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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.

An insightful exploration of the impact of urban change on Black culture, identity, and language Across the United States, cities are changing. Gentrification is transforming urban landscapes, often pushing local Black populations to the margins. As a result, communities with rich histories and strong identities grapple with essential questions. What does it mean to be from a place in flux? What does it mean to be a specific kind of person from that place? What does gentrification mean for the fabric of a community? In The Black Side of the River, sociolinguist Jessi Grieser draws on ten years of interviews with dozens of residents of Anacostia, a historically Black neighborhood in Washington, DC, to explore these ideas through the lens of language use. Grieser finds that residents use certain speech features to create connections among racial, place, and class identities; reject negative characterizations of place from those outside the community; and negotiate ideas of belonging. In a neighborhood undergoing substantial class gentrification while remaining decisively Black, Grieser finds that Anacostians use language to assert a positive, hopeful place identity that is inextricably intertwined with their racial one. Grieser's work is a call to center Black lived experiences in urban research, confront the racial effects of urban change, and preserve the rich culture and community in historic Black neighborhoods, in Washington, DC, and beyond.

In a series of interviews conducted in the years preceding his death in 2012, activist and scholar Neville Alexander reflected on how the languages he had used throughout his life shaped his world and his relationships with his immediate and wider communities. A version of these conversations was published in German in 2011 by Drava Verlag. In this reconstruction, the only extensive (auto)biographical work about Alexander in print in English, his belief in the emancipatory potential of multilingualism frames his vividly recalled life and his incisive observations about language in post-apartheid South Africa. He speaks candidly about his childhood in the Eastern Cape, his political awakening and Robben island incarceration. He also gives an insider's view of how South Africa's post- apartheid language dispensation was shaped. The book also includes some of Alexander's seminal writings on multilingualism, a rewarding yet often neglected aspect of his work.

This book analyses the communicative structure of interpersonal, or casual, conversation. The author shows how the balance of conversation can be upset by variations in the status of the participants during the conversation and how the participants frequently adopt the strategy of negatively evaluating non-present third persons to redress the balance. The repair of such interactional trouble motivates topic change and major topic movement. The author uses transcripts of actual recorded conversations thus providing extensive support for her observations and analysis. Christine Cheepen is currently a Research Fellow in Articial Intelligence at the Hatfield Polytechnic, U.K. Her abiding interest is in linguistics, - in particular the study of natural conversation, and she has recently been involved in research connected with various computational projects. She has combined these two areas of interest, and is presently working primarily on aspects of dialogue in the human/machine interface.

This book provides readers with the latest research on the dynamics of language and language diversity in professional contexts. Bringing together novel findings from a range of disciplines, it challenges practitioners and management scholars to question the conventional understanding of language as a tool that can be managed by language policies that 'standardize' language. Each of the contributions is designed to recognize the strides that have been made in the past two decades in research on language and languages in organizational settings while addressing remaining blind spots and emerging issues. Particular attention is given to multilingualism, sociolinguistic approaches to language in the workplace, migration challenges, critical perspectives on the power of language use and the management of organizations as dialogical, discursive spaces. Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Multilingualism in Professional Contexts offers new insights into familiar and less familiar issues for international business scholars, sociolinguists, management practitioners and business communication scholars and experts, and brings understanding to the central role that language usage and linguistic diversity play in organisational processes.

Changing practices and perceptions of parenthood and family life have long been the subject of intense public, political and academic attention. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role digital media and technologies can play in these shifts, yet this topic has been under-explored from a discourse analytical perspective. In response, this book's investigation of everyday parenting, family practices and digital media offers a new and innovative exploration of the relationship between parenting, family practices, and digitally mediated connection. This investigation is based on extensive digital and interview data from research with nine UK-based single and/or lesbian, gay or bisexual parents who brought children into their lives in non-traditional ways, for example through donor conception, surrogacy or adoption. Through a novel approach that combines constructivist grounded theory with mediated discourse analysis, this book examines connected family lives and practices in a way that transcends the limiting social, biological and legal structures that still dominate concepts of family in contemporary society.

The volume offers an up-to-date overview of the influence of English on Italian, bringing together the linguistic and the cultural dimensions. The history of language contact between Italy and Anglo-American societies is the basis for understanding lexical borrowing and for identifying the domains of vocabulary more intensely affected in time. Drawing on previous research and on existing lexicographic evidence, this book presents a typology of borrowings based on a new, usage-based word list of Italian Anglicisms which is part of a larger multilingual project (GLAD - Global Anglicism Database). The topics covered are the number of Anglicisms in Italian, their frequency in specialist fields and registers, the blurred area between borrowing and the circulation of international vocabulary, luxury loans and casuals. The book rounds up with the cultural debate on English-only education, which has recently stirred purist concerns, marking an attitudinal shift of Italian from an 'open' to a 'protectionist' language towards exogenous influences. This book is addressed primarily to scholars and university students, but also to a lay audience of non-experts, interested in the linguistic and cultural contacts between English and Italian.