Re: gibberish

William O. Beeman (William_Beeman@BROWN.EDU)
Fri, 27 Jan 1995 20:14:30 -0500

In article <GRAND%LISTS.ANTHRO.12730@brownvm.brown.edu> Joseph Rubenstein <IAPROD490@VAX003.STOCKTON.EDU> writes:
>I'm writing a paper on "gibberish' and other cryptic generes of talk. I have
>had some difficulty locating published reference materials on the subject. If
>anyone knows of any literature on the subject, I would like to hear from you.
>Most of my data has been collected from creole languages, but I am interested
>in "pig latins" from any source.
> Thank you.
> Laurie Greene
> Assistant Professor of Anthropology
> Richard Stockton College

You might check with Joel Sherzer at the University of Texas in Austin. A
number of years ago, he and Dick Bauman and others had a working paper series
called Penn-Texas working papers in the ethnography of communication or
something like that. IN any case, there were a number of papers on secret
languages in that series. For classic works, check out Hymes' Language in
Culture and Society which has enormous comprehensive bibliographies on every
possible language and culture topic, but all from pre-1970 sources.