The history of "language teaching" is shot through with methods and approaches to language learning - most recently with "communicative language teaching" - but this book demonstrates that a more differentiated and richer understanding of learning a foreign language is both necessary and desirable. Languages and cultures are interlinked and interdependent and their teaching and learning should be too. Learning another language is part of a complex process of learning and understanding other people's ways of life, ways of thinking and socio-economic experience

The multilingual situation in Cameroon and the status of English as a co-official language constitute a unique and fascinating case for sociolinguistic investigation. Drawing from first-hand material, the author investigates several aspects of this complex configuration, including the historical development of English in Cameroon, the various languages and lingua franca areas, the linguistic policy, the de facto status of English and the situation in the anglophone provinces. The speech community of the Anglophones is highlighted as a rare example of an ethnicity tied to the second language. Apart from important sociolinguistic findings, the work includes a novel, corpus-based analysis of Cameroon English. Certain lexical phenomena are explained by the cognitive coding of culture - particularly the African cultural model of community, which also underlies the self-perception of the Anglophones - a perspective hitherto neglected in the study of the New Englishes.

In a new era of global conflict involving non-state actors, At War with Words offers a provocative perspective on the role of language in the genesis, conduct and consequence of mass violence. Sociolinguistics meets political science and communication studies in order to examine interdependence between armed conflict and language. As phenomena attributed only to humans, both armed conflict and language are visible on two axes: language as war discourse, and language as a social policy subject to change by the victorious. In this unique volume, internationally known contributors provide original data and new insights that illuminate roles of text and talk in creating identities of enemies, justifications for violence, and accompanying propaganda. Incorporating contexts from around the world, this collection's topics range from a radio talk show hosts' inflammatory rhetoric to the semantic poverty of the lexicon of mass destruction. The first eight chapters discuss war texts. How does language serve as a vehicle to incite, justify, and resolve an armed conflict? Case studies from the US to China, and from Austria to Ghana detail such a progression to, through, and from war. The book's second part reflects the understanding of language as a symbol of power achieved by a victorious side in war. Five chapters discuss cases from Okinawa, Croatia, Cyprus, Palau, and Northern Ireland. Edited by a sociolinguist and a political scientist, At War with Words includes chapters by Michael Billig, Paul Chilton, Ruth Wodak and a dozen other prominent linguists and communications scholars. This book will be of interest to linguists, media scholars and political scientists, but is also accessible to any reader interested in language and war. Teachers will find particular chapters useful as course material in discourse analysis, language policy, war and peace studies, conflict resolution, mass communication, and other related disciplines.

The Last Language on Earth is an ethnographic history of the disputed Eskayan language, spoken today by an isolated upland community living on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. After Eskaya people were first 'discovered' in 1980, visitors described the group as a lost tribe preserving a unique language and writing system. Others argued that the Eskaya were merely members of a utopian rural cult who had invented their own language and script. Rather than adjudicating outsider polemics, this book engages directly with the language itself as well as the direct perspectives of those who use it today. Through written and oral accounts, Eskaya people have represented their language as an ancestral creation derived from a human body. Reinforcing this traditional view, Piers Kelly's linguistic analysis shows how a complex new register was brought into being by fusing new vocabulary onto a modified local grammar. In a synthesis of linguistic, ethnographic, and historical evidence, a picture emerges of a coastal community that fled the ravages of the U.S. invasion of the island in 1901 in order to build a utopian society in the hills. Here they predicted that the world's languages would decline leaving Eskayan as the last language on earth. Marshalling anthropological theories of nationalism, authenticity, and language ideology, along with comparisons to similar events across highland Southeast Asia, Kelly offers a convincing account of this linguistic mystery and also shows its broader relevance to linguistic anthropology. Although the Eskayan situation is unusual, it has the power to illuminate the pivotal role that language plays in the pursuit of identity-building and political resistance.

First published in 1987, the Dictionary of Jargon expands on its predecessor Newspeak (Routledge Revivals, 2014) as an authoritative reference guide to specialist occupational slang, or jargon. Containing around 21, 000 entries, the dictionary encompasses a truly eclectic range of fields and includes extensive coverage of both British and U.S. jargon. Areas dealt with range from marketing to medicine, from advertising to artificial intelligence and from skiing to sociology. This is a fascinating resource for students of lexicography and professional lexicographers, as well as the general inquisitive reader.

The twelve papers featured in this book focus on codeswitching as an urban language-contact phenomenon. Some papers seek to distinguish codeswitching from other contact phenomenon such as borrowing or language mixing, while others look at the effect codeswitching has on one's position in society. The papers discuss such topics as the politics of codeswitching, the role of using more than one language in social identity, attitudes toward multi-language use, and the way codeswitching may occur as a community norm. The editor, Carol Eastman, is also author of "Aspects of Language and Culture", "Language Planning", and "Linguistic Theory and Language Description".

George Orwell coined the term 'Newspeak' for his novel 1984, the purpose of which was designed to shrink vocabularies and eliminate subtlety and nuance. For this dictionary, first published to herald the year 1984, Jonathon Green compiled nearly 8, 000 entries - selected from the slangs and specific vocabularies of trades, professions and interests - covering such areas as the world of entertainment, the media, the military economics, and finance. This dictionary provides an accurate and useful linguistic guide for students of lexicography and an interesting compendium for the general inquisitive reader.

This collection represents contemporary perspectives on important aspects of research into the language in the public space, known as the Linguistic Landscape (LL), with the focus on the negotiation and contestation of identities. From four continents, and examining vital issues across North America, Africa, Europe and Asia, scholars with notable experience in LL research are drawn together in this, the latest collection to be produced by core researchers in this field. Building on the growing published body of research into LL work, the fifteen data chapters test, challenge and advance this sub-field of sociolinguistics through their close examination of languages as they appear on the walls and in the public spaces of sites from South Korea to South Africa, from Italy to Israel, from Addis Ababa to Zanzibar. The geographic coverage is matched by the depth of engagement with developments in this burgeoning field of scholarship. As such, this volume is an up-to-date collection of research chapters, each of which addresses pertinent and important issues within their respective geographic spaces.

This book presents an investigation of the influence of gender, social class, age and illness type in the language of people talking about their experiences of illness. It shows evidence of both conformity with and resistance to gender stereotypes.
  

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.

Although much scholarly and critical attention has been paid to the relationship between rhetoric and environmental issues, media and environmental issues, and politics and environmental issues, no book has yet focused on the relationship between popular culture and environmental issues. This collection of essays provides a rigorous and multifaceted rhetorical and critical perspective on the ways in which the language and imagery of nature is incorporated strategically into various popular culture texts--ranging from greeting cards to advertisements to supermarket tabloids. As a distinguished group of scholars reveals, our notions about the environment and environmentalism are both reflected in and shaped by our popular culture in fascinating ways never previously examined in an academic context.

The consumptive vision of nature presented in these texts represents a wholly American view, one promoting leisure and comfort, and nature as the place to experience them. This good life attitude toward the environment often serves to commodify it, to render it little more than space in which to pursue conventional notions of the American dream. As such, the volume represents a bold and striking vision both of popular culture and of popular notions of an environment that can be either protected or just simply consumed.

The volume highlights the role of language ideologies in the process of negotiation of identities and shows that in different historical and social contexts different identities may be negotiable or non-negotiable. The chapters address various ways in which individuals may be positioned or position themselves in a variety of contexts. In asking questions about social justice, about who has access to symbolic and material resources, about who is 'in' and who is 'out', the authors take account not only of localised linguistic behaviours, attitudes and beliefs; they also locate them in wider social contexts which include class, race, ethnicity, generation, gender and sexuality. The volume makes a significant contribution to the development of theory in understanding identity negotiation and social justice in multilingual contexts.

"Arguing that a corpus-based approach is indispensable for the study of changes of complementation in British and American English, the author examines several central patterns of sentential complementation in a number of electronic corpora to shed light on the emergence and spread of innovative constructions in relatively recent English"--

This book explores the experiences of Indigenous children and young adults around the world as they navigate the formal education system and wider society. Profiling a range of different communities and sociolinguistic contexts, this book examines the language ecologies of their local communities, schools and wider society and the approaches taken by these communities to maintain children's home languages. The authors examine such complex themes as curriculum, translanguaging, contact languages and language use as cultural practice. In doing so, this edited collection acts as a first step towards developing solutions which address the complexity of the issues facing these children and young people. It will appeal to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and community development, as well as language professionals including teachers, curriculum developers, language planners and educators.

This book throws light on ideologies, practices and sociocultural developments currently shaping language use in Japan by departing from the more common investigation of language in private contexts and examining aspects of the language found in a range of significant public spaces, from the material (an international airport, the streets of Tokyo, the JSL classroom in Japan and courtrooms) to the electronic (television dramas, local government web pages and cyberspace). Through its study of the language encountered in such settings, the volume provides a deeper understanding of multifaceted aspects of linguistic diversity, both in terms of the use of languages other than Japanese and of issues relating to the Japanese language itself. The variety of theoretical approaches brought to bear by contributing authors ensures a substantial intellectual contribution to the literature on language in contemporary Japan. This book was published as a special issue of Japanese Studies.

Positioned within the field of linguistics and multisemiotic discourse analysis, the theme of this book is the multifaceted interaction between text and image in different discourse genres, and it offers critical views on how we talk and show our experience of the world around us.

This book examines language contact and shift in Nepal, a multilingual context where language attitudes and policies often reflect the complex socio-cultural and socio-political relationship between minority, majority and endangered languages and peoples. Presenting the results of a 15-year study and making use of both quantitative and qualitative data, the author presents evidence relating to speakers' opinions and perceptions of mother tongues including English, Hindi, Nepali, Sherpa, Dotyali, Jumli and Tharu. This book explores an under-studied part of the world, and the findings will be relevant to scholars working in other multilingual contexts in fields including language policy and planning, language contact and change, and language attitudes and ideologies.

Whilst earlier studies of language planning and of standardisation have tended to study macro processes, this volume is in line with more recent work aimed at bridging the macro and the micro levels by examining how the two interact and influence each other. It covers seven countries and deals with a range of sociolinguistic constellations.

"Citizenship is highly topical and relevant to a number of disciplines including law, politics and sociology. What can a linguistic study contribute to the debate? In this impressive volume a combination of theorists -- linguists, historians and lawyers -- address the subject of citizenship testing in language proficiency and 'cultural' knowledge"--

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 is an original and comprehensive treatment of the languages of Israel - of the practice and of the ideology. Against the background of an original theory of language policy set out in the opening, it asks about the extent to which the present linguistic pattern may be attributed to explicit language planning activities. The chapters give balanced analyses of the history and current status of the revitalized national language Hebrew, of the second official language Arabic, of the all-pervasive international language English, of the large number of immigrant languages brought to Israel, and in particular of the fate of the many Jewish languages. This is all tied together with a reasoned account of the new language education policy, and a consideration of the likelihood that the long hegemony of Hebrew is giving way to an evolving acceptance of linguistic diversity.

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.

This is the fully revised and expanded second edition of English - One Tongue, Many Voices, a book by three internationally distinguished English language scholars who tell the fascinating, improbable saga of English in time and space. Chapters trace the history of the language from its obscure beginnings over 1500 years ago as a collection of dialects spoken by marauding, illiterate tribes. They show how the geographical spread of the language in its increasing diversity has made English into an international language of unprecedented range and variety. The authors examine the present state of English as a global language and the problems, pressures and uncertainties of its future, online and offline. They argue that, in spite of the amazing variety and plurality of English, it remains a single language.