Language, Health and Culture brings together contributions by linguistic scholars working in the area of health communication in Asia—in particular, in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. Olga Zayts-Spence and Susan M. Bridges, along with the contributors, draw on a diverse range of authentic data from different (primary, secondary, digital) healthcare contexts across Asia. The contributions probe empirical analyses and meta-reflections on the empirical, epistemological and theoretical foundations of doing research on language and health communication in Asia. While many of the medical and technological advances originate from the ‘non-English-dominant’/‘peripheral’ contexts, when it comes to health communication, there is a strong tendency to downplay and marginalize the scope and the impact of the ripe research tradition in these contexts. The contributions to the edited volume problematize the hegemony of dominant (Anglocentric) traditions in health communication research by highlighting culture- and context-specific ways of interpreting different health realities through linguistic lenses.

This book presents an original empirical study on the linguistic repertoires of post-2008 Italian migrants living in London. The author interrogates how migrants' trajectories and their relation with their homeland's migration history are displayed through the engagement of new multilingual practices, such as translanguaging, and how new identities are negotiated during conversational acts. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Sociolinguistics and Migration Studies.

Women in the History of Linguistics is a ground-breaking investigation into women's contribution to the description, analysis, and codification of languages across a wide range of different linguistic and cultural traditions. Notably, the volume looks beyond Europe to Africa, Australia, Asia, and North America, offering a systematic and comparative approach to a subject that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. In view of women's often limited educational opportunities in the past, their impact is examined not only within traditional and institutional contexts, but also in more domestic and less public realms. The chapters explore a variety of spheres of activity, including the production of grammars, dictionaries, philological studies, critical editions, and notes and reflections on the nature of language and writing systems, as well as women's contribution to the documentation and maintenance of indigenous languages, language teaching and acquisition methods, language debates, and language use and policy. Attitudes towards women's language-both positive and negative-that regularly shape linguistic description and analysis are explored, alongside metalinguistic texts specifically addressed to them as readers. Women in the History of Linguistics is intended for all scholars and students interested in the history of linguistics, women's studies, social and cultural history, and the intersection between language and gender

Language Myths and the History of English aims to deconstruct the myths that are traditionally reproduced as factual accounts of the historical development of English. Using concepts and interpretive sensibilities developed in the field of sociolinguistics over the past 40 years, Richard J. Watts unearths these myths and exposes their ideological roots. His goal is not to construct an alternative discourse, but to offer alternative readings of the historical data. Watts raises the question of what we mean by a linguistic ideology, and whether any discourse--a hegemonic discourse, an alternative discourse, or even a deconstructive discourse--can ever be free of it. The book argues that a naturalized discourse is always built on a foundation of myths, which are all too easily taken as true accounts.

Language without Rights is a book-length critique of the concept of language rights. Synthesizing insights from a variety of disciplines, including linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology and political philosophy, Wee demonstrates how the appeal to language rights faces a number of conceptual and practical problems, particularly because the discourse of rights is fundamentally inconsistent with the socially variable nature of language. The book also explores an alternative that is more in tune with the complexities of language in social life by suggesting that issues involving language are better managed within a model of deliberative democracy.

This book presents a much-needed discussion on ethnic identification and morphosyntactic variation in San Francisco Chinatown-a community that has received very little attention in linguistic research. An investigation of original, interactive speech data sheds light on how first- and second-generation Chinese Americans signal (ethnic) identity through morphosyntactic variation in English and on how they co-construct identity discursively. After an introduction to the community's history, the book provides background information on ethnic varieties in North America. This discussion grounds the present book within existing research and illustrates how studies on ethnic varieties of English have evolved. The book then proceeds with a description of quantitative and qualitative results on linguistic variation and ethnic identity. These analyses show how linguistic variation is only one way of signalling belonging to a community and highlight that Chinese Americans draw on a variety of sources, most notably the heritage language, to construct and negotiate (ethnic) identity. This book will be of particular interest to linguists - particularly academics working in sociolinguistics, language and identity, and language variation - but also to scholars interested in related issues such as migration, discrimination, and ethnicity.

This edited book includes chapters that explore the impact of war and its aftermath in language and official discourse. It covers a broad chronological range from the First World War to very recent experiences of war, with a focus on Australia and the Pacific region. It examines three main themes in relation to language: the impact of war and trauma on language, the language of war remembrance, and the language of official communications of war and the military. An innovative work that takes an interdisciplinary approach to the themes of war and language, the collection will be of interest to students and scholars across linguistics, literary studies, history and conflict studies.

Non-Binary Gender Identities examines how non-binary people discover, adopt, and negotiate language in a variety of social settings, both offline and online. It considers how language, in the form of gender-neutral pronouns, names, and labels, is a central aspect of identity for many and has been the subject of much debate in recent years. Cordoba captures the psychological, social, and linguistic experiences of non-binary people by illustrating the multiple, complex, and evolving ways in which non-binary people use language to express their gender identities, bodies, authenticity, and navigate social interactions - especially those where their identities are not affirmed. These findings shed light on the gender and linguistic becomings of non-binary people, a pioneering theoretical framework developed in the book, which reflects the dynamic realities of language, subjectivities, and the materiality of the body. Informed by these findings, the text offers recommendations for policy makers and practitioners, designed to facilitate gender-related communication and decrease language-related distress on non-binary people, as well as the general population. This important book advances our understanding of non-binary gender identities by employing innovative methodologies - including corpus-based research and network visualisation - furthering and developing theory, and yielding original insights. It is essential reading for students and academics in social psychology and gender studies, as well as anyone interested in furthering their understanding of non-binary gender identities.

This timely intervention into composition studies presents a case for the need to teach all students a shared system of communication and logic based on the modern globalizing ideals of universality, neutrality, and empiricism. Based on a series of close readings of contemporary writing by Stanley Fish, Asao Inoue, Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Zizek, and Steven Pinker, this book critiques recent arguments that traditional approaches to teaching writing, grammar, and argumentation foster marginalization, oppression, and the restriction of student agency. Instead, it argues that the best way to educate and empower a diverse global student body is to promote a mode of academic discourse dedicated to the impartial judgment of empirical facts communicated in an open and clear manner. It provides a critical analysis of core topics in composition studies, including the teaching of grammar; notions of objectivity and neutrality; empiricism and pragmatism; identity politics; and postmodernism. Aimed at graduate students and junior instructors in rhetoric and composition, as well as more seasoned scholars and program administrators, this polemical book provides an accessible staging of key debates that all writing instructors must grapple with.

This book is an innovative sociolinguistic study of New Australia, an Australian immigrant community in Paraguay in 1893, whose descendants today speak Guarani. Providing fresh data on a previously under-researched community who are an extremely rare case of language shifting from English heritage language to a local indigenous language, the case study is situated within the wider context of the colonial and post-colonial spread of English in Latin America over the past century. Drawing on insights from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, Latin American studies and history, the author presents the history of the colony before closely analysing the interplay of language and identity in this uniquely diasporic setting. This book fills a longstanding gap in the World Englishes and heritage languages literature, and it will be of interest to scholars of colonial and postcolonial languages, and minority language more generally.

This book takes a fresh approach to analysing how new languages are created, combining in-depth colonial history and empirical, usage-based linguistics. Focusing on a rarely studied language, the authors employ this dual methodology to reconstruct how multilingual individuals drew on their perception of Romance and West African languages to form French Guianese Creole. In doing so, they facilitate the application of a usage-based approach to language while simultaneously contributing significantly to the debate on creole origins. This innovative volume is sure to appeal to students and scholars of language history, creolisation and languages in contact. Chapter 3 is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book presents a collection of academic essays that take a fresh look at content and body transformation in the new media, highlighting how old hierarchies and canons of analysis must be revised. The movement of narratives and characterisations across forms, conventionally understood as adaptation, has commonly involved high-status classical forms (drama, epic, novel) being transformed into recorded and broadcast media (film, radio and television), or from the older recorded media to the newer ones. The advent of convergent digital platforms has further transformed hierarchies, and the formation of global conglomerates has created the commercial conditions for ever more lucrative exchanges between different media. Now source texts can move in any direction and take up any configuration, as emerging interacting fan bases drive innovation and new creative and commercial possibilities are deployed. Moreover, transformation may be not just a technology-driven creative practice and response, but at the very centre of the thematic worlds developed in those forms of story-telling which are currently popular: television series, video games, films and novels. The magic transformation of "your" money into "their" money is paralleled in contemporary media and culture by the centrality of transformation of one product to another as a media industry practice, as well as the transformation of bodies as a major theme both in the ensuing media products and in people's identity practices in daily life.

This book addresses, for the first time, the question of how development NGOs attempt to 'listen' to communities in linguistically diverse environments. NGOs are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they 'listen' to the people and communities that they are trying to serve, but this can be an immensely challenging task where there are significant language and cultural differences. However, until now, there has been no systematic study of the role of foreign languages in development work. The authors present findings based on interviews with a wide range of NGO staff and government officials, NGO archives, and observations of NGO-community interaction in country case studies. They suggest ways in which NGOs can reform their language policies to listen to the recipients of aid more effectively.

Comprising 11 countries and hundreds of languages from one of the most culturally diverse regions in the world, the chapters in this collection explore a wide range of translation issues. The subject of this volume is set in the contrasted landscapes of mainland peninsulas and maritime archipelagos in Southeast Asia, which, whilst remaining a largely minor area in Asian studies, harbors a wealth of textual heritage that opens to inquiries and new readings. From the post-Angkor Cambodia, the post-colonial Viantiane, to the ultra-modern Singapore metropolis, translation figures problematically in the modernization of indigenous literatures, criss-crossing chronologically and spatially through different literary landscapes. The peninsular geo-body gives rise to the politics of singularity as seen in the case of the predominant monolingual culture in Thailand, whereas the archipelagic geography such as the thousand islands of Indonesia allows for peculiar types of communication. Translation can also be metaphorized poetically to configure the transference in different scenarios such as the cases of self-translation in Philippine protest poetry and untranslatability in Vietnamese diasporic writings. The collection also includes intra-regional comparative views on historical and religious terms. This book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of translation studies, sociolinguistics, and Southeast Asian studies.

This book considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. The author explains the relationship between a real diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and reveals the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another. Professor Aikhenvald uses the example of Arawak and Tucanoan languages spoken in the large area of the Vaupes river basin in northwest Amazonia, which spans Colombia and Brazil. In this region language is seen as a badge of identity: language mixing, interaction, and influence are resisted for ideological reasons. The book considers which grammatical categories are most and least likely to be borrowed in a situation of prolonged language contact where lexical borrowing is reduced to a minimum. The author provides a genetic analysis of the languages of the region and considers their historical relationships with languages of the same family outside it. She also examines changes brought about by recent contact with European languages and culture, and the linguistic and cultural effects of being part of a group that is aware of the threat to its language and identity. The book is presented in relatively nontechnical language and will interest linguists and anthropologists.

This book traces the history of language technology from writing - the first technology specifically designed for language - to digital speech and other contemporary language systems. The book describes the social impact of technological developments over five millennia, and addresses topics such as the ways in which literacy has influenced cognitive and scientific development; the social impact of modern speech technology; the influence of various printing technologies; the uses and limitations of machine translation; how far mass information access is a means for exploitation or enlightenment; the deciphering of ancient scripts; and technical aids for people with language disabilities.
Richard Sproat writes in a clear, readable style, introducing linguistic and other scientific concepts as they are needed. His book offers fascinating reading for everyone interested in how language and technology have shaped and continue to shape our day-to-day lives.

This book aims to provide a micro-level, working model of a methodological approach and practical guidelines for building a corpus, informed by the work on the CorCenCC project (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh). It focuses specifically on the development of detailed design frames for corpora across communicative modes (spoken, written and e-language), and the practical processes involved in the planning, collection, transcription, collation and (re)presentation of language data. The book is designed to be of significant value and relevance to those interested in critically engaging with corpus methodology. Although Welsh is the language under discussion, the processes and approaches discussed in the building of CorCenCC can be applied to a lesser or greater extent to other language contexts. This book provides a working model, and an account of how to build a corpus dataset from which step by step guidelines for creating other linguistic corpora in any language can be easily extrapolated. It will be of value to students and scholars of minority languages and corpus linguistics.

Focusing on English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in the Arab Gulf states, the authors consider both sociolinguistic and pedagogical perspectives, and explore practical implications. This edited volume features chapters covering how teachers are negotiating the linguistic challenges posed by EMI; issues of ownership, choice and agency; the scaffolding of academic literacies; how to support the development of content teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in EMI settings as well as the benefits of a bilingual education. Chapter authors all have extensive local experience that they draw upon reflectively in their writing. Policy-makers, teachers and teacher educators wondering how they can best balance the need to develop competence in English in students of all ages on the Arabian Peninsula in a globalizing world, together with the concern to nurture Arabic language, culture and identity, will gain rich insights from this book. Postgraduates and researchers exploring issues surrounding EMI, both locally and internationally, will benefit from the arguments presented in this volume.

This edited book examines the use of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in a variety of international higher education contexts. The internationalization of education - indicated by increasing mobility of students, staff and ideas, as well as by policies and programmes put in place to facilitate educational exchange - has led to increasing adoption of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) for educational purposes. In this book, the authors present the results of empirical research into the implementation, assessment, development and use of EMI programmes in different settings, presenting the case for more structured training of teachers and staff. It will be of interest to second/foreign language teaching and administrative staff, as well as anyone else involved in teaching in English at higher education level.

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts. This monograph provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan.

Austronesian is the largest language family on earth: Some 1300 languages, 20% of the world's total, are spoken by 270 million people in a region that extends from Easter Island in the Pacific 10,000 miles west to Madagascar off the coast of Africa. Many of the languages in this diverse and linguistically rich region are undocumented and in imminent danger of extinction. This book provides a critical account of current knowledge, reviews the state of the documentation of languages in the region, and considers the linguistic effects of government policies and economic change. The editor's introduction draws out the key issues and themes. An overview of the Austronesian language family then examines the historical relations between the languages, their diversity, and their distribution in the region and describes the nature and aims of contemporary research. Individual chapters are then devoted to the revitalization of languages in Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, East Timor, and Vanuatu.
This pioneering account of one of the world's most linguistically rich regions offers direction and impetus to research in linguistics and anthropology, and holds out the means of saving many endangered languages and cultures.

This book offers sociological and structural descriptions of language varieties used in over 2 dozen Jewish communities around the world, along with synthesizing and theoretical chapters. Language descriptions focus on historical development, contemporary use, regional and social variation, structural features, and Hebrew/Aramaic loanwords. The book covers commonly researched language varieties, like Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as less commonly researched ones, like Judeo-Tat, Jewish Swedish, and Hebraized Amharic in Israel today.

Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself.
A Better Pencil puts our complex, still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into perspective, describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. The book explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube.
Here then is a fascinating history of our tangled dealings with a wide range of writing instruments, from ancient papyrus to the modern laptop. With dozens of illustrations and many colorful anecdotes, the book will enthrall anyone interested in language, literacy, or writing.

This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This book examines stereotypical traits of women as they are reflected in Anglo-American anti-proverbs, also known as proverb transformations, deliberate proverb innovations, alterations, parodies, variations, wisecracks, fractured proverbs, and proverb mutations. Through these sayings and witticisms the author delineates the image of women that these anti-proverbs reflect, her qualities, attributes and behavior. The book begins with an analysis of how women's role in the family, their sexuality and traditional occupations are presented in proverbs, and presents an overview of the genre of the anti-proverb. The author then analyses how this image of women is transformed in anti-proverbs, sometimes subverting, but often reinforcing the sexist bias of the original. This engaging work will appeal to students and scholars of humour studies, paremiology, gender studies, cultural studies, folklore and sociolinguistics alike.