Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2019 This book explores how political economy intersects with sociolinguistics, specifically how neoliberalism, inequality and social class mediate language in society issues. After the preface, in which the author sets the scene for the content of the book, Chapter 1 is an extensive, though selective, review of sociolinguistics research which has been framed as political economic in orientation. The chapter concludes that such research generally contains little in the way of thorough and in-depth coverage of the key ideas and conceptual frameworks said to undergird it. With this consideration in mind, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are organised around in-depth discussions of, respectively, political economy as a general disciplinary frame; neoliberalism as the variegated variety of capitalism dominant in the world today; and stratification, inequality and social class, as phenomena intrinsic to capitalism, which in the neoliberal era have come to the fore as key issues. Drawing directly on the background provide in Chapters 2-4, Chapters 5 and 6 explore two distinct political economy-informed lines of research, on the one hand, the 'neoliberal citizen', and on the other hand, 'discursive class warfare'. The book ends with an epilogue addressing issues arising around political economy in sociolinguistics.

Uncovering the structures and functions of conversational narratives uttered within natural social networks, Laine Berman shows how working-class Javanese women discursively construct identity and meaning within the rigid constraints of an hierarchical social order. She does this by identifying the silences, the "unsaid," and by revealing both the structure and function of silence in terms of its indexical reference to local meaning. It is here that the force of the Javanese language as used in everyday interaction shows itself to be an extremely potent philosophical entity as well as a means of social control. Thus, at least in regard to the urban poor, the book boldly questions the difference between traditional definitions of Javanese elegance and oppression. This study will contribute to our understanding of the social consequences of language use, to the linguistic knowledge of Indonesia and Java, and to such basic linguistic issues as narrative structure and function, speech levels and styles, and indexicality features.

This book brings applied linguistics and translation studies together through an analysis of literary texts in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean and their translations. It examines the traces of translanguaging in translated texts with special focus on the strategic use of scripts, morphemes, words, names, onomatopoeias, metaphors, puns and other contextualized linguistic elements. As a result, the author draws attention to the long-term, often invisible contributions of translanguaging performed by translators to the development of languages and society. The analysis sheds light on the problems caused by monolingualizing forces in translation, teaching and communicative contexts in modern societies, as well as bringing a new dimension to the burgeoning field of translanguaging studies.

Chinese immigrants who settle in Russia's Far East without formal instruction in the Russian language communicate with local Russians using Russian vocabulary. Each immigrant forms their language to communicate with Russians, not with family or other immigrants. The 'single-generation languages' that immigrants form are not replications or simplifications of Chinese or Russian. Grammatical systems formed by these speakers challenge some fundamental assumptions in early 21st-century linguistic theories. Grammatical systems of single-generation languages provide a unique window into how complex grammatical systems emerge, what are the first formal means of expression, and what are the first meanings expressed in grammatical systems. Given massive migrations in the contemporary world, single-generation languages are common, yet understudied, products of language contact.

Languages are constantly changing. New words are added to the English language every year, either borrowed or coined, and there is often railing against the decline of the language by public figures. Some languages, such as French and Finnish, have academies to protect them against foreign imports. Yet languages are species-like constructs, which evolve naturally over time. Migration, imperialism, and globalization have blurred boundaries between many of them, producing new ones (such as creoles) and driving some to extinction. This book examines the processes by which languages change, from the macroecological perspective of competition and natural selection. In a series of chapters, Salikoko Mufwene examines such themes as:natural selection in language. the actuation question and the invisible hand that drives evolution multilingualism and language contact language birth and language death. the emergence of Creoles and Pidgins the varying impacts of colonization and globalization on language vitality. This comprehensive examination of the organic evolution of language will be essential reading for graduate and senior undergraduate students, and for researchers on the social dynamics of language variation and change, language vitality and death, and even the origins of linguistic diversity.

Discourse Analysis: The Questions Discourse Analysts Ask and How They Answer Them is the first introductory text organized around the kinds of questions discourse analysts ask and how they are systematically addressed by analysts of different empirical persuasions, thereby cultivating a principled understanding of the interdisciplinary field of discourse analysis. The text promotes synthesis, integration, and a multidimensional understanding of the core issues that preoccupy discourse analysts. (1) How is discourse structured? (2) How are social actions accomplished in discourse? (3) How are identities negotiated in discourse? (4) How are ideologies constructed in discourse? The answer to each question is illustrated with transcripts and analyses of actual discourse as exemplified in key studies in the field. With a range of other features such as boxed definitions, study questions, and analytical tasks, this guide to the complex world of discourse is an ideal resource for courses on discourse analysis.

All communication involves acts of stance, in which speakers take up positions vis-a-vis the expressive, referential, interactional and social implications of their speech. This book brings together contributions in a new and dynamic current of academic explorations of stancetaking as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. Drawing on data from such diverse contexts as advertising, tourism, historical texts, naturally occurring conversation, classroom interaction and interviews, leading authors in the field of sociolinguistics in this volume explore how linguistic stancetaking is implicated in the representation of self, personal style and acts of stylization, and self- and other-positioning. The analyses also focus on how speakers deploy and take up stances vis-a-vis sociolinguistic variables and the critical role of stance in the processes of indexicalization: how linguistic forms come to be associated with social categories and meanings. In doing so, many of the authors address critical issues of power and social reproduction, examining how stance is implicated in the production, reproduction and potential change of social and linguistic hierarchies and ideologies. This volume maps out the terrain of existing sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research on stance, synthesizes how it relates to existing theoretical orientations, and identifies a framework for future research.

The words and grammatical structure of a given language are the most basic building blocks of thought and communication; they reflect the ways speakers conceptualize themselves and their world and communicate with others. Since language reflects a culture's biases and inequities, a socially constructed, gendered power differential between men and women may lead each to have very different relationships to language. The essays in this collection explore some of the ways in which power and its expression (or repression) is gendered. The contributors seek to discover contexts and patterns within which power is articulated, reproduced, and ultimately transformed. While some contributors provide primarily descriptive examinations of presumed gender differences, others seek to critique or deconstruct these supposed meanings associated with gender and power relationships. An important collection for scholars and researchers involved with communication and with gender issues.

The crucial nature of developmental theory is the question of relationship between cultural and personal facets of human development. Dialogue is a useful concept to specify this relationship from a process-oriented perspective. In its broadest sense, the notion of dialogue entails the interaction between at least two entities (persons, meanings, perspectives) out of which novelty can (but need not) emerge. Thus, dialogic models are open for developmental questions. These issues are examined in this, the first volume in which the increasingly popular metaphor of dialogue is systematically applied to developmental issues. Dialogue is a multilevel concept and can be understood (1) as a real exchange between two interacting persons, (2) as the interaction between culture at large (e.g. stories and narratives) and the interacting, developing person, and (3) as a metaphor for developmental processes in general. In the first part of this international volume, the concept of dialogue is elaborated by researchers from different disciplines. The focus of the second section is on dialogic models in the area of self development. The third deals with the dialogical co-development of person and culture.

This book offers a model of classroom discourse analysis that uses systemic functional linguistic theory and associated genre theory to develop a view of classroom episodes as "curriculum genres", some of which operate in turn as part of larger unities of work called "curriculum macrogenres". Drawing on Bernstein's work, Christie argues that two registers operate in pedagogic discourse: a regulative register, to do with the goals and directions of the discourse; and an instructional register, to do with the particular "content" or knowledge at issue. Each can be shown to be realized in distinctive clusters of choices in the grammar. The operation of the regulative register determines the initiation, pacing, sequencing and evaluation of the overall pedagogic activity. It serves to draw various fields of experience and knowledge from beyond the school (the instructional register) and to "relocate" them for the purposes of teaching and learning The book explores the model and demonstrates the methodology of school discourse analysis in considerable detail. The methodology is set out, explained and exemplified in selections of classroom texts, both spoken and written, and over a range

This volume offers insights on language learning outside the classroom, or in the wild, where L2 users themselves are the driving force for language learning. The chapters, by scholars from around the world, critically examine the concept of second language learning in the wild. The authors use innovative data collection methods (such as video and audio recordings collected by the participants during their interactions outside classrooms) and analytic methods from conversation analysis to provide a radically emic perspective on the data. Analytic claims are supported by evidence from how the participants in the interactions interpret one another's language use and interactional conduct. This allows the authors to scrutinize the term wild showing what distinguishes L2 practices in our different datasets and how those practices differ from the L2 learner data documented in other more controlled settings, such as the classroom. We also show how our findings can feed back into the development of materials for classroom language instruction, and ultimately can support the implementation of usage-based L2 pedagogies. In sum, we uncover what it is about the language use in these contexts that facilitates developmental changes over time in L2-speakers' and their co-participants' interactional practices for language learning.

This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter's responsibility from the original speaker's responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on "what is said", whether this is a minimal semantic logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

In the case of hip-hop, the forces of top-down corporatization and bottom-up globalization are inextricably woven. This volume takes the view that hip-hop should not be viewed with this dichotomous dynamic in mind and that this dynamic does not arise solely outside of the continental US. Close analysis of the facts reveals a much more complex situation in which market pressures, local (musical) traditions, linguistic and semiotic intelligibility, as well as each country's particular historico-political past conspire to yield new hybrid expressive genres. This exciting collection looks at linguistic, cultural and economic aspects of hip-hop in parallel and showcases a global scope. It engages with questions of code-switching, code-mixing, the minority language/regional dialect vs. standard dynamic, the discourse of political resistance, immigrant ideologies, youth and new language varieties and will be essential reading for graduates and researchers in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

A collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity, that advocates for linguistic decolonization. 'The language of literature', Ngugi writes, 'cannot be discussed meaningfully outside the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demanding our attention, and a problem calling for a resolution.' First published in 1986, Decolonising the Mind is one of Ngugi's best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a pre-eminent voice theorizing the 'language debate' in postcolonial studies. Ngugi wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu. He describes the book as 'a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature...'. Split into four essays - 'The Language of African Literature', 'The Language of African Theatre', 'The Language of African Fiction', and 'The Quest for Relevance' - the book offers an anti-imperialist perspective on the destiny of Africa and the role of languages in combatting and perpetrating imperialism and neo-colonialism in African nations. East Africa [Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda]: EAEP

This book contributes to the understanding of the transformative power of incorporating translanguaging, the dynamic language practices of bi/multilingual communities, in the schooling of US Latinx children and youth. It showcases instructional spaces in US education where Latinx children's and youths' translanguaging is at the center of their teaching and learning. By centering racialized Latinx bilingual students, including their knowledge systems and cultural and linguistic practices, it transforms the monolingual-white supremacy ideology of many educational spaces. In so doing, racialized bilingual Latinx subjectivities are potentially transformed, as students learn to understand processes of colonization and domination that have robbed them of opportunities to use their entire semiotic repertoire in learning. The book makes a strong theoretical contribution to the field, putting decolonial, post-structuralist understandings of language and bilingualism alongside critical race theory and critical pedagogy.

This book presents the narratives and voices of young, mostly male practitioners of hip hop culture in Delhi, India. The author suggests that practitioners understand hip hop as both a thing that can be appropriated and authenticated, made real, in the local and global context and as a way that enables them to transform their lives and futures in the rapidly globalising urban environments of Delhi. The dancers, artists, musicians and cultural theorists that feature in this book construct a multitude of voices in their narratives to formulate their 'own' transcultural voices within global hip hop. Through a combination of linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the book addresses issues including gender and sexuality, identity construction and global culture.

Scholars from various disciplines have used key concepts to grasp mobilities, but as of yet, a working vocabulary of these has not been fully developed. Given this context and inspired in part by Raymond Williams' Keywords (1976), this edited volume presents contributions that critically analyze mobility-related keywords: capital, cosmopolitanism, freedom, gender, immobility, infrastructure, motility, and regime. Each chapter provides an historical context, a critical analysis of how the keyword has been used in relation to mobility, and a conclusion that proposes future usage or research.

This book demonstrates the power and distinctiveness of the contribution that sociolinguistics can make to our understanding of everyday communicative practice under changing social conditions. It builds on the approaches developed by Gumperz and Hymes in the 1970s and 80s, and it not only affirms their continuing relevance in analyses of the micropolitics of everyday talk in urban settings, but also argues for their value in emergent efforts to chart the heavily securitised environments now developing around us. Drawing on 10 years of collaborative work and ranging across disciplinary, interdisciplinary and applied perspectives, the book begins with guiding principles and methodology, shifts to empirically driven arguments in urban sociolinguistics, and concludes with studies of (in)securitised communication addressed to challenges ahead.

Researching Sociopragmatic Variability showcases a range of research approaches to the study of speech acts and pragmatic markers across different languages and varieties of a language, investigating native and non-native usages and variation across gender, situation and addressee.

Identity is a problematic concept in-as-much-as we recognise it now as non-fixed, non-rigid and always being co-constructed by individuals of themselves, or by people who share certain core values or perceive another group as having such values. This volume re-examines the analytical tools employed in the sociolinguistic research of 'identity' in order to assess their efficiency, establish the roles of language in the identity claims of specific communities of people, and determine the place of identity in a variety of social contexts, including work places and language classrooms. It will be of interest to academics researching sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and second language learning.

This book presents a description and analysis of sociolinguistics written from a demographer's perspective. It synthesizes the data on the materials, methods, and issues of this interdisciplinary field, pulling together the scattered materials published in this area into a coherent whole. Drawing on a wide range of sciences in addition to demography and sociolinguistics, including sociology, anthropology, statistics, psychology, neuroscience, and public policy, the book treats theoretical and applied issues, links methods and substantive findings, covers both national and international materials, and provides prehistorical, historical, and contemporary illustrations. The book treats the theoretical issue of how the language we use develops socially on a base of linguistic genetic capacity and the practical issue of how the intervention of the state and public figures may profoundly alter the natural evolution of the language. As such, this book will appeal to a wide range of users, from students to teachers and practitioners of social demography, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and particularly to those social scientists interested in ethnic studies and human migration.

The Politics of Language surveys and analyses the historical background of recent controversies over language in the United States, and compares the US to two official multilingual societies: Canada and Switzerland. This accessible book will be suitable for courses in linguistics, political science, and sociology.

PC or Political Correctness has received bad press, according to Choi and Murphy. Indeed, the body of ideas and concepts embodied in PC have been trivialized by conservatives seeking to defend their own positions and by a press catering to a public put off by philosophical discussions. Choi and Murphy seek to analyze the key facets of the debate over PC.

Starting with an examination of the key concepts of PC, Choi and Murphy review the essentials of neo-conservative social philosophy and the Postmodern Alternative as well as neo-conservative critiques of postmodernism. By providing a comprehensive examination of PC from its historical and philosophical underpinnings, Choi and Murphy show what is at stake in the controversy. This book is an important synthesis for researchers and students of contemporary philosophy and social policy.

This collection of original articles covers a range of research connecting with the work of the eminent linguist Ruqaiya Hasan. It contains contributions from M.A.K. Halliday, G. Williams, D. Butt, D. Miller and M. Berry among others, an interview with Ruqaiya Hasan, and notes from the contributors about their connection with Ruqaiya Hasan's work.