This is the first work of its kind to bring together a wide range of studies of major sociolinguistic issues as they concern the languages of South Africa.

Written by specialists in their fields, the contributions deal with such topics as language contact, language loss, the formation of pidgins, Creoles and social dialects, and language policy and planning.

The book is aimed chiefly at all students of linguistics and language, and will be of use and interest as well to historians, sociologists, speech therapists and anthropologists.

Haunting Hands looks closely at the consequences of digital media's ubiquitous presence in our lives, in particular the representing, sharing, and remembering of loss. From Facebook tribute pages during public disasters to the lingering digital traces on a smartphone of the deceased, the digital is both extending earlier memorial practices and creating new ways in which death and loss manifest themselves. The ubiquity of digital specters is particularly evident in mobile media spanning smartphones, iPads, iPhones, or tablets. Mobile media entangle various forms of social, online and digital media in specific ways that are both intimate and public, and yet the use of mobile media in contexts of loss has been relatively overlooked. Haunting Hands seeks to address this growing and important area by helping us to understand the relationship between life, death, and our digital after-lives.

Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site (Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site), and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site's management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed.

The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently "dialogical." No speaker speaks alone, because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves, but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on "the monologic imagination" gives us new insights into languages' political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.

Linguistic Rivalries weaves together anthropological accounts of diaspora, nation, and empire to explore and analyze the multi-faceted processes of globalization characterizing the migration and social integration experiences of Tamil-speaking immigrants and refugees from India and Sri Lanka to Montreal, Quebec in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Montreal, a city with more trilingual speakers than in any other North American city, Tamil migrants draw on their multilingual repertoires to navigate longstanding linguistic rivalries between anglophone and francophone, and Indian and Sri Lankan nationalist leaders by arguing that Indians speak "Spoken Tamil " and Sri Lankans speak "Written Tamil " as their respective heritage languages. Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and linguistic methods to compare and contrast the communicative practices and language ideologies of Tamil heritage language learning in Hindu temples, Catholic churches, public schools, and community centers, this book demonstrates how processes of sociolinguistic differentiation are mediated by ethnonational, religious, class, racial, and caste hierarchies. Indian Tamils showcase their use of the "cosmopolitan " sounds and scripts of colloquial varieties of Tamil to enhance their geographic and social mobilities, whereas Sri Lankan Tamils, dispossessed of their homes by civil war, instead emphasize the "primordialist " sounds and scripts of a pure "literary " Tamil to rebuild their homeland and launch a "global " critique of racism and environmental destruction from the diaspora. This book uses the ethnographic and archival study of Tamil mobility and immobility to expose the mutual constitution of elite and non-elite global modernities, defined as language ideological projects in which migrants objectify dimensions of time and space through scalar metaphors.

This volume responds to a growing interest in the language of legal settings by situating the study of language and law within contemporary theoretical debates in discourse studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. The chapters in the collection explore many of the common occasions when those acting on behalf of the legal system, such as the police, lawyers and judges, interact with those coming into contact with the legal system, such as suspects and witnesses. However the chapters do this work through the conceptual lens of 'textual travel', or the way that texts move across space and time and are transformed along the way. Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways in which texts can influence, and are influenced by, social and legal life. With contributions from leading experts in language and law, Legal-Lay Communication explores such 'textual travel' themes as the mediating role of technologies in the investigatory stages of the legal process, the centrality of intertextuality in the legal construction of cases in court, the transformative effects of recontextualization in processes of judicial decision-making, and the way that processes of textual travel disturb the apparent permanence of legal categorization. The book challenges both the notion of legal text as a static repository of meaning and the very idea of legal-lay or lay-legal communication.

Anita Pomerantz is one of the pioneers of Conversation Analysis (CA), a field that has grown from a small and marginalized subfield into a significant, international, multidisciplinary field of inquiry. CA now enjoys widespread acceptance and appreciation, thanks in large part to Pomerantz's contributions. Asking and Telling in Conversation collects Pomerantz's most influential articles across the span of her career, focusing on the complexities of asking and telling something to another person. The actions of asking and telling may seem straightforward, but speakers deal with a number of complexities when they ask and tell. Pomerantz's work focuses on the ways in which the performances of asking and telling are shaped by, and shape, the identities of the participants, the activities in which they are engaged, what was said and done prior to the actions in question, and the anticipated reactions to their talk and action. Each of the volume's nine chapters is framed by original pieces by Pomerantz which discuss the significance and contribution of the article to current studies in CA. In addition to the new introductions and closing commentary for each work, this book includes full introductory and concluding chapters that draw out the connections across the author's work. Pomerantz also shares her reflections on preference organization, which she first analyzed in her foundational research nearly fifty years ago. Bringing together seminal works of CA with contemporary analysis in the field, this book sheds new light on important questions-and answers-in communication studies. A collection of work from a foremost scholar, Asking and Telling in Conversation is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Conversation Analysis.

Nationalism informs our ideas about language, culture, identity, nation, and State--ideas that are being challenged by globalization and an emerging new economy. As language, culture, and identity are commodified, multilingualism becomes a factor in the mobility of people, ideas and goods--and in their value.
In Paths to Post-Nationalism, Monica Heller shows how hegemonic discourses of language, identity, and the nation-State are destabilized under new political and economic conditions. These processes, she argues, put us on the path to post-nationalism. Applying a fine-grained ethnographic analysis to the notion of "francophone Canada" from the 1970s to the present, Heller examines sociolinguistic practices in workplaces, schools, community associations, NGOs, State agencies, and sites of tourism and performance across francophone North America and Europe. Her work shows how the tensions of late modernity produce competing visions of social organization and competing sources of legitimacy in attempts to re-imagine--or resist re-imagining--who we are.

This volume offers a representative selection of Sally McConnell-Ginet's publications on language, gender and sexuality, which circle around the following themes: language users are actively engaged in making meanings, both as speakers and listeners; languages and socio-political institutions constrain, but do not determine, communicative possibilities; attention to language deepens understanding of gender and sexuality, including connections to ethnicity, class, race, and other dimensions of social identity and inequality.

A surging movement for Catalan political independence from Spain has brought renewed urgency to questions about what it means, personally and politically, to speak or not to speak Catalan and to claim Catalan identity. This book develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and uses it to illuminate the politics of language in Catalonia, where Catalan jostles with Castilian for legitimacy. Kathryn Woolard's longitudinal research across decades of political autonomy contextualizes this ethnographic study of the social meaning of Catalan in the 21st century. Part I lays out the ideologies of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, and naturalism that underpin linguistic authority in the modern western world, and gives an overview of a shift in the ideological grounding of linguistic authority in contemporary Catalonia. Part II examines discourses in the media surrounding three public linguistic controversies: an immigrant president's linguistic competence, a municipal festival, and an international book fair. Part III explores individuals' linguistic practices and views, drawing on classroom ethnographies and interviews with two generations of young people from the same high school. Woolard argues that there is an ongoing shift at both public and personal levels away from the ethnolinguistic authenticity that powered relations in the early transition to political autonomy, and toward new discourses of anonymity, rooted cosmopolitanism, and authenticity understood as a project rather than a matter of origins and essence.

This book explores the history of Pittsburghese, the language of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area as it is imagined and used by Pittsburghers. Pittburghese is linked to local identity so strongly that it is alluded to almost every time people talk about what Pittsburgh is like, or what it means to be a Pittsburgher. But what happened during the second half of the 20th century to reshape a largely unnoticed way of speaking into this highly visible urban "dialect"? In this book, sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone focuses on this question. Treating Pittsburghese as a cultural product of talk, writing, and other forms of social practice, Johnstone shows how non-standard pronunciations, words, and bits of grammar used in the Pittsburgh area were taken up into a repertoire of words and phrases and a vocal style that has become one of the most resonant symbols of local identity in the United States today.

When talk circulates through technological media - through television or radio and through the activities they support, like the dissemination of news, product advertising or entertainment - it takes on distinctive characteristics, functions and styles. The talking media have developed their own ways of styling individuals (often as celebrities of different types, but also as 'ordinary people'), and ways of styling relationships (such as constructing informality or trust or authority). Media also style their own ways of communicating (how to read the news, how to conduct interviews, how to entertain or educate others, and so on). Media invest heavily in style and styling, drawing on semiotic modes well beyond speech itself. 'Style' therefore needs to be theorised carefully in sociolinguistics and neighbouring disciplines. Episodes and fragments of mediated styles commonly take on new lives when they are re-circulated via interactive 'new' media platforms. Style therefore points to both stability, where ways of speaking and ways of being have become culturally familiar, and to instability, in the talking media's persistent dynamic reworking of stylistic norms. This book explores a wide range of normative structures and creative media processes of this sort, in many different national contexts and in different languages. The globalised world is already massively mediatised - what we know about language, people and society is necessarily shaped through our engagement with media. But talking media are caught up in wider currents of rapid change too. Creative innovations in media styling can heighten our reflexive awareness, but they can also unsettle our existing understandings of language-society relations. In reporting new investigations by expert researchers, situated in relation to relevant theory, the book gives an original and timely account of how style, media and change need to be integrated further to advance the discipline of sociolinguistics.

Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with scholarship on superdiversity while highlighting some points of engagement with work on ideas about community. The book draws upon a broad range of scholarship on Indonesia, recordings of Indonesian television from the mid-1990s onwards, and recordings of the talk of Indonesian students living in Japan. It is argued that some of the main mechanisms for the reproduction and revaluation of ethnicity and its links with linguistic form include waves of technological innovations that bring people into contact (e.g. changes in transportation infrastructure, introduction of print media, television, radio, the internet, etc.), and the increasing use of one-to-many participation frameworks such as school classrooms and the mass media. In examining the talk of sojourning Indonesians the book goes on to explore how ideologies about ethnicity are used to establish and maintain convivial social relations while in Japan. Maintaining such relationships is not a trivial thing and it is argued that the pursuit of conviviality is an important practice because of its relationship with broader concerns about eking out a living.

This readable book presents a new general theoretical understanding of politeness. It offers an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken largely from authentic British and American sources. Building on his earlier pioneering work on politeness, Geoffrey Leech takes a pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that politeness is communicative altruism. Leech's 1983 book, Principles of Pragmatics, introduced the now widely-accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness; this book returns to the pragmalinguistic side, somewhat neglected in recent work. Drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, Leech rejects the prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms 'polite' or 'impolite' to linguistic phenomena. Leech covers all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and disagreement. Additional chapters deal with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony ("mock politeness") and banter ("mock impoliteness"), and with the role of politeness in the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter takes a fascinating look at more than a thousand years of history of politeness in the English language.

Few conversational topics can be as significant as our troubles in life, whether everyday and commonplace, or more exceptional and disturbing. In groundbreaking research conducted with John Lee at the University of Manchester UK, Gail Jefferson turned the microscope on how people talk about their troubles, not in any professional or therapeutic setting, but in their ordinary conversations with family and friends. Through recordings of interactions in which people talk about problems they're having with their children, concerns about their health, financial problems, marital and relationship difficulties (their own or other people's), examination failures, dramatic events such as burglaries or a house fire and other such troubles, Jefferson explores the interactional dynamics and complexities of introducing such topics, of how speakers sustain and elaborate their descriptions and accounts of their troubles, how participants align and affiliate with one another, and finally manage to move away from such topics. The studies Jefferson published out of that remarkable period of research have been collected together in this volume. They are as insightful and informative about how we talk about our troubles, as they are innovative in the development and application of Conversation Analysis. Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) was one of the co-founders of Conversation Analysis (CA); through her early collaboration with Harvey Sacks and in her subsequent research, she laid the foundations for what has become an immensely important interdisciplinary paradigm. She co-authored, with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, two of the most highly cited articles ever published in Language, on turn-taking and repair. These papers were foundational, as was the transcription system that she developed and that is used by conversation analysts world-wide. Her research papers were a distinctive and original voice in the emerging micro-analysis of interaction in everyday life.

Across scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries like female versus male and gay versus straight have been problematized as a symbol of the stigmatization and erasure of non-normative subjects and practices. The chapters in Queer Excursions offer a series of distinct perspectives on these binaries, as well as on a number of other, less immediately apparent dichotomies that nevertheless permeate the gendered and sexual lives of speakers. Several chapters focus on the limiting or misleading qualities of binaristic analyses, while others suggest that binaries are a crucial component of social meaning within particular communities of study. Rather than simply accepting binary structures as inevitable, or discarding them from our analyses entirely based on their oppressive or reductionary qualities, this volume advocates for a re-theorization of the binary that affords more complex and contextually-grounded engagement with speakers' own orientations to dichotomous systems. It is from this perspective that contributors identify a number of diverging conceptualizations of binaries, including those that are non-mutually exclusive, those that liberate in the same moment that they constrain, those that are imposed implicitly by researchers, and those that re-contextualize familiar divisions with innovative meanings. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on locally salient linguistic practices that help constitute gender and sexuality in marginalized communities. As a collection, Queer Excursions argues that researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that our own preconceptions about binary social structures will be shared by the communities we study.

Beyond Yellow English is the first edited volume to examine issues of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished contributors-who represent a broad range of perspectives from anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education-focus on the analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the APA experience. Authors cover topics such as media representations of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and geographic locations across home, school, community, and performance sites.

This accessible textbook offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in societies around the world. It is written for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics. It combines text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems.
In Part One Patrick Stevenson invites readers to investigate and reflect on issues about the status and function of the German language in relation to its speakers and to speakers of other languages with which it comes into contact. In Part Two the focus shifts to the forms and functions of individual features of the language. This involves, for example, identifying features of regional speech forms, analysing similarities and differences between written and spoken German, or looking at the 'social meaning' underlying different forms of address. Part Three explores the relationship between the German language and the nature of 'Germanness'. It concentrates on people's attitudes towards the language, the ways in which it is changing, and their views on what it represents for them.
Features and benefits of using this book:
* Comprehensive: provides the basis for a typical one-semester course
* Informative and practical: combines a review of current themes with graded exercises and relevant reading, plus an index of terms
* Topical and contemporary: deals with current situations with the most up-to-date information
* Has a workbook character: encourages students to think and work for themselves.
Patrick Stevenson is a lecturer in German in the School of Modern Languages, Southampton University.

Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book's 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology. While each chapter takes up different materials using different methods, they all chart relations between the key elements of agency: intentionality, causality, flexibility and accountability. Each chapter seeks to explain how and why such relations are distributed-not just across individuals, but also across bodies and minds, people and things, spaces and times. To do this, the authors work through empirical studies of particular cases, while also offering reviews and syntheses of key ideas from the authors' respective research traditions. Our goals with this collection of essays are to assemble insights from new research on the anatomy of human agency, to address divergent framings of the issues from different disciplines, and to suggest directions for new debates and lines of research. We hope that it will be a resource for researchers working on allied topics, and for students learning about the elements of human-specific modes of shared action, from causality, intentionality, and personhood to ethics, punishment, and accountability.

This book is an ethnography of labor mobility and its challenges to the idea of the nation. Using the example of francophone Canada, it examines how social difference-race, ethnicity, language, gender-has been used to sort out who must (or can) be mobile and who must (or can) remain in place in the organization of global circulation of human and natural resources. It argues that "francophone Canada" can best be understood as an ethnoclass category that has embedded francophones into specific forms of labor mobility since the beginnings of European colonization, even as their social difference has been constructed as national in the interests of gaining political power. The result has been an erasure both of francophone mobilities and of their contribution to the rooted community that lies at the heart of the idea of the nation, and of francophone capacity to resist economic marginalization and exploitation. By following French Canadian workers back and forth between eastern and central Canada and the frontiers of the Canadian northwest, Sustaining the Nation explores how contemporary forms of labor mobility make it increasingly difficult for national structures and discourses to produce the francophone nation. By following the ideological tensions between language as a skill and language as a marker of belonging, the authors present grounded evidence of how the globalized new economy challenges the nation-state, and how mobilities and immobilities are co-constructed.

This book examines gendered language use in six gay male subcultures: drag queens, radical faeries, bears, circuit boys, barebackers, and leathermen. Within each subculture, unique patterns of language use challenge normative assumptions about gender and sexual identity. Rusty Barrett's analyses of these subcultures emphasize the ways in which gay male constructions of gender are intimately linked to other forms of social difference. In From Drag Queens to Leathermen, Barrett presents an extension of his earlier work among African American drag queens in the 1990s, emphasizing the intersections of race and class in the construction of gender. An analysis of sacred music among radical faeries considers the ways in which expressions of gender are embedded in a broader neo-pagan religious identity. The formation of bear as an identity category (for heavyset and hairy men) in the late 1980s involves the appropriation of linguistic stereotypes of rural Southern masculinity. Among regular attendees of circuit parties, language serves to differentiate gay and straight forms of masculinity. In the early 2000s, barebackers (gay men who eschew condoms) used language to position themselves as rational risk takers with an innate desire for semen. For participants in the International Mr. Leather contest, a disciplined, militaristic masculinity links expressions of patriotism with BDSM sexual practice. In all of these groups, the construction of gendered identity involves combining linguistic forms that would usually not co-occur. These unexpected combinations serve as the foundation for the emergence of unique subcultural expressions of gay male identity, explicated at length in this book.

In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity, musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques strategies that are currently employed to support endangered musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat. Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued diversity of our global musical traditions.

To do ethnography, a researcher must have rapport with research subjects. But what is rapport? Ethnography and ethnographic methods have increasingly become a feature of social inquiry in general and sociolinguistics in particular, and rapport is generally considered a prerequisite for fieldwork. And yet, unlike related terms such as "communication" and "phatic communion," this concept has remained largely unexamined. Reimagining Rapport turns a critical eye to the use of the term "rapport" across disciplines. The collection analyzes the very idea of rapport, both exploring how it has been shaped by historical forces and actors within sociocultural anthropology, and questioning its usefulness. Rather than viewing the term as simply denoting a type of positive social relationship that needs to be formed between researcher and consultant before research can begin, this book invites us to reimagine rapport theoretically, methodologically, and meta-methodologically. Zane Goebel and other leading sociolinguists challenge readers to think about how rapport has been constructed within these disciplines, and ultimately to see rapport as an emergent, co-constructed social relationship that is actively built during situated multimodal encounters. The contributors collectively examine the role of ideology and mediation in the construction of rapport, and argue that reconceptualizing research-subject relationships is essential for establishing more sophisticated ways of understanding, interpreting, and representing research context. A valuable resource for scholars and students of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology-as well as for others engaged in ethnographic fieldwork-Reimagining Rapport is the first collection to provide an in-depth investigation of this critically important but previously unexamined concept.

In the early 1900s, the language of America was becoming colloquial English-the language of the businessman, manager, and professional. Since college and high school education were far from universal, many people turned to correspondence education-that era's distance learning-to learn the art of speaking and writing. By the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of Americans were sending coupons from newspapers and magazines to order Sherwin Cody's 100% Self-correcting Course in the English Language, a patented mail-order course in English that was taken by over 150,000 people.
Cody's ubiquitous signature advertisement, which ran for over forty years, promised a scientifically-tested invention that improved speaking and writing in just 15 minutes a day. Cody's ad explained that people are judged by their English, and he offered self-improvement and self-confidence through the mail.
In this book, linguist Edwin Battistella tells the story of Sherwin Cody and his famous English course, situating both the man and the course in early twentieth century cultural history. The author shows how Cody became a businessman-a writer, grammatical entrepreneur, and mass-marketer whose ads proclaimed "Good Money in Good English" and asked "Is Good English Worth 25 Cents to You?" His course, perhaps the most widely-advertised English education program in history, provides a unique window onto popular views of language and culture and their connection to American notions of success and failure. But Battistella shows Sherwin Cody was also part of a larger shift in attitudes. Using Cody's course as a reference point, he also looks at the self-improvement ethic reflected in such courses and products as theHarvard Classics, The Book of Etiquette, the Book-of-the-Month Club, the U.S. School of Music, and the Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie courses to illustrate how culture became popular and how self-reliance evolved into self-improvement.