposed in 1997. Bottom: The Street of Harmony is the
line in between Zones 2 and 3 339
Fig. 13.3 Buildings in Seven Streets cordoned off for redevelopment
in 2019 346
Fig. 13.4 The present boundary of George Town World Heritage Site 347
 List of Tables

Table 11.1 Dichotomies of sociolinguistic scales 282

Table 13.1 Summary of different manifestations of the contour of
historic George Town (selected) 344

xix
 1
Introduction
Greg Niedt

The way we talk about the shape of the world is as important as the world
itself—for it is through language that we come to understand the signifi-
cance of our surroundings, learning the histories and mythologies that
make places personal to various groups and individuals. Our experiences
with the material are contextualized by the verbal, and by extension the
discursive; as Yi-fu Tuan has pointed out, “Speech is a component of the
total force that transforms nature into a human place.” (1991: 685) Out
of its roots of primarily examining physical landscapes, geography has
expanded its scope tremendously over the past several decades to account
for those landscapes’ contents, both tangible (people, infrastructure, arti-
facts…) and abstract (social ties, emotional significance, political con-
flict…). Most would probably agree at this point that aspects of culture,
experience, and ideology are as present and important in the field of
geography as any other. Yet there is still little attention given to how

G. Niedt (*)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, USA
e-mail: gniedt@pobox.pafa.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 1
G. Niedt (ed.), New Directions in Linguistic Geography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3663-0_1
2 G. Niedt

human communication mediates those elements as they are incorporated

into geographic analysis.
In the essay quoted above, Tuan suggests several approaches for how
geographers might fold some of the lessons from linguistics—sociolin-
guistics in particular—and literature into their practice. One can exam-
ine the way that grammars handle spatial relationships, or the use of
language around activities that engage with the landscape, such as con-
struction or mapmaking. He settles on advocating for a “narrative–
descriptive approach” wherein the use of words and texts of different
genres create speakers’ ideas of the world around them. This call to
action has been heeded by many scholars, but arguably it has had more
impact on sociolinguistics and its “spatial turn” than on geography. This
isn’t to say that researchers in the latter discipline are indifferent to the
role language and narrative play, merely that those elements are rarely
considered to be primary ones in the conception of a landscape, or any
other kind of -scape, that is being examined.
This volume is an attempt to call more attention to how words, names,
stories, dialogue, and the mere presence of languages themselves can lead
to the creation of place. They do not do this on their own; rather, lan-
guage facilitates a dialectic exchange between people, their environments,
and the things they bring into it, creating complex structures of localized
discourse to reinforce and disseminate their points of view (Scollon &
Scollon, 2003). Importantly, this is quite different from what “linguistic
geography” has usually referred to in the past, namely the work of creat-
ing maps and atlases of language varieties. But part of the point here is to
demonstrate the fluidity of these two words, exploring them to the point
where their boundaries begin to blur. Much as texts can be treated as
geographies (Cresswell, 2017), so too can geographies be treated as texts,
considered as much for their symbolic meaning as for their landforms or
the activities on their surfaces.
In truth, a binomial term like “linguistic geography” is not fully ade-
quate to describe the full range of connections and possibilities of such
analysis. The syntax of English makes it impossible not to privilege one
element over the other, and both are so much broader than whatever defi-
nition most readers will parse from the surface level. Moving the field
forward must entail showing that its two halves are not things we must
 1 Introduction 3

struggle to balance, but rather simultaneous outlooks, equally valid and

complementary, both necessary to fully understand the world we live in.
In terms of ideas, theories, and methods, that is the project here.

Interdisciplinary Background
Given this book’s theme of “Articulations of Space”, it’s helpful to first
give a summary of some of the different perspectives from both linguis-
tics and geography, as well as other fields that have undergone the “spatial
turn” (Warf & Arias, 2008), on the relationship between language and
space. The following selection is not an exhaustive list of disciplines and
subdisciplines that deal with this pairing, but are among the most well-­
developed that do so intentionally.
The term linguistic geography (or alternatively, language geography—see
Withers, 2016) has been mainly associated with the mapping of language
varieties, graphically reflecting how they are distributed in space. Their
content can range from showing the different expressions of a single pho-
neme or lexical item in a given city to, at the broadest level, the boundar-
ies of where an entire language family is spoken. Researchers might be
interested in the features that occur from to language to language, or
between varieties within a given language (i.e., dialectology), as its speak-
ers would understand it—although as Max Weinreich famously noted,
such distinctions are often driven by cultural or political concerns. (“A
language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”) Atlases compiled from
such studies are valuable to geographers for tracing the spread and evolu-
tion of linguistic features and their speakers over time, but they are still
rooted in linguistics—sociolinguistics, in particular. The Journal of
Linguistic Geography, for example, calls for papers whose subject matter
can be extended to social and material contexts beyond the language itself
(Labov & Preston, 2013), and that utilize geographic technologies to
study them. This counters early criticisms of integrating sociolinguistics
into the mapping practice, as outlined by Trudgill (1974), by going
beyond the merely descriptive, and using the powerful combination of
the visual and verbal to posit explanations for why specific variations
occur. Nevertheless, this approach to the topic remains oriented towards
4 G. Niedt

quantitative analysis, collecting numerically significant samples from dis-

tinct groups of speakers in order to find correlations between their speech
and location (as well as other identity markers). Concepts that have arisen
from this approach, such as the isogloss and the dialect continuum, are
certainly helpful for understanding and depicting the complex dynamics
of language contact and change. But they rely on the map itself having a
certain static authority—or to put it another way, while the interviewees
and research subjects in these studies may have a sense of how their speech
connects to the space(s) they inhabit, space itself may be more fluid and
nuanced a concept to them than the objective fixity of a map might
suggest.
Focused on that same interrelationship of linguistic and geographic
features is the field of geolinguistics, which arose from the work of linguist
Mario Pei. While linguistic geography is an outgrowth of sociolinguistics,
this counterpart was first situated as a branch of human geography, seeing
language as a necessary part of understanding space rather than vice versa.
(Williams, 1988) Formal groups that use the term (e.g., the American
Society for Geolinguistics, the Geolinguistics academic journal) have his-
torically positioned themselves as taking a broader view of the real-world
implications of language contact and conflict, by analogy with geopolitics
(Finke, 2015). The perception of linguistic geography as being rooted in
cartography may lead some to believe that its proponents are only inter-
ested in the method, rather than the social conditions the maps reveal.
But at this point, the distinction between linguistic geography and geolin-
guistics has become a blurry one, and the two terms are often deployed
interchangeably. Most scholars who classify their work under either have
grown to become interested in both the visual representation of linguistic
situations, and the application of those findings outside the academic
space. Especially as the spatial turn has drawn many of these social sci-
ence subdisciplines closer together, there is more common ground than
not between these two.
Close by in the constellation of linguistics’ offshoots is the study of
linguistic landscapes (commonly called “LL”). Unlike the previous two
fields, LL studies center on physical texts and the written word rather
than the oral. Similar to traditional linguistic geography, the quantitative
element involves measuring the distribution of texts in public space
 1 Introduction 5

featuring different languages or linguistic features, sometimes plotting

these out onto maps. And as with geolinguistics, the qualitative element
is the interpretation of what those distributions mean: the local sociolin-
guistic situation they reflect, how residents of the area perceive them,
their implications for policy. While early work in the field (see Spolsky &
Cooper, 1991; Landry & Bourhis, 1997) mainly gravitated towards the
documentation and counting of signs, there has been increasing atten-
tion to the human impact of the LL. Ethnography has become another
commonly-­used method in the field (Blommaert, 2013), and a closer
look at how various discourses are made manifest in the public texts has
deepened the analyses. The scope of LL research covers a wide variety of
environments that extend down to smaller scales than most geography
studies: specific city blocks, multilingual classrooms, marketplaces, local
monuments, even individual surfaces. Underlying these cases is the ethos
that any space, no matter how localized, can be a nexus of cultural knowl-
edge and ideology that informs those who engage with it. (Scollon, 2002)
This is especially the case when one moves through or past such micro-­
geographies on a regular basis, as an environment and the understanding
of it are mutually constitutive. (Niedt, 2020) An added benefit of expos-
ing these connections between spaces mediated by their contents, and the
people who encounter them, is to open up critical discussions of inequal-
ity; the ensuing findings have been applied in the context of education,
government policy, and social justice, among others. (See for example
Shohamy, 2015; Rubdy et al., 2016; Seals, 2020).
More recently, there has been discussion among LL scholars about the
nonverbal aspects of their analyses, and to what extent they can be inves-
tigated on their own. The term semiotic landscape (as posited by Jaworski
& Thurlow, 2010) or semioscape is sometimes used to highlight the sig-
nificance people apply to nonlinguistic objects, configurations of space,
and the materiality of texts in these landscapes. Certainly these elements
operate in tandem with the use of language proper, but constitute a sys-
tem of communication that may signal other discourses, and requires
other methods of investigation. Such questions may be less important to
a researcher grounded in linguistics than one operating in geography;
still, they form two necessary fractions of the whole. Given the aim of
unpacking how language and communication are used to define and
6 G. Niedt

describe space (and its interwoven discourses), it is necessary to consider

the inherent “meanings” of textless objects themselves, whether urban,
political, or topographic—the housing block, the border, the glacial
lake—as well as objects that combine words with symbols, namely maps.
(It is also worth pointing out that a common criticism leveled at LL stud-
ies, and semioscape studies by extension, is their outsize focus on urban
areas; however, this is mostly a function of density, as cities tend to con-
tain far more instances of items to analyze.)
Moving away from linguistics’ emphasis on individual languages and
their specific features, steps have also been taken to formally connect
communication and media theory to geography (see for example Adams,
2009; Thielmann, 2010; Adams & Jansson, 2012). Information flows
have always been directed and structured by spatial elements, especially
the messages analyzed by scholars of mass communication, so a geo-
graphic framework continues to be useful for them. (Leszczynski, 2015;
Jansson & Lindell, 2015) But examining the reverse influence is also
important, if for no other reason than the fact that media reproduce the
discourses that define space and contextualize it in individual experience.
Compared with linguistics, which highlights the meanings, uses, and
deployment of terms that describe the world around us, communication
focuses on how they propagate: geographies built from the movement of
messages rather than physical territories. (This aspect of the discipline is
more important to the purpose of this volume than the well-established
emphasis on new media technologies in communication geography.)
Related to this view of geography as a dynamic process, the rise of the
mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Moriarty, 2014) underscores
the growing consideration of time and change as variables, from both
individual and societal perspectives. While linguistic work has never
implied that the processes it describes are fixed in time, a series of snap-
shots showing the shift of phonemes or spread of vocabulary must be
paired with an understanding of the motivations and social consequences
of those changes. The era of globalization has broadened the always-­
evolving meanings that may be encoded into place; immigration, travel,
and disseminated knowledge thanks to the internet all create additional
layers of context for the geographies that ensue.
 1 Introduction 7

Other branches of the social sciences and humanities also handle con-
cepts that lie at the intersection of language and space. For example, the
cataloguing of toponyms is useful for tracing the substrate languages and
points of possible contact within an area—but from a more anthropo-
logical point of view, it can open a window into the traditions of the
people who live (or formerly lived) there. (Heikkilä & Fondahl, 2010;
Low, 2016) Understanding naming practices and ritual demarcations of
space are crucial to ethnographic work in anthropology (exemplified by
Basso, 1996), especially when those are at odds with the practices of some
other community, potentially aligning an intergroup tension with a dis-
cursive one. The work of Bachelard (2014 [1958]) is situated within
architecture, but his insights into how rooms and domestic spaces are
conceived of by their inhabitants suggest that discourse must inform the
material practice of building them. By extension, other spaces outside of
these private ones can be considered through the lens of personal experi-
ence. Phenomenology work in the vein of de Certeau (1984) helps illu-
minate the processes by which regular encounters with features of the
landscape accrue into a feel for its atmosphere, the way it forms an inter-
face between the individual and the community as a kind of personalized
territory. And within critical theory, the constellation of meanings sur-
rounding that word territory and its derivatives, ranging from Foucault’s
“jurido-political [notion]” (2007 [1978]) to Appadurai’s “crisis “(1996),
demonstrate how space is an omnipresent factor—quite literally—in any
kind of analysis, an aspect that must be deconstructed and interpreted
through the lens of culture, and an organizing metaphor for human
interaction.
Coming at last to the formal discipline of geography itself, there are
several lines of research touching on themes to which language and dis-
course are applicable. The “emotional turn” in human geography empha-
sizes the necessity of attending to how individuals feel about the spaces
they occupy (Bondi et al., 2016), and how emotionally invested bodies
themselves can create, maintain, and respond to spaces (Davidson &
Milligan, 2004). The deployment of terms like the “Global South” and
the growing practice of Indigenous land acknowledgment bring attention
to the relationship between geographies and the deep structures of dis-
course they enfold. (Keefe, 2019) Such critical moves are prefigured in
8 G. Niedt

work such as Lewis and Wigen’s (1997) work on metageography, which

deconstructs many of the essentializing concepts that researchers inter-
ested in space may take for granted. Fundamentally, no geographical
term or proper place name exists in isolation; each is entangled with his-
tories, some of them histories of conflict or violence, in relation to which
a researcher must comprehend their own position.

The Purpose of this Book

First and foremost, this volume takes closest to heart Tuan’s (1991)
“narrative-­descriptive” approach. Rather than centering on the mechan-
ics of languages and their sociolinguistic reflection (and attempting to
advance linguistic theory as a result), the focus is on the environments,
situations, and associated discourses used for place-creation. As a conse-
quence, a wide variety of entry points to the subject matter and method-
ologies for analysis become possible. Linguistic geography in this schema
becomes less of a system to arrange the theoretical principles of linguistics
in space, and more of an interpretive take on place-creation that deeply
probes the role language plays. Rather than asking, how does place affect
language?, the central question here is, how does language generate place?
Labels on the landscape cannot by themselves wholly explain the origins
of toponyms, the division of land ownership, or the interconnection of
locations, so they must be situated within narratives and cultural dis-
courses—indeed, place is inextricable from discourse (Scollon & Scollon,
2003). Like other streams of human geography, this perspective empha-
sizes the voices and beliefs of the people who occupy these places, with
the added potential to show how history (oral or written) and culture are
tied to the material. The land itself and its features form a body of knowl-
edge that is transmitted within a community, perhaps handed down over
time, and given additional meaning by how it connects to other forms of
knowledge. Each person will also engage with a given discourse in their
own subjective way; foregrounding it reminds us that human, or human-
istic, geography is not only a study of the group’s relationship with space,
but also the individual’s.
 1 Introduction 9

To that end, the places described herein should be framed by the ways
that the people who engage with them understand them. Before an urban
neighborhood is a series of blocks or a rural area an arrangement of topo-
graphical features, it is an expanse where someone might live, or work, or
wander through now and then. Its material conditions and the norms of
society affect how any given person will interact within that space, but
language and discourse are the tools with which they create epistemolo-
gies of place, and better understand their own patterns of behavior. The
upshot of this is an approach to human geography that is more on the
phenomenological end of the spectrum, or at least an approach that
accounts for personal ideas of what places signify as much as social ones.
Language must be a mostly-shared system of communication to function
properly; nevertheless, each person will have their own relationships to
the terms and names that surround them, and the experienced geogra-
phies those words summon. And as shown by communication geogra-
phy, that process is not static. No doubt many of the places studied in this
volume, and the ways they are constructed in discourse, will change in
the near future, some of them rapidly—some of them already may have
by the time this book goes to print. Any physical changes driven by large-­
scale, sometimes invisible, sometimes nefarious, social and political inter-
ests are complemented by how we rethink and re-speak the matter of
those transformations. There is an opportunity to take a critical stand-
point here, too: how is the “right” to re-define a place, and moreover
decide how it will be constructed or reconstructed, determined? (Lefebvre
& Nicholson-Smith, 1991; Soja, 2013; Harvey, 2015) Who has access to
actively contribute their voices to the surrounding discourse? Given that
language is often used as a proxy for discrimination, so too does it allow
those in power to shut out others from discussions about management of
their everyday world. Geography has the capability to expose links
between arrangements of space and social problems, enabling them to be
addressed. This volume is intended to support that project by laying out
at least some of the possible cultural and experiential side effects of such
changes.
Given the number and variety of factors involved in how a place is
defined and described, research that takes this stance is served by employ-
ing qualitative methods as well as quantitative. The data collected from
10 G. Niedt

interviews, oral histories, and media artifacts can help build an overview
of the ideas and positions at play in the emplaced discourses of a particu-
lar area, while tallying up instances of one perspective or another and
comparing the numbers might explain the relative weight of different
ideas in the community. This might be supplemented with ethnographic
observation, which could give a researcher the added benefit of using as
data the thread of their own lived experience weaving through the land-
scape. (Blommaert, 2013) And even if they choose not to actively partici-
pate in the environment they study, they must attend to how their
position can influence their own ways of situating the place within dis-
courses. Even for the more quantitatively inclined, there is nothing to
prevent such a nuanced exploration of language and discourse from still
being worked into (for example) a mapping project. The results might
also be used to help advise policymakers who wish to better understand a
population’s conception of a place on the brink of change, or to advocate
for improved local attitudes towards diversity. Whatever the outcome,
this volume embraces numerous forms of methodology, with the caveat
that a human, even personal, element must be kept visible by the research.
All of this is ultimately a much broader and more complex project
than is usually attributed to linguistic geography. That is the final goal of
the volume: to nudge the discipline towards a wider body of research, and
to continue extending the focus beyond the distribution of languages and
their features. Each case study would benefit from an approach tailored
to the geographic space in question, and the interplay it has with specific
expressions of language use. Perhaps this attempt to foreground that
nuanced relationship will challenge us not to take for granted the ways
we talk about space and place, as Lewis and Wigen allude to in their
work. As a discipline, linguistic geography must build for itself a robust
and consistent theoretical framework—but that in and of itself is a kind
of discourse, with all the issues of power and subjection it entails.
Researchers will surely benefit from acknowledging the necessity of
accounting for as many of these elements as is feasible, for isn’t it just as
useful to find the differences as well as the similarities, calling on the resi-
dents of an area to share their own conceptions? Just as language and
place cannot exist in isolation, a field that studies them cannot move
forward without seeking new horizons.
 1 Introduction 11

Summary of Chapters
The case studies in this book are grouped into four sections that each
engage with a central theme. Part I, Reconceptualizing the Landscape
features chapters that address concepts of linguistic geography them-
selves, and how they might be complicated or redefined with respect to
local concerns.
The opening chapter by Babcock keys off the term “hinterland” and its
meanings in Singapore, one of the most urbanized and densely populated
nations on the planet. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, postcolonial
theory and Black feminist geography, his analysis demonstrates how
texts—in this case, a set of short story collections forms the central
source—can reflect the underlying social politics of a city. A single word
or phrase can encapsulate entire discourses of race, class, and language; in
a multicultural polity, engaging with a text that uses these geographic
terms entails occupying a stance relative to the people in it, and what they
represent to the reader. The various ways one can describe Singapore—
city, nation, island—no matter how innocuous on the surface, become
nexuses of connection or contestation in the local context.
Di Carlo follows with a chapter that presents new options for the
methodology of linguistic cartography. As noted above, the output of
linguistic geography as a discipline has largely revolved around mapping,
with various degrees of success in representing the full depth of language
use in a given space (often dependent on the objects of analysis for each
researcher). This chapter explores different scopes of multilingualism and
the complexities in each type that researchers might encounter, before the
author turns to rural Cameroon as a pilot case for a method that fore-
grounds social networks for map design. His work serves as a reminder
that aside from the boundaries between “languages” being hard to define,
the way they are deployed among members of a community is deeply
rooted in the people’s personal experiences, and the micro-scale social
conventions that govern what each language stands for.
The final chapter in this section is Fedorova’s ethnographic work in
Zabaykalsky (or Zabaikalskii) Krai, Russia. Here, the concept of the
“border” (with neighboring China) is presented as a complicated term,
12 G. Niedt

one that encodes deeply embedded histories and attitudes from commu-
nities on both sides. A collection of interviews, media texts, and observa-
tions show the relationship between individuals’ outlooks and the broader
discourses that exist at slightly higher levels—an approach is well-­
established in migration and border studies. Fedorova does not abstract
too far from the lived experiences of people in the area, reminding the
reader that while a border is always as much a narrative construction as a
natural or political one, any additional meanings it has must be under-
stood in the specific outlooks of those who cross it.
Part II, Decolonize this Space, collects three chapters that take a
deeper look at Indigenous epistemologies of place, how they have been
suppressed or contested by colonial ones, and the tension that results
from the dialectic between the two. (Toponyms are a point of special
contention in those debates.) Wright’s chapter begins the section with a
discussion of traditional place naming practices in Hawaiʻi, showing how
they encode the transmission of ownership and social history of a com-
munity. As white settlers from the US arrived, and eventually seized
power, they renamed the land and its features in tandem with other forms
of cultural erasure and material oppression. Wright provides historical
detail and textual artifacts that show the evolution of not only the names
themselves, but the discursive contexts in which they are situated: sover-
eign nation contrasted with tourist destination. She explores the impact
of legislation on residents’ efforts to maintain and reclaim their heritage
through the landscape, and suggests that a remapping project could help
in the continuing push for self-determination.
Next, Brown takes a similar approach in her discussion of the
Hodino̱hsho:nih lands in what is now known as upstate New York.
Between the erosion of Indigenous place names in the area, and the over-
all disenfranchisement of the related language communities, the forcible
transformation of the cultural landscape is nearly complete. Brown argues
that remapping can work as a positive practice of language revitalization
and reclamation, providing examples of what this might look like—a
strategy to educate white residents who are unaware of their local history.
This raises the question of authentic knowledge of a place: who has it,
and how shall it be transmitted? In all of these cases, the legacy of colo-
nialism is deeply inscribed; unraveling the ideologies surrounding its
 1 Introduction 13

impact will take time, but can help redress this expression of violence in
US history.
The section closes with Volfova’s chapter on a 2018 incident in the
Yukon Territory of Canada, wherein one of the Kaska First Nations com-
munities asserted their rights to require permits for hunting on their tra-
ditional territory. In their public announcements, they emphasized the
pre-colonial toponyms of the area, using the phrasing “often confused as”
to frame the settler-derived names that are commonly used. Several
examples are given of how Kaska place names reflect both topographical
features and environmental knowledge, such as herd movements, repre-
senting an epistemology of place that outside hunters often ignore. The
chapter also demonstrates how the Kaska names are not impersonal
labels; they are part of a living body of knowledge that is held commu-
nally by elders. This provides an important counterpoint to anyone who
might think the articulation of a space’s features (on a map or otherwise)
is objective, isolated from the life of the community who lives there.
The two chapters in Part III, Speaking of the Environment, consider
how language and discourse factor into discussions of stewardship and
ethnoecology. A frequent reason given for preserving endangered lan-
guages is that they contain local wisdom about the flora and fauna that
might be useful for medicine or agriculture. Regardless of how much a
language has to contribute to either of those domains on a large scale, the
way its community of speakers describes the land intertwines with any
attempt to maintain it.
Fadiman and Gobbo begin this section with a report from northwest-
ern Tanzania on the ethnobotanical knowledge of the Ha people. Their
methodology is a collaborative one, involving members from two villages
in the region to create trilingual “dictionaries” of local flora and their
uses, ensuring the transmission of knowledge from elders to future gen-
erations. Importantly, the project was guided at every step by input from
the participants; the chapter also notes the importance of accounting for
social and cultural factors, such as gender or hesitation around sharing
privileged knowledge, during this process. It serves as a model for how
linguistic geography researchers can responsibly and productively work
with communities, bolstered by the authors’ accounts of community
14 G. Niedt

members’ positive reactions to the end result: books they could hold in
their hands, in their language, privileging their knowledge.
That chapter is followed by Feder’s work on the mythological dimen-
sion of geographic discourse in Iceland, where the huldúfolk, “hidden
people,” play an important role in local narratives. The island is charac-
terized by highly active geology and a landscape in flux, but also the pride
its residents have for its beauty. Feder argues that the huldúfolk function
as a point of connection with their past, almost a kind of personification
of the land itself, to be defended against overdevelopment. She traces this
mythos from old folklore and fiction through to the present, where it is
clear that the discourse is valued as a symbol of resistance for environ-
mental groups as much as it is a beloved piece of tradition. A communi-
ty’s epistemology of the land may include wisdom about plants and their
uses, but also involves codes of behavior around how to maintain the
ecosystem—an important consideration for any conversation about its
maintenance.
The final section is Part IV, Grassroots Linguistic Geography. While
many of the other chapters also feature community involvement in the
creation of place, these final four shift focus from the landscape itself to
the people’s practices of engagement with it. Mokwena opens this sec-
tion by juxtaposing linguistic landscape methodology (which unpacks
the meanings of written texts in public space) with spoken communica-
tion. The two sites in question, mining towns in South Africa, are shown
to have a lack of helpful signage, so residents must create their own
orally transmitted geographies, creating a vocabulary to refer to the loca-
tions around each site. The terms they use are functional and grounded
in personal experience, reminding the reader that places, their names,
and the associated media are not always constructed with the input of
the people who must navigate them, who will build their own geography
out of necessity.
Harr’s chapter considers the deployment of geographic terms to build
rhetorical identities in Lio, a minority language of Indonesia. While this
practice is common for political purposes, the Lio case is marked by how
the meaning of spatial “marginality” has developed and been recontextu-
alized against the background of democratic reforms in Indonesia. Harr
 1 Introduction 15

analyzes this shift in connection with the concept of sociolinguistic scale,

wherein a speaker’s level of engagement with discourses connected to dif-
ferent levels of political administration are associated with different
speech registers. In the context of language diversity—Indonesia having
the second-greatest number of languages of any country—presenting
“authenticity” through marginality is an effective way for candidates to
establish their stance at the level of local elections. Other, larger-scale
ideologies do not cease to exist, however; the significance of geography is
played out on multiple discursive levels simultaneously.
Following this is Nassif ’s work on public meetings for urban plan-
ning projects in two neighborhoods located in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
They serve as examples of the disconnect that can occur in communica-
tion between experts and residents in determining the future of their
homes. Through interviews with participants, the author shows how
structures of linguistic capital make it difficult for project leaders to
explain their goals comprehensibly, and cultural norms prevent com-
munity members from having their concerns heard. As with the previ-
ous study, these issues must be understood in the local context, for
which Nassif provides extensive background on the recent history of
Brazil’s development practices. The chapter shows that in conversations
around a place and how its geography might be altered, it is crucial for
all parties involved to be using the same language, a hurdle that socio-
linguistic analysis can help overcome.
This section, and the book as a whole, close with Rugkhapan’s exami-
nation of toponyms in George Town, Malaysia, whose layered colonial
history deeply informs the local practices of naming. Each piece of the
city’s heritage is considered in terms of its associated political ideologies,
past and present; certain residents’ push to create an official historic dis-
trict has directed much of the discourse. (Another layer was added by
George Town’s inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list in
2008.) The chapter illustrates how names and boundaries can be used as
tools to reinforce inclusion and exclusion for political reasons.
Furthermore, in a postcolonial context like this one, place names often
function as a continual reminder of past and ongoing violence, compli-
cating the relationship of people with the space in which they live.
16 G. Niedt

Future Directions
To be sure, there will continue to be a need for classic approaches to
studying the intersection of language and space; maps remain a valuable
resource for visualizing patterns of usage, while landscape studies reveal
how those patterns can be socially, culturally, and politically significant.
But neither language nor space exist in isolation. They take on meaning
through their usage in everyday communication, the positions they
occupy (or are made to occupy) in discourse, and the habituated ways we
navigate them. This volume provides twelve jumping-off points that can
inspire further explorations, and countless others exist. (The Linguistic
Geography sessions at the American Association of Geographers’ Annual
Meetings, from which several of these chapters were adapted, have pre-
sented several dozen more possibilities over the past few years.) At times,
the scope of inquiry can seem overwhelming, since the two elements in
question touch on so many other aspects of our world that are themselves
rich and important topics to consider: material resources, race and eth-
nicity, historical tensions, gender issues, and so forth. Rather than be
daunted by the magnitude of that web of connections, however, linguis-
tic geography provides an opportunity for researchers to use the places we
create and the way we speak of them as a unified lens through which the
many threads come into focus.
It is incumbent on all researchers to turn a critical eye on the concepts
they work with, to challenge their own assumptions and keep an open
mind about using them as a foundation for their findings. Any geography
study beyond the purely physical ought to begin with the question, what
is “place” in this context? And who better to answer that than the people
who live and work there, are born and die there, move through and
around it, and talk about it in deeply personal ways? Each of the other
aspects of a delineated piece of space can be interrogated in the same way,
tangible or intangible: city, wilderness, market, border, homeland. The
arc of the social sciences continues to bend towards a sensitivity to the
astonishing variety and affective weight all these pieces can have within a
given community, and applying the findings of any research project
requires some idea of how they will impact others. Considering language
 1 Introduction 17

can help improve our understanding of the possible benefits that stem
from a study of place. Likewise, examining place can provide deeper con-
text for language and the discourses rooted in it—and this kind of work,
by crossing the boundaries between disciplines, itself demonstrates a way
by which we might reach a more nuanced understanding of our world.

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 Part I
Reconceptualizing the Landscape
 2
Southeast Asian Island City-State,
Singapore: Multi-Scalar Spatial Fictions
and the Hinterland within
Joshua Babcock

We need a different idea of space, a better theory of how it is integrated

with nonspatial aspects of context, and a more thorough treatment of the
social embedding of the deictic field. —Hanks, 2005. “Explorations in the
Deictic Field,” 198

If space and place appear to be safely secure and unwavering, then what
space and place make possible, outside and beyond tangible stabilities, and
from the perspective of struggle, can potentially fade away. Geography is
not, however, secure and unwavering; we produce space, we produce its
meanings, and we work very hard to make geography what it
is…Concealment, marginalization, boundaries are important social pro-
cesses. We make concealment happen; it is not natural but rather names
and organizes where racial-sexual differentiation occurs. —McKittrick,
2006. Demonic Grounds, xi–xii

J. Babcock (*)
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
e-mail: jdbabcock@uchicago.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 23
G. Niedt (ed.), New Directions in Linguistic Geography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3663-0_2
24 J. Babcock

I contend that the very distinction between material and literary, or physi-
cal and representational space, must be done away with. —Watson, 2011.
The New Asian City, 13

“Singapore has no hinterland.” Sitting with an urban planner in the

atrium of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, with a three-­
dimensional scale model of Singapore visible in my peripheral vision like
a heavy-handed literary device, my interviewee delivered this pronounce-
ment with an air of finality: “You cannot understand what has happened
since 1965 if you do not understand this. Other cities, other countries
have their hinterlands to source raw materials, their talents and labor
force, everything they need, they have right there. We did not. We do
not. You must understand this.” For a Singaporean (or someone familiar
with Singapore’s history), the planner’s reference to 1965 invoked the
Southeast Asian island city-state’s tumultuous events, from internal self-­
rule under the British to the fraught Merger with Malaysia to the cata-
strophic advent of full independence, which pulled the rug out from
under Singaporean hopes of a unified Malaysian market and left the place
without access to key natural resources like fresh water (Rahim, 2010).
More than just a tale of environmental determinism, the planner’s state-
ment told another story, narrating a world of boundaries and asymme-
tries, of abundance outside and lack within.
Approximately a month later, I sat in a cab waiting at a traffic light. Up
to this point, the ride had proceeded in silence, but at this moment the
driver craned his neck, peering at the scaffolding and sound barriers
installed around the high-rise buildings that were being constructed on
both sides of the road. Gesturing upward with a raised palm, the driver
exclaimed: “Always building! Everything in Singapore, always changing.
Government says must upgrade, must tear down. Singapore is very small,
no hinterland—so, always building.” At the time, my exploratory field-
work was focused on urban planning and nation branding in Singapore.
I was relatively familiar with the concept of “hinterland” from the schol-
arly and practitioner literatures I was exploring and talk of “hinterlands”
recurred among planners, marketers, and civil servants in the ministries
and statutory boards whose work focused on making, managing, and
marketing place in Singapore. However, the taxi driver’s pronouncement
 2 Southeast Asian Island City-State, Singapore: Multi-Scalar… 25

was the first time I had encountered talk of “hinterland” outside expert-­
technical domains, used to voice a latent critique of an abstract institu-
tional entity rather than to ideologically assert a mere
physical-geographical fact.
Within imaginaries such as these, what kind of entity has a hinterland,
what do anxieties or assertions over the hinterland tell us, and what kind
of entity is Singapore such that it does not have a hinterland? Who does
the imagining? Who or what gets displaced or erased by this imaginative
storytelling about Singapore? As the epigraphs indicate, this chapter
approaches these questions by exploring resonances across three fields
concerned with the geographic and socio-historical study of space: lin-
guistic anthropology, Black feminist geography, and postcolonial com-
parative literature. Building on the work of scholars across these three
areas, I begin from the perspective that space is not a neutral, inert back-
drop for social life, nor is it separate from the stories that take place in,
through, and about it. Rather, space and place are co-participants in the
making of social positions, boundaries, and personae, together with the
systems and structures into which social actors are slotted or against
which they struggle.
Despite the relative hegemony of perspectives that variously assert
Singapore does not have a hinterland, the social actors that voice these
perspectives work to erase other ways that Singapore’s hinterlands do get
materialized. As a Global City that is also a strategically positioned island
at the nexus of global shipping lanes, political and economic commenta-
tors in Singapore and beyond have long asserted that the world is
Singapore’s hinterland: Singapore sources its raw materials, its talent, and
its labor force (to re-voice the urban planner’s perspective) from the
world. This rescales the hinterland beyond Singapore’s geopolitical bor-
ders, which also rescales the influx of materials, talent, labor, and other
resources as always foreign. To better understand where and how the dis-
avowed hinterland gets materialized, I thus turn beyond hegemonic,
state-backed, and expert discourses to consider other genres in and
through which other constructions of space and place appear—construc-
tions of space and place that are shaped by, but extend beyond a manifest
concern for “hinterlands” as such. Though a named concern for “hinter-
lands” is rarely voiced by individuals aside from planners, marketers, state
26 J. Babcock

officials, or individuals who lived through Singapore’s fraught indepen-

dence, I argue that the hinterland motivates latent forms of boundary-­
making across other domains, too.
This chapter’s intended contribution is both conceptual and empirical.
Conceptually, I draw together linguistic-anthropological work on the
embedding of deictic fields in social fields—an approach that theorizes
how discourse is tied to the social and spatial worlds in which it occurs
(Hanks, 2005)—with theorizations of pragmatic paradigms: sets of
indexical, or context-indicating and implicating, signs taken by users as
“appropriate to distinct contextual conditions” (Silverstein, 2014,
p. 152). I further connect these to theorizations of “geographic stories”
(2006, p. 34) by geographer Katherine McKittrick, linking this, finally,
to the production and circulation of multi-scalar spatial fictions, a term I
extend from comparative literature scholar Jini Kim Watson to describe
mutually constitutive, contested entanglements of built environments
with creative texts and other communicative genres (Watson, 2011). I
mobilize this conceptual framework to undertake an ethnographic explo-
ration of the contrasts and contradictions that animate the multi-genre
production of geographic stories in and about Singapore, stories through
which concerns over “hinterland” locate racial-gendered difference in
place and space. Singapore has the distinction of being the world’s only
sovereign island city-state, yet the terms available for its categorization—
as island, city, state, or belonging to a region—each entail mutually desta-
bilizing pragmatic paradigms (Silverstein, 2014) of spatial organization.
Singapore is variously described as an outlier in—but not of—a Southeast
Asian region (Goh & Yeoh, 2003); a Chinese island in a Malay-Muslim
region (Rahim, 2010); an island without a mainland (Holden, 2001); a
city without a hinterland (Tan, 2007); a state without a (single) nation
(Wee, 1993). Though not overtly contradictory, each paradigm selec-
tively focuses attention on the kind of space and place Singapore is taken
to be while provisionally silencing alternatives.
I focus on the ways that multi-scalar spatial fictions materialize, and
are materialized by, axes of differentiation that are brought to bear in
constructing trans-modal figures of landscape for understanding
Singapore as island, city, nation/state, and regional entity. I show how
individuals’ selection of one over another pragmatic paradigm—focusing
 2 Southeast Asian Island City-State, Singapore: Multi-Scalar… 27

on island over city, city over nation/state, etc.—drives semiotic processes

of differentiation (Gal & Irvine, 2019) that produce what I call a hinter-
land within: an iterative, spatialized introflection of each paradigm’s
social, linguistic, racialized, and cultural outsides. I track these processes
across the contributions to the six-volume Balik Kampung series of short
stories (edited between 2012 and 2016 by Singaporean storyteller and
author Verena Tay), together with material drawn from Singaporean
political talk and written reflections by policymakers/politicians and
scholarship by Singaporean and Singapore-based academics. I examine
how these texts narrate actors’ experiences of discovering the outside,
inside; when the mainland comes to the island; when the hinterland
appears in the city; and when the region makes itself at home in (or as)
the nation.

 eographic Storytelling, Embedded Deictic/

G
Social Fields, Spatial Fictions
Building on work by a broad, inter- and multidisciplinary cast of charac-
ters, McKittrick’s work offers a methodological and conceptual toolkit
for tracing interconnections across “material referents, external, three-­
dimensional spaces, and the actions taking place in space, as they overlap
with subjectivities, imaginations, and stories” (2006 xiii). In elaborating
a theorization of geographic stories, McKittrick begins from a familiar
analytic insight: that all geography, like all social practice, involves story-
telling. While not dismissing the importance of this insight, however,
McKittrick goes on to invert the formula: not only is all geography story-
telling, but all storytelling is geography. In elaborating this perspective,
McKittrick peels back the layers of emplacement and displacement of
racial-sexual differentiation through which Black women’s geographies—
ways of knowing, negotiating, and experiencing space and place as Black
women (McKittrick, 2006, p. x)—get situated in space. Her work elabo-
rates how Black women’s geographies are constitutive of space in and as
stories; further, she does this “without situating these geographies firmly
inside an official story or history” (ibid, p. xxiv).
28 J. Babcock

Like McKittrick, scholars in social, cultural, linguistic, and archaeo-

logical anthropology have long been interested in the interconnections
among language, place, and space. Both classic and recent works have
employed a range of perspectives and methodologies to analyze space and
placemaking as socio-cultural practices. I mention this work only in pass-
ing here.1 Instead, I here engage most closely with Hanks’ (2005) elabora-
tion of the embedding of deictic fields in social fields, linking this to
Michael Silverstein’s conceptualization of the pragmatic paradigm.
Drawing on a broadly linguistic anthropological approach to language,
Hanks offers an important (re)conceptualization of deixis—context-­
indicating linguistic resources like “this,” “that,” “here,” “there,” “I,” and
“you” through which speakers of any language work to link “elementary
social relations of speaker, addressee, and object to the phenomenal con-
text of utterance” or speech setting (2005, p. 191). Deictic expressions are
united by the fact that they all derive their meaning and force from con-
text. In this view, context does not precede interaction, it is projected from
interaction. Importantly, context is not just the immediate or even distal
spatial surround to a speech situation, but also encompasses social fields:
the “space of positions and position takings in which agents (individual
or collective) and through which various forms of value…circulate (ibid,
p. 192). Moreover, “in any social field there are boundary processes that
constrain who can engage in different positions and which moves can be
made and which not” (ibid). Deictics articulate with social fields, but
because of their status as grammaticalized, context-indicating or-implicat-
ing resources, they are distinct from other linguistic resources in their
relative autonomy and semiotic specificity.
Though beginning from deixis, the perspective on which I draw (fol-
lowing Hanks and others) is more broadly indexical, affording a method
for tracking the stratification of interacting participants’ orientations to
the context-appropriateness of signs at varying degrees of explicitness. As
Michael Silverstein has argued, users’ conceptualizations are key to

1
An in-depth review of the centrality of space in the history of social and cultural anthropology is
beyond the scope of this chapter. For a review of anthropological approaches to language and space,
see Levinson, 1996; Hanks, 2005 also provides an excellent, more recent (though technical)
overview.
 2 Southeast Asian Island City-State, Singapore: Multi-Scalar… 29

understanding how language-internal contextual variation is made and

made meaningful:

[L]anguage users conceptualize contextual variability as “different [context-­

indexing] ways of [denotationally] saying ‘the same’ thing,” at whatever
plane and level of analysis, the isolable formal differences constituting, as
was noted above, a (sometimes gradient) paradigm of indexical signs
appropriate to distinct contextual conditions, in short a pragmatic para-
digm. Speakers have intuitions—sometimes even explicit normative stipu-
lations—of how one or more elements of such paradigmatically
differentiated indexes can appropriately—congruently—co-occur across
textual stretches. Such principles define a denotational-textual regis-
ter for the users of language, an intuition (or stipulation) of which textual
elements go together with which others, and which ought to be excluded
from textual co-occurrence—save for producing (entailing) special effects
by violation (Silverstein, 2014, pp. 152–53).

For Silverstein, like Hanks, social fields importantly include not only
implicit normative orientations, but also explicit stipulations on linguis-
tic and paralinguistic forms’ uses. This means that difference is a constitu-
tive feature of all language- and sign-use, both grammatically and through
the encoding of socio-cultural distinctions. Difference, in other words, is
not manifest through abstract, macro-sociological structures that hover
over social or three-dimensional worlds; it is a discursive, interactional
achievement that shifts from moment to moment within and across events.
Like McKittrick, Hanks, and Silverstein, comparative literature scholar
Jini Kim Watson examines how “three-dimensional fictions” get made in
and as built environments. Watson explores the postcolonial intertwine-
ment of sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and spatial shifts in Singapore,
Seoul, and Taipei, tracing the ways that political-economic arrangements
impact, and were impacted by, storytelling practices. By examining
Singaporean political memoir, post-independence national(ist) poetry,
and rehabilitative anti-nationalist poetry produced between the 1960s
and early 2000s, she works to trouble the category of the postcolonial
and decenter “Western theorizations on modernity and urbanization”
(ibid, p. 9), particularly as such theorizations relegate fictional texts either
30 J. Babcock

to a realm of epiphenomenal cultural production, or as fodder for

Orientalizing debates over texts’ cultural authenticity as resistance or
identity (see Said, 1978/1994).
Focusing on Singapore’s post-independence, industrialization, and
post-industrialization periods, Watson’s text elaborates how the Singapore
state’s expropriation of land and “urban renewal” programs—which gave
rise to the proliferation of towering public housing and other high-rise
architecture—also drove new narratives about Singaporean modernity,
citizenship, identity, and subjectivity. The analysis traces this across auto-
biographical texts by Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew,
whose tour of seventeen postcolonial African states in the 1960s afforded
a series of negative images against which his own desired image of
Singapore was constructed (Watson, 2011, pp. 181–83). Watson juxta-
poses Lee’s storytelling against works by Singaporean poet laureate Edwin
Thumboo, who in the 1960s and 1970s used reflexively public, national-
ist poetry to celebrate Singapore’s built-environmental transformation as
iconic to the new Singaporean national identity. Finally, Watson turns to
1970s poetry by Singaporean poet Arthur Yap, whose poetry excavates
the Singaporean experiences that came to be located outside the new
modern/urban/national subjectivities (ibid, p. 195).
While Watson’s analysis serves as a source of methodological and
empirical inspiration for me, I nevertheless seek to expand her analysis
beyond the city as a category. As much as Singapore’s status as a sovereign
city-state has been incessantly focalized in national(ist) narratives and
scholarly accounts, what Watson calls the “New Asian City” is just one
among many pragmatic paradigm of spatial denotation for telling geo-
graphic stories about the place—not only about what kind(s) of place(s)
Singapore is, but also about the kinds of people who are, or should be,
there. The next two sections elaborate this by explicating, first, Singapore’s
raciolinguistic situation, and second, by tracing out various “geographic
solutions to difference and political crisis” (McKittrick, 2006, 34)
through which race and language get co-naturalized and spatially located
in Singapore.
 2 Southeast Asian Island City-State, Singapore: Multi-Scalar… 31

Singapore’s Raciolinguistic Situation

As myriad critical scholars have demonstrated, encounters with differ-
ence in Singapore are racialized by default (PuruShotam, 1998; Goh,
2010; Chan & Siddique, 2019). As my own ethnographic research has
also shown, this observation should not be understood as a statement of
analytic necessity; rather, it describes an empirical-ethnographic reality.
To emphasize the raciolinguistic construction of difference in Singapore
is not to ignore or deny other intersectional axes of differentiation.
Instead, it is to point out the ways that individuals navigate encounters
with difference by attempting to fix interactants to locations in a racial
ordering project. This work happens from within asymmetric positions
intersectionally structured by historical, institutional, and interactional
defaults (Rosa & Flores, 2017, p. 623; p. 637).
As reflexively modernist, co-naturalized constructs, language and race
have been deeply intertwined in Singapore from the British colonial
period onward. Further, the intersections of language and race have been
variously institutionalized across state bureaucracies and other sites.
Singapore’s population is officially categorized according to a standard-
ized model known as CMIO, an acronym referring to Singapore’s four
official “races,” each with an official “Mother Tongue” language: Chinese-­
Singaporeans comprise 76% of the population and speak Mandarin;
Malay-Singaporeans make up 14% of the population and speak Malay;
Indian-Singaporeans comprise 7% of the population and have Tamil as
an official “Mother Tongue,” though Tamil speakers comprise a slim
majority of all officially Indian people in Singapore; finally, Other is
simultaneously an administratively capacious and ideologically narrow
category.2 Because of bilingual education policy from the 1970s onward
(Tan, 2017), Singapore also comprises a society of what sociolinguist
Anne Pakir has called “English-knowing bilinguals” (Pakir, 1991):

2
For an in-depth historical overview, see PuruShotam, 1998. Further complicating any simple
raciolinguistic picture of Singaporean-Indian as a category is the fact that five “non-Tamil Indian
Languages” (Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Urdu) are also available for “Mother Tongue”
instruction today due to early-2000s advocacy efforts (Cavallaro & Ng, 2014, pp. 40–41). “Others”
historically referred only to mixed-race descendants of European and East-Asian intermarriages,
but today also includes anyone who does not fall into the CMI categories.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 PLANT OR ANIMAL?

D ID you ever stop to ask yourself, “What is the difference

between a plant and an animal?” because this is the place
where that question should be answered.
“Why, an animal is altogether different from a plant,” you answer,
perhaps a little scornfully. “I have no trouble in telling which is which.”
It is very natural that you should feel this way. A cow or a horse,
for example, is not at all like a tree; and when you think of animals,
you think of the ones you know best, and likewise of plants.
But wise men have discovered plants that look and act so much
like animals, and animals that look and act so much like plants, that
at one time they say, “Now, these are animals, surely,” and a little
later exclaim, “No, after all, these are plants;” and they take a long
time to make up their minds as to whether certain objects are plants
or animals.
And already even you children have discovered that the plants you
know best belong to families, and have children, and care for them in
a very motherly fashion; that they drink earth food with their roots,
and eat carbon food with their leaves; and soon you will find that
they do many other things which once upon a time you would have
thought it a great joke to be told a plant could do.
You remember my telling you of one little plant cell that could
swim; and there are some animals, you know, that are rooted to one
spot as we usually think only a plant is rooted.
What, then, is the difference between a plant and an animal?
Leaf Green and Sunbeam between them put life into what had no
life before; and the living plant matter, which they help to make, is
that which animals cannot make themselves, yet which they cannot
live without, for this living matter is absolutely necessary to them as
food.
 And the one real difference between a plant and an animal is this,
—a plant can make out of certain dead substances the living matter
that all animals must have for food; an animal cannot do this.
HOW WE ARE HELPED BY LEAF GREEN AND
SUNBEAM

T HE cell in which Leaf Green lives has no little mouths such as

we saw in the picture some time ago.
Its walls are so delicate that the carbonic-acid gas passes through
them quite easily,—as easily as the gas escaping from an unlighted
jet in the schoolroom could pass to your nose even if you wore a veil,
or as easily as water would pass through a piece of muslin.
But between Leaf Green’s cell and the outer air are other cells,—
those which make up the outer covering or skin of the leaf. These
are arranged so as to form the openings or mouths about which we
have read. By means of these mouths the gas makes its way
through the leaf’s thick skin.
The plant needs as food the carbon in this gas, and so keeps fast
hold of it; but the oxygen is not needed for this purpose, and so it is
pushed back into the air.
Now, we learned in the last chapter of one very great service
rendered to animals by plants. We learned that plants took carbon
from the air, and turned this into food for animals.
But there is still another way in which plants serve animals. And
once more it is the work of Leaf Green and Sunbeam that is of such
importance to us; for when they take hold of the carbon, making it
into living food for man and beast, they take from the air the gas that
is poisonous, and send back into the air the gas which gives life and
health.
This poisonous gas which they lay hold of, you remember, is
carbonic-acid gas; and carbonic-acid gas is what we animals send
out of our bodies with every breath, for it is the part of the air which
poisons us. When the schoolroom is so close that our heads ache, it
is because so many children have been breathing out this gas, and
we are forced to take it back into our bodies again.
 But when this gas is stolen by the plant, and robbed of its carbon,
it is no longer carbonic-acid gas. Nothing of it is left but the oxygen
which is pushed out through the cell walls; and this oxygen is as
good to breathe as the other gas (carbon and oxygen mixed) is bad.
So the plant finds good what we find poisonous. It takes in and
keeps that which hurts us (the carbon), and sends out that which
helps us (the oxygen).
So you see that our lives depend on the lives of plants in two
ways:—
1. The plants give us the food we need for life.
2. The plants take from the air the gas that poisons us, and give to
the air the gas which we need for life and health.
And in both cases it is Leaf Green and Sunbeam who are making
life possible for us.
Remember the great services of these two fairies when next you
pass a green tree which is bathing itself in sunshine.
 HOW A PLANT BREATHES

P ERHAPS you have heard people say that it is not good to sleep
in a room with plants.
They say this, because they have heard that at night the plant
does not give out oxygen, but that it does give out the poisonous
carbonic-acid gas.
Now, you children know that part of this statement is true.
You know that the plant cannot give out oxygen at night, because
at that time there is no Sunbeam about to help Leaf Green tear apart
carbonic-acid gas and send the oxygen back into the air.
But how about the other part of the statement?
Is it true that at night plants give out the poisonous carbonic-acid
gas?
Both day and night, plants give out carbonic-acid gas; for though
plants, save in the sunlight, cannot eat by means of their little green
cells, they can breathe through the tiny mouths (Fig. 137) on the
under side of the leaf by night as well as by day.
And when either a plant or an animal breathes, it takes the life-
giving oxygen from out the air mixture, and keeps it for its own use.
But poisonous carbonic-acid gas is sent back into the air. Now, the
question is, whether a plant does most good or most harm to the air
by taking in and sending out the different gases.
Of course, it does good when it lets the oxygen out through its cell
walls, and stores away the carbon within itself; and it may seem to
do harm when through its leaf mouths it breathes in oxygen and
breathes out carbonic-acid gas.
There is only one key to unlock the matter, and that is this,—to find
out whether the plant does most towards poisoning or towards
purifying the air.
And that has been found out already.
 Wise men say that Leaf Green and Sunbeam do much more good
to the air than the little breathing mouths do harm. The two good
fairies take away a great deal of poison, and send back a great deal
of the helpful oxygen; while the tiny mouths neither rob the air of
much oxygen nor give it much poison. Indeed, the harm they do is so
small compared with the great good accomplished by Leaf Green
and Sunbeam, that even at night you need not worry at the thought
that you have plants in your room.
Perhaps you wonder that a plant does these two things that are so
exactly opposite to each other.
But a plant must breathe as well as eat; for when it breathes, it
takes in the precious oxygen which is just as necessary to its life as
to ours.
In summer, by the dusty roadside, you see plants almost white
with dust, looking quite ill and lifeless.
And they are both ill and lifeless; for their little leaf throats are so
choked that they cannot breathe in the oxygen they need, and in
consequence they are being slowly suffocated.
 THE DILIGENT TREE

N OW we have learned three things about plants, and especially

about leaves. We have learned—
1. That they perspire.
2. That they eat and drink.
3. That they breathe.
They perspire when the water passes through the leaf mouths into
the air.
They eat when Leaf Green and Sunbeam together manage to take
the carbon out of the carbonic-acid gas which has made its entrance
through the leaf mouth and the cell wall. They drink when the roots
suck in water and earth broth.
They breathe when the leaf mouths take from the air the oxygen,
and give back to it carbonic-acid gas.
The veins and veinlets, of which you see so many running through
a leaf, act in something the same way as the water pipes of a city;
for through these veins the watery food, the earth broth, is carried to
the different cells.
When one knows all that we know even now about a plant, one
looks at a tree covered with leaves with a good deal of admiration.
Just think of what is being done inside that quiet-looking tree!
Think of the millions of cells that go to make it up, each cell having
its own work to do! Think of the immense amount of business being
carried on within the trunk, inside the branches, and especially in
each green leaf! And when you have the chance, notice how hard
each leaf tries to get just as much sun and air as it possibly can.
In the first place, the thin, flat leaf blades are so spread out that
every part is exposed to the light and air.
 Then notice how the leaves are placed in reference to one
another.
Almost every single one is fastened to the tree so as to get its fair
share of sunshine.
When you think of the many thousands of leaves borne by one
tree, it astonishes you to see how seldom one leaf gets in another’s
light.
And the shapes of leaves are always suited to their arrangement
on the tree.
If you should take the leaves of a chestnut tree and replace them
by the leaves of a maple, you would find the maple leaves all getting
in each other’s way, or else you would see that they were taking up a
great deal more room than necessary.
But when a leaf is studied on its own tree, one sees that its shape
is the very best that could be imagined for its position.
And in the smaller plants we notice this same thing.
And when you remember that Leaf Green cannot feed the plant
unless Sunbeam comes to her assistance, you realize how
necessary it is that each leaf be within the reach of Sunbeam’s visits.
 LEAVES AND ROOTS

Y OU will be surprised to learn that the way in which a plant’s

leaves grow tells us something of the way in which its roots
grow.
Many of you have been overtaken far from home in a rainstorm,
and have sought shelter under a spreading tree. The ground directly
beneath the tree has kept almost dry even after some hours of rain,
but the earth just under the tips of the spreading branches got very
wet: for the great tree acted like a large umbrella; and when the
raindrops fell upon the smooth leaves, which sloped outward and
downward, they rolled from leaf to leaf till they reached the very
lowest, outermost leaves of all. From these they fell to the ground,
just as the drops that gather upon your umbrella run outward and
downward to the umbrella’s edge, and then off upon the ground.
So you can see that the circle of earth which marks the spread of
the branches above must be specially wet, as it received a great part
of the rain which fell upon the whole tree.
And whenever you see a tree which sheds the rain water in such a
circle, you can be pretty sure that, if you should dig into the earth a
ditch which followed this circle, you would soon reach the tips of the
new root branches of the tree.
You know that the root does the drinking for the plant; and only the
newest parts of the root, the fresh root tips, are really good for work
of this sort. You remember that the earth food is carried up the stem
to the leaves in a watery broth; and that if the water supply should
give out, the new plant cells would not get the broth which helps
them to grow, and to put out other cells, and so to build up the plant.
Now, as only the new root branches, near their tips, are able to
drink, if the water should leak through the earth in equal quantities
everywhere, much of it would be wasted; but when this water is
collected in certain spots within reach of the new root branches,
there is good reason to believe that these will be able to satisfy their
thirst.
By the shedding of the rain from the tips of the spreading branches
above, the water is collected in a ring, and so sinks into the earth;
and the root branches below spread out in just the same direction as
the tree branches above, till they find what they need, and drink their
fill.

Fig. 138

So by the way in which a tree sheds the rain, you can tell just
where its root branches reach out underground.
In smaller plants you see much the same thing. Fig. 138 shows a
plant called the Caladium. You can see that the raindrops must roll
outward down these leaves, and fall upon the earth just above the
tips of the root branches.
Fig. 139 shows you the rhubarb plant. This has quite a different
sort of root. Now, if the rhubarb leaves were like those of the
Caladium, unless the rhubarb root-branches changed their direction,
these root-branches would grow very thirsty indeed.
 Fig. 139

But as it is, the water pours down these leaves toward the center
of the plant, and reaches the ground almost directly over the straight,
fleshy root, with its downward-growing branches; and we see that
these root-branches are watered by the leaves above just as
carefully as are those of the Caladium.
By knowing one thing about a plant, often you can guess that
another thing is so.
You understand now that when the leaves of a plant shed rain
water after the fashion of the Caladium, the chances are that its root-
branches spread out as far as the drip of the water; and that the root
of the rhubarb points almost straight downward, is told you by the
drip of water from the rhubarb leaves.
 LEAF VEINS

S OME time ago you learned that from the stem of a plant you
could guess the number of seed leaves which it brought into the
world, and that in the same way from the seed leaves you could
guess what kind of a stem it would build up.
From the way in which a leaf is veined you can guess both of
these things. You can guess what sort of a stem belongs to the plant,
and with how many seed leaves it began life.
When the little veins run in and out, forming a sort of network, we
say that the leaf is “net-veined.”

Fig. 140
 Fig. 141

Fig. 142

These leaves of the quince (Fig. 140), the maple (Fig. 141), and
the basswood (Fig. 142) are all net-veined.
Net-veined leaves are borne by plants which brought into the
world more than one seed leaf; and with the net-veined leaf we can
expect to find that stem which comes with more than one seed leaf,
—a stem where the skin or bark, the woody rings, and the soft
central pith, are clearly separated one from another.
 Fig. 143

Fig. 144

But a leaf such as that in Fig. 143 or that in Fig. 144, where the
veins do not branch off in a network, but run in unbroken lines side
by side,—such leaves as these tell you that they are borne by plants
which started life with only one seed leaf, and which have such a
stem as the cornstalk, where you see no woody rings or central pith.
These leaves are called “parallel-veined.”
I fear that you find all this a little difficult to understand and to
remember; but if you read it patiently, when you study the botany for
older children, I think it will come back to you and make your lessons
easier.
 LEAF SHAPES

A S I told you before, we should notice always the shape of a leaf.

Fig. 145
 It is much easier to describe some new plant we have met on our
walks if we remember the shape of its leaves.
Next summer I hope you will make a collection of leaves, pressing
and keeping them. I think you will be amazed at their great variety in
shape.

Fig. 146

Some you find long and narrow, others almost round. Some are
arrow-shaped, others star-shaped, others needle-shaped (Fig. 145).
Some are three-pointed like the maple leaf (Fig. 146); others deeply-
parted, like the oak leaf (Fig. 147).

Fig. 147
 Sometimes a large leaf is cut up into several little leaves. These
little leaves are called “leaflets.”

Fig. 148

The clover leaf (Fig. 148) has three leaflets.

Fig. 149

The locust leaf (Fig. 149) is cut into a great many leaflets.
The edge of one leaf (Fig. 150) is smooth, while that of another is
cut into little teeth (Fig. 151) like the teeth of a saw.
 Fig. 150

Fig. 151

I should like to know how many of you children, without looking

even at a picture save such as you carry in that little gallery in your
head, could describe correctly the shapes of some of our common
leaves. I should like to ask you to draw on the blackboard the rough
outlines of any leaves that you remember. If you think you could not
do this, will you not try, when next you see a leaf, to carry off in your
mind such a picture of it as to enable you to outline it on the
blackboard when you go back to the school room?
Really it does not take any more time to see a thing correctly than
to see it incorrectly. It takes a little more sense, that is all.
It takes some sense to give even one minute of honest thought to
the thing you are looking at.
You know some children who never seem to have all their
thoughts in one place at a time, and who in consequence never see
anything really well.
 It is better to stop doing a thing altogether than to do it in a foolish
sort of way; and it is foolish to start to do even the smallest thing,
and yet not do it.
The child who looks at even a leaf in a way to make it possible for
him to draw the outline of that leaf five minutes later, is likely to be
the child who goes in for both work and play with all his heart, and
who comes out as far ahead on the playground as he does in the
schoolroom.
Now, after that lecture, which some of you need badly enough
(and which I will tell you, as a great secret, I need not a little myself),
I want to point out a few more of the things that are worth noticing in
a leaf.
But perhaps it is better to save them for another chapter.
 HAIRY LEAVES

N OTICE always whether a leaf is smooth or hairy. Do you

remember the mullein that sends up its tall spires over the hill
pasture? The grayish leaves of this mullein are so hairy that they feel
almost like wool. What is the use of all this hair? It is not likely that a
plant would wrap itself in this hairy coat except for some good
reason.
It is believed that this coating of the mullein prevents animals from
eating the leaves, and so destroying the plant. In the mouth, these
hairs slip from the leaf blade, and cause a most unpleasant
sensation.
But usually the hairs on a leaf are helpful because they prevent
too much perspiration or giving-off of water. The more freely the hot
sun beats upon a leaf, the more quickly the water is drawn away
from it. You can see just how this is by hanging a wet towel in front of
the fire. In a very short time the heat from the burning coals draws
the water from the towel. But put a screen between the fire and the
towel, and the water passes off more slowly.
Now, the hairs on that side of the leaf which faces the sun act as a
screen from its fierce heat. We have learned how important it is that
the leaf should not part with its water more quickly than the roots can
make up the loss. We know that when a leaf does this, it wilts just as
a leaf wilts when it is picked and cut off from its water supply, on
account of the collapse of the walls of the many little cells which are
emptied of water.
So you can understand that plants which grow in dry, sunny
places, where there is little drinking water for the roots, and where
the sun beats constantly on the leaves, must take every care that
there is no waste of water.
And if you keep your eyes open, you will discover that many of the
plants which grow in such places screen themselves from the full
heat of the sun by a coat of hairs.