Update: 14 February 2021
I was hasty in my judgment of this article. As a result of my myopia from being a white, middle-aged man (and, I must admit, excitement in seeing my own work cited), I failed to see some serious flaws in the introductory portion of the article and some questionable aspects of the analysis of the data. Conversations with several BIPOC scholars have caused me to revise my opinion.
The introduction completely ignores the work on this subject by scholars of color, citing only white scholars (like me) who have made only marginal contributions to the work on the term Anglo-Saxon and the topic of racism in medieval studies in general. This erasure of BIPOC scholars from the conversation is all too frequent. Not only is the erasure too significant on its own to be ignored, but it has implications for the analysis itself.
An example of this erasure is the omission of the work of Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm from the references. Dr. Rambaran-Olm has perhaps written more on this topic than any other scholar. Yet the authors are clearly aware of her contribution as they refer to it in their analysis, only they treat her as a subject of study instead of as a researcher, a move that not only erases her work but dehumanizes her as well.
Furthermore, despite the point of the paper being the problematic nature of the term Anglo-Saxon, the authors continue to use it to refer to the pre-Conquest period, a move that positions them in the debate over the term without explicitly declaring a conflict of interest.
This erasure implicates the analysis as well, in that a handful of white scholars, especially those that have shown they are insensitive to the racial implications of what they write, cannot be expected to note all the racist uses of the term. They are only likely to note the more egregious examples. As a result, this paper probably understates the number of ethno-racial uses of the term, and the analysis should be read in that light.
Original post follows:
12 February 2014
The following article is a must-read for anyone interested in questions regarding how the term Anglo-Saxon is used in present-day discourse:
Schmid, Hans-Jörg, Quirin Würschinger, Melanie Keller, and Ursula Lenker. “Battling for semantic territory across social networks. The case of Anglo-Saxon on Twitter.” Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 8.1, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2020-0002.
The article is a cognitive linguistics study that expands on the work on the term I previously published. It is an analysis of how Anglo-Saxon has been used on Twitter, in over half a million tweets from December 2006 through May 2020. It not only confirms what I had concluded using a different data set (I did not examine Twitter), it also uncovers additional nuances in how the term is being deployed.
The study uses the categories I outlined (ethno-racial, politico-cultural, and historical/pre-Conquest) and adds the category of metalinguistic, that is discussion of the term itself. (That category did not emerge from the corpora that I examined, but it’s a useful addition.)
In short, the study shows frequency of use of Anglo-Saxon is stable over time—an increase consistent with the growth of the Twitter platform—but that ethno-racial uses of Anglo-Saxon are increasing relative to the term’s other senses. And it also shows that the individual senses have become increasingly centralized in particular discourse communities, with each community adopting only one of the senses. So, for example, those engaged in medieval studies only tend to use historical/pre-Conquest category, while those who are politically oriented will tend to use only the ethno-racial one.
