Adding a new introduction and two previously unpublished papers, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis brings together van Leeuwen's methodological work on discourse analysis of the last 15 years. Discourse, van Leeuwen argues, is a resource for representation, a knowledge about some aspect of reality which can be drawn upon when that aspect of reality has to be represented, a framework for making sense of things. And they are plural. There can be different discourses, different ways of making sense of the same aspect of reality that serve different interests and will therefore be used in different social contexts.
However abstract some discourses are, discourses ultimately always represent doings, van Leeuwen argues. Doing is the foundation of knowing, and social practices are the foundation of discourses. Studying children's books, newspaper reports, brochures and other texts, as well as photographs and children's toys, van Leeuwen investigates what can happen when practices are transformed into discourses and provides analytical tools for reconstructing discourses from texts.
Throughout the book, van Leeuwen makes connections between sociological and linguistic or semiotic concepts and methods to ensure the social and critical relevance of his analytical categories. van Leeuwen's work has already been widely used by critical discourse analysts across the world. This volume will be a welcome guide for anyone looking for a form of discourse analysis that is both explicit and methodical, and critically incisive.

This book brings together current research by leading international scholars on the often contentious nature of language policies and their practical outcomes in North America, Australia and Europe. It presents a range of perspectives from which to engage with a variety of pressing issues raised by multilingualism, multiculturalism, immigration, exclusion, and identity. A recurrent theme is that of tension and conflict: between uniformity and diversity, between official policies and real day-to-day life experiences, but also between policies in schools and the corporate world and their implementation. Several chapters present research about language policy issues that has previously not been fully or easily available to an English-language audience. Many of the chapters also provide up-to-date analyses of language policy issues in particular regions or countries, focusing on recent developments.

The contributors to "Internationalising the University: the Chinese Context "offer an in-depth understanding of the rapidly changing developments in the fields of institutional, social, management, curriculum and student concerns and changes.

An original and timely study of men's experiences of depression in which the author tackles the discursively constructed relationship between the self and depression showing its linguistic and social complexity and analyses the relationship between depression and masculinity.

AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS The new eighth edition of An Introduction to Sociolinguistics brings this valuable, bestselling textbook up to date with the latest in sociolinguistic research and pedagogy, providing a broad overview of the study of language in social context with accessible coverage of major concepts, theories, methods, issues, and debates within the field. This leading text helps students develop a critical perspective on language in society as they explore the complex connections between societal norms and language use. The eighth edition contains new and updated coverage of such topics as the societal aspects of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), multilingual societies and discourse, gender and sexuality, ideologies and language attitudes, and the social meanings of linguistic forms. Organized in four sections, this text first covers traditional language issues such as the distinction between languages and dialects, identification of regional and social variation within languages, and the role of context in language use and interpretation. Subsequent chapters cover approaches to research in sociolinguistics--variationist sociolinguistics, ethnography, and discourse analytic research--and address both macro- and micro-sociolinguistic aspects of multilingualism in national, transnational, global, and digital contexts. The concluding section of the text looks at language in relation to gender and sexuality, education, and language planning and policy issues. Featuring examples from a variety of languages and cultures that illustrate topics such as social and regional dialects, multilingualism, and the linguistic construction of identity, this text provides perspectives on both new and foundational research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Eighth Edition, remains the ideal textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate course in sociolinguistics, language and society, linguistic anthropology, applied and theoretical linguistics, and education. The new edition has also been updated to support classroom application with a range of effective pedagogical tools, including end-of-chapter written exercises and an instructor website, as well as materials to support further learning such as reading suggestions, research ideas, and an updated companion student website containing a searchable glossary, a review guide, additional exercises and examples, and links to online resources.

Focuses on the endangering effects of language-ideological processes. This book looks at the challenges imposed by globalization and super-diversity on the nation state and its language situations and ideologies, and demonstrates how many of its problems rise from the tension between late-modern diversity and the (pre-)modernist responses to it.

Language and Migration is timely for two main reasons: one is social - international migration is at an all-time high - and the other is theoretical - theorizing language as a mobile resource is currently the most exiting frontier in sociolinguistics. Including the very best contemporary scholarship as well as key foundational research, this four volume collection will strike a balance between the socially-relevant and topical issues of wider concern raised by migration on the one hand, and disciplinary conceptual and methodological concerns on the other. In doing so, Language and Migration is intended both as a showcase of the most important work in the field as well as an intervention into contemporary debates.

Stories told within institutions play a powerful role, helping to define not only the institution itself, but also its individual members. How do institutions use stories? How do those stories both preserve the past and shape the future? To what extent does narrative construct both collective and individual identity?
Charlotte Linde's unique and far-reaching study addresses these questions by looking at the interplay of narratives, memory, and identity in a large insurance company. Her detailed ethnography looks at the role of stories within the institution and how they are employed by its members in both private and group settings. Analyzing the re-telling of certain key stories, she shows how the formation of "core" stories and their multiple re-tellings and modifications provide a means of formulating and promoting a cohesive group identity -- which in turn shapes the stories and identities of the individuals within the collective. Linde also looks at silences, and how stories not told also convey their version of the past.
Working the Past shows how stories that might otherwise be seen as part of mundane daily life are in fact utterly essential to the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity. Her original research will appeal to those interested in narrative studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and institutional memory.

This work examines and reviews the ecological context of language planning in 14 countries in the Pacific basin: Japan, the two Koreas, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. It provides the only up-to-date overview and review of language policy in the region and challenges those interested in language policy and planning to think about how such goals might be achieved in the context of language ecology.

From television shows to the manosphere, and from alt-right communities to fatherhood forums, debates about masculinity have come to dominate the media landscape. What does it mean to be a man in contemporary society? How is masculinity constituted in different media spaces? This growing cultural tension around masculinities has been discussed and analyzed both for general audiences and in burgeoning academic scholarship. What has been typically overlooked, however, is the role that language plays in these mediated performances of masculinity. In Language and Mediated Masculinities, Robert Lawson draws on data from newspapers, social media sites, television programs, and online forums to explore language and masculinities across a range of media contexts. The book offers a critical evaluation of the intersection between language, masculinities, and identities in contemporary society and addresses three key questions: How are masculinities constructed, in both public and private spheres, through linguistic and discursive strategies? How does language about masculinity and men affect (and recreate) gender ideologies in different social, political, and historical contexts? What might the language of men tell us about the state of contemporary gender relations in the twenty-first century? Lawson furthers our understanding of how language is implicated in (re)creating gender ideologies and how it shapes contemporary gender relations. Against a cultural backdrop of rising neoliberalism, ethnic nationalism, online radicalization, networked misogyny, and fractious gender relations, this book is an important contribution to charting how language is used to monitor, evaluate, and police masculinities in online and offline spaces.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches - theoretical and empirical - supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines - anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This book presents, for the first time, an overarching, trans-Scandinavian, comprehensive and comparable account of linguistic developments and practices in late modern urban contact zones. The book aims to capture the multilingual realities of all young people in urban contexts, whether they are of migrant descent or not. Taking a multi-layered approach to linguistic practices, chapters in the book include structural and phonological analyses of new linguistic practices, examine how these practices and their practitioners are perceived, and discuss the sociolinguistic potentials of speakers when constructing, challenging and negotiating identities. The book also contains three short overview articles describing studies of multilingual practices in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The editors have aimed to make Scandinavian research on urban multilingualism accessible to scholars and students who don't speak Scandinavian languages, and also to make a valuable contribution to the global study of multilingualism.

The book outlines the evolution and role of minority languages locally and nationally; it investigates current educational language policies in minority areas; and it assesses the social and economic outcomes of language change for communities in contemporary China.

The study of language and law has seen explosive growth in the past twenty-five years. Research on police interrogations, trial examination, jury deliberation, plea bargains, same sex marriage, to name a few, has shown the central role of written and oral forms of language in the construction of legal meaning. However, there is another side of language that has rarely been analyzed in legal settings: the role of gesture and how it integrates with language in the law. This is the first book-length investigation of language and multimodal conduct in the law. Using audio-video tapes from a famous rape trial, Matoesian and Gilbert examine legal identity and impression management in the sociocultural performance of precedent, expert testimony, closing argument, exhibits, reported speech and trial examination. Drawing on insights from Jakobson and Silverstein, the authors show how the poetic function inheres not only in language but multimodal conduct generally. Their analysis opens up new empirical territory for both forensic linguistics and gesture studies.

What is French and how has it changed over time? Can we distinguish language history from historical linguistics, and language change from linguistic change? These questions are explored using copious material from the history of the French language, concentrating on changes in the relatively modern period in particular. Posner explains how change comes about and how changes at different levels of language interact, and the role of sociological and ideological factors is set against the internal mechanisms that trigger change. This work makes a substantial contribution to the theory of linguistic change, as well as to discussion of the relationship between language and history in French-speaking areas, including Canada and French Creole-speaking countries.

‘The first and perhaps only book on the relative merits of American and British English that is dominated by facts and analysis rather than nationalistic prejudice. For all its scholarship, this is also a funny and rollicking read.’

The Economist, Books of the Year

Only an American would call autumn fall or refer to a perfectly good pavement as a sidewalk… Not so, says Lynne Murphy. The English invented sidewalk in the seventeenth century and in 1693 John Dryden wrote the line, ‘Or how last fall he raised the weekly bills.’

Perhaps we don’t know our own language quite as well as we thought.

Murphy, an American linguist in Britain, dissects the myths surrounding British and American English in a laugh-out-loud exploration of how language works and where it’s going.

Language, Literacy, and Health: Discourse in Brazils National Health System analyzes language, literacy, and health as social practices, with a focus on Brazils national health system, the Unified Health System (SUS). The SUS was established in the 1990s, offering free consultations, health promotion activities, and home visits by a professional team to the Brazilian population, and of particular interest is the Family Health Strategy program. This book is based on research conducted in two different Brazilian regions, the Northeast and the Southeast. Izabel Magalhaes and Kenia Lara da Silva discuss language and literacy as discourse-a very important dimension of health practice-and different uses of texts, including multimodal texts. The research and analysis, and the authors' ethnographic approach, bring to light some issues with SUS practices, and the authors suggest improvements. The book contributes to the debate about language and literacy in health practices, in which patients are partly responsible for keeping well.

The last 50 years have witnessed a rapid growth in the understanding of the articulation and the acoustics of vowels. Contemporary theories of speech perception have concentrated on consonant perception, and this volume is intended as a balance to such bias. The authors propose a computational theory of auditory vowel perception, accounting for vowel identification in the face of acoustic differences between speakers and speaking rate and stress. This work lays the foundation for future experimental and computational studies of vowel perception.

The book contains a selection of papers reflecting cutting-edge developments in the field of learning and teaching second and foreign languages. The contributions are devoted to such issues as classroom-oriented research, sociocultural aspects of language acquisition, individual differences in language learning, teacher development, new strands in second language acquisition research as well as methodological considerations. Because of its scope, the diversity of topics covered and the adoption of various theoretical perspectives, the volume is of interest not only to theorists and researchers but also to methodologists and practitioners, and can be used in courses for graduate students.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

In The Ideology of Conduct, first published in 1987, scholars from various fields, from the medieval period to the present day, discuss literature in which the sole purpose is to instruct women in how to make themselves desirable. This collection investigates how middle-class writers who had long emulated the behaviour of the aristocracy began to criticise that behaviour by formulating an alternative object of desire. They did so without appearing to breed political controversy because it seemed to concern only the female. But writing for and about women in fact became a powerful instrument of hegemony as it introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations, induced certain forms of economic behaviour as desirable in men and women respectively, and insured the reproduction of the nuclear family. It is argued, therefore, that the literature of conduct not only recorded but also assisted the production of our contemporary gender-based culture.

Battles over knowledge, authority, and power are often fought when two different fields address the same issues. This book takes an important step towards showing how quite different fields, law and linguistics, can work together effectively in trademark cases. After presenting the basics of each field, readers are shown how linguistics was used in ten trademark lawsuits, five of which had opposing linguists on each side. Finally, helpful suggestions are given to both linguists and lawyers.

Becoming an African Diaspora in Australia extends debates on identities, cultures and notions of race and racism into new directions as it analyses the forms of interactional identities of African migrants in Australia. It de-naturalises the commonplace assumptions and imaginations about the cultures and identities of African diaspora communities, and probes the relevance and usefulness of identity markers such as country of origin, nationality, ethnicity, ethnic/heritage language and mother tongue. Current cultural frames of identity representation have so far failed to capture the complexities of everyday lived experiences of transnational individuals and groups. Therefore by drawing on fresh concepts and recent empirical evidence, this book invites the reader to revisit and rethink the vocabularies that we use to look at identity categories such as race, culture, language, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship, and introduces a new language nesting model of diaspora identity. This book will be of great interest to all students of migration, diaspora, African and Australian studies.

This edited collection presents cutting edge research on the process of identity construction in professional and institutional contexts, from corporate workplaces, to courtrooms, classrooms, and academia. The chapters consider how interactants do identity work and how identity is indexed (often in subtle ways) in workplace discourse.