While top-down policies and declarations have yet to establish equal status and opportunities for speakers of all languages in practice, activists and advocates at local levels are playing an increasingly significant role in the creation of new social imaginaries and practices in multilingual contexts. This volume describes how social actors across multiple domains contribute to the elusive goal of linguistic equality or justice through their language activism practices. Through an ethnographic account of Indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language activism in Oaxaca, Mexico, this study illuminates the (sometimes conflicting) imaginaries of what positive social change is and how it should be achieved, and the repertoire of strategies through which these imaginaries are being pursued. Ethnographic and action research conducted from 2013-2018 in the multilingual Isthmus of Tehuantepec brings to light the experiences of educators, students, writers, scholars and diverse cultural activists whose aspirations and strategies of social change are significant in shaping the future language ecology. Their repertoire of strategies may inform and encourage language activists, scholars, and educators working for change in other contexts of linguistic diversity and inequality.

This book will enable students, researchers and practitioners with some background in applied linguistics and/or (business) communication to engage with most of the issues raised by the multidisciplinary field of business discourse. To applied linguists new to business communication, and to researchers with a business background and with an interest in language and communication, this book offers accessible, varied and well-documented material inspired by practice-shaping research in business contexts. The latest developments in research methodology are discussed through problem-solving case-studies; issues emerging from the field such as the role of new technology and of globalisation, are showcased to stimulate research projects that reflect the multicultural and multimedial reality of the corporate world. Readers are encouraged to adopt a reflexive, and where possible, multi-disciplinary and collaborative mode of action that is one of the strengths of business discourse research in practice. The book also illustrates the benefits of sustained dialogue and field-led applications across allied disciplines.

Based on approaches from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, this study proposes an analytical model focusing on the linguistic and discursive means narrators use to construct a variety of identities in everyday stories. This model is further exploited in language teaching to cultivate students' cultural sensitivity and critical literacy.

This book defines the notion of applied sign linguistics by drawing on data from projects that have explored sign language in action in various domains. The book gives professionals working with sign languages, signed language teachers and students, research students and their supervisors, authoritative access to current ideas and practice.

New speakers are an increasingly important aspect of the revitalization of minority languages since, in some cases, they can make up the majority of the language community in question. This volume examines this phenomenon from the viewpoint of three minority languages: Breton, Yiddish and Lemko.

This inter-disciplinary book is the first in an Irish context to address issues connected with the 'super-diversifying' of language and society engendered by recent and historical migrations. It analyses novel data from interviews with allochthonous and autochthonous groups of monolingual and plurilingual youngsters living in Northern Ireland. A key aim is to test models within second language acquisition and language variation and change research. Another goal is to examine the extent to which distinctive migratory trends generated changes in the language ecologies of communities on the island of Ireland as well as globally in regions where the Irish settled intensively from the 1700s. The book also compares contemporary migratory experiences with historical records to further our understanding of the dynamics of identification through language across time. The first-ever book devoted to all aspects of the sociolinguistics of globalization and migration in Northern Ireland will be welcomed by scholars interested in the consequences for ethnolinguistic vitality of large-scale population movements. It could not be more timely given the fact that 2.5 million sought asylum in Europe alone during 2016, greatly enhancing its diversity.

Migration and the mobility of citizens around the globe pose important challenges to the linguistic and cultural homogeneity that nation-states rely on for defining their physical boundaries and identity, as well as the rights and obligations of their citizens. A new social order resulting from neoliberal economic practices, globalisation and outsourcing also challenges traditional ways the nation-state has organized its control over the people who have typically travelled to a new country looking for work or better life chances. This collection provides an account of the ways language addresses core questions concerning power and the place of migrants in various institutional and workplace settings. It brings together contributions from a range of geographical settings to understand better how linguistic inequality is (re)produced in this new economic order.

Since the earliest days of our species, technology and language have evolved in parallel. This book examines the processes and products of this age-old relationship: a phenomenon we're calling technolingualism -- the mutually influential relationship between language and technology. One the one hand, as humans advance technology to master, control, and change the world around us, our language adapts. More sophisticated social-cultural practices give rise to new patterns of linguistic communication. Language changes in its vocabulary, structures, social conventions, and ideologies. Conversely-and this side of the story has been widely overlooked-the unique features of human language can influence a technology's physical forms and technical processes. Technolingualism explores the fascinating ways, past and present, by which language and technology have informed each other's development. The book reveals important corollaries about the universal nature of language and, most importantly, what it means to be human. From our first babbling noises to the ends of our lives, we are innately attuned to the technologies around us, and our language reflects this. We are, all of us, technolinguals.

In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness. The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.

This pioneering collection of previously unpublished articles on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender language combines queer theory and feminist theory with the latest thinking on language and gender. The book expands the field well beyond the study of "gay slang" to consider gay dialects (such as Polari in England), early modern discourse on gay practices, and late twentieth-century descriptions of homosexuality. These essays examine the conversational patterns of queer speakers in a wide variety of settings, from women's friendship groups to university rap groups and electronic mail postings.
Taking a global--rather than regional--approach, the contributors herein study the language usage of sexually liminal communities in a variety of linguistic and cultural contexts, such as lesbian speakers of American Sign Language, Japanese gay male couples, Hindi-speaking hijras (eunuchs) in North India, Hausa-speaking 'yan daudu (feminine men) in Nigeria, and French and Yiddish gay groups. The most accessible and diverse collection of its kind, Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality sets a new standard in the study of language's impact on the construction of sexuality.

Scandoromani: Remnants of a Mixed Language is the first, comprehensive, international description of the language of the Swedish and Norwegian Romano, also labeled resande/reisende. The language, an official minority language in Sweden and Norway, has a history in Scandinavia going back to the early 16th century. A mixed language of Romani and Scandinavian, it is spoken today by a vanishingly small population of mainly elderly people. This book is based on in-depth linguistic interviews with two native speakers of different families (one of whom is the co-author) as well as reviews of earlier sources on Scandoromani. The study reveals a number of interesting features of the language, as well as of mixed languages in general. In particular, the study gives support to the model of autonomy of mixed languages.

Sociocultural research has long recognized the necessity of sustained interpersonal interaction for language development. However, less is known about the underlying relationships that promote language acquisition and their relevance for language classrooms. Presenting cutting-edge research on social networks and their applications in language teaching, this book explores the relationships that mediate language learning in and out of classrooms. Highlighting the complexity of language in multilingual contexts, chapters engage social network analysis to understand the role of instructional practices, socialization, motivation, language status, online communications technology, and language policies in the development of social resources for language learning. Discussing popular language teaching frameworks such as translanguaging, Social Networks in Language Learning and Language Teaching provides a nuanced account of the influences of social context on language learning, exploring classroom applications and pointing the way to a robust research agenda.

This book contributes to current theory building within applied linguistics and sociolinguistics by looking at the role of language in the lives, realities, and understandings of real children and youth in an urban setting. Collectively the studies amount to a comprehensive account of how urban children and youth construct, reactivate, negotiate, contest, and navigate between different linguistic and sociocultural norms and resources.

This book presents the consolidated acoustic data for all phones in Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB), commonly known as Bangla, a Bengali language used by 350 million people in India, Bangladesh, and the Bengali diaspora. The book analyzes the real speech of selected native speakers of the Bangla dialect to ensure that a proper acoustical database is available for the development of speech technologies. The acoustic data presented consists of averages and their normal spread, represented by the standard deviations of necessary acoustic parameters including e.g. formant information for multiple native speakers of both sexes. The study employs two important speech technologies:(1) text to speech synthesis (TTS) and (2) automatic speech recognition (ASR). The procedures, particularly those related to the use of technologies, are described in sufficient detail to enable researchers to use them to create technical acoustic databases for any other Indian dialect. The book offers a unique resource for scientists and industrial practitioners who are interested in the acoustic analysis and processing of Indian dialects to develop similar dialect databases of their own.

The book contains a selection of papers focusing on the idea of crossing boundaries in literary and cultural texts composed in English. The authors come from different methodological schools and analyse texts coming from different periods and cultures, trying to find common ground (the theme of the volume) between the apparently generically and temporarily varied works and phenomena. In this way, a plethora of perspectives is offered, perspectives which represent a high standard both in terms of theoretical reflection and in-depth analysis of selected texts. Consequently, the volume is addressed to a wide scope of both scholars and students working in the field of English and American literary and cultural studies; furthermore, it will be of interest also to students interested in theoretical issues linked with investigations into literature and culture.

In this book, Surma develops a critical cosmopolitan orientation to public and professional writing. Combining threads from ethical, political, communication, sociological, feminist, rhetorical and discourse theories, she examines the influences and impacts of writing in a range of contexts - government, corporate, organizational and community. Case-study examples illustrate the ways in which writing may be mobilized to strengthen our connections with others, and to reflect on how writing practices might entrench or transform our positions as both citizens of the world and members of situated communities.

Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective is devoted to the diverse array of spoken and written language varieties that have been employed by Jews in the Diaspora from antiquity until the twenty-first century. It focuses on the following five key themes: Jewish languages in dialogue with sacred Jewish texts, Jewish languages in contact with the co-territorial non-Jewish languages, Jewish vernacular traditions, the status of Jewish languages in the twenty-first century, and theoretical issues relating to Jewish language research. This volume includes case studies on a wide range of Jewish languages both historical and modern and devotes attention to lesser known varieties such as Jewish Berber, Judeo-Italian, and Karaim in addition to the more familiar Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, and Ladino. "On top of Brill's Journal of Jewish Languages and a number of recent publications providing systematic overviews of Jewish languages as well as related theoretical discussions, this volume is a valuable addition to the increasing interest in Jewish languages and linguistics." -Wout van Bekkum, Groningen, Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXVI 3-4 (2019)

Zito argues that although meanings change with time, at the end of the 20th century we are witnessing not a change in meanings, but the demise of meaning itself. He presents evidence of the ever decreasing use of word language, upon which meaning is predicated, and the increase in iconographic impacts (Macintosh and television, for example); the routinization of ritual; the efforts to control information (as during the Gulf War); and the ideological competition among groups to dominate definitions of social situations by the use of oversimplified rhetorics. Zito pays particular attention to language, employing empirical data with classical and contemporary theoretical perspectives to argue that as the meanings of language change, the relations among persons change, and vice versa. Recommended for scholars of sociology and language.

This book offers a new perspective on the British experience of the Second World War in Europe, one in which foreignness and foreign languages are central to the dynamics of war-making. It offers a series of snapshots of the role which foreign languages played in Britain's war - in intelligence gathering (both signals and human intelligence), in psychological warfare, in preparations for liberating and occupying the continent, in denazification, in providing relief for refugees and displaced persons, and in postwar relationships with the USSR. By mapping the linguistic landscape of Britain's war in Europe, key aspects of international communication - translation, language performance, authenticity, language policies - are seen to be vital to military preparations and operations.

This book draws on a range of sources, including tales of castaways, fictional narratives, and interviews with teachers in conversation schools and universities in Japan, to explore many current concerns around teacher identity, gender, and intercultural sexuality in global English language teaching.

Welsh Writing, Political Action and Incarceration examines the prison literature of certain iconic Welsh authors whose political lives and creative writings are linked to ideas about Wales and the Welsh language. Through this case study, the author interrogates the nature of political activism and social movements, including the use of violence and non-violent approaches to protest. Also examined are the function and significance of variations in literary form, style and language in this prison literature along with the motivations driving each of these prison authors and the effects of their texts on their readers - their community outside of prison, and upon society more widely. This work successfully challenges orthodox perspectives on this body of prison literature. In adopting a case study approach the author universalizes the Welsh experience, drawing insights from international research on prison literature, the political science of protest and the sociology of language.

This volume examines how internationalization, stakeholders, and educational contexts have a reciprocal influence on multilinguals and their communities both as individual and collective variables. Therefore, the exploration of these variables and how they intersect and interact with worldwide phenomena like globalization, global citizenship, and responsive and responsible provisions of education are the central foci of this volume. Contributors from different parts of the world draw on analyses of various forms of data to foreground these foci with implications for effective multilingual education practices in their contexts, and beyond. The Multilingual Education Yearbook publishes high-quality empirical research on education in multilingual societies. It publishes research findings that, in addition to providing descriptions of language learning, development and use in language contact and multilingual contexts, will shape language education policy and practices in multilingual societies.

Gender is a hotly debated topic in the field of education. The role that language plays in educational contexts especially in the classroom has long been acknowledged. Innovatively combining approaches in the analysis of classroom discourse, this book offers rich empirical findings as well as being theoretically interesting and valuable.

This volume offers empirically grounded perspectives on translanguaging as a locally situated, interactional accomplishment of practical action, and its significance within different domains of social life-school, education, diasporic families and communities, workplaces, urban linguistic landscapes, advertising practices and mental health centres - focusing on case studies from different countries and continents. The 14 chapters contribute to the understanding of translanguaging as a communicative and discursive practice, which is relationally constructed and strategically deployed by individuals during everyday encounters with language and cultural diversity. The contributions testify to translanguaging as an interdisciplinary and critical research paradigm by assembling scholars working on translanguaging from different perspectives, and a wide range of social, cultural, and geographical contexts. This volume contributes to the further development of new theoretical and analytical tools for the investigation of translanguaging as everyday practice, and how and why language practices are constructed, negotiated, opposed or subverted by social actors.