Words Matter


Book Description

Featuring current and historical concrete examples and minimising technical vocabulary, Words Matter is for all interested in examining ideas about language and its connections to social conflict and change. Accessible to general readers, the book will also be useful in linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, or other classes featuring language.




Language Planning and Social Change


Book Description

This book describes the ways in which politicians, church leaders, generals, leaders of national movements and others try to influence our use of language. Professor Cooper argues that language planning is never attempted for its own sake. Rather it is carried out for the attainment of nonlinguistic ends such as national integration, political control, economic development, the pacification of minority groups, and mass mobilization. Many examples are discussed, including the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, feminist campaigns to eliminate sexist bias in language, adult literacy campaigns, the plain language movement, efforts to distinguish American from British spelling, the American bilingual education movement, the creation of writing systems for unwritten languages, and campaigns to rid languages of foreign terms. Language Planning and Social Change is the first book to define the field of language planning and relate it to other aspects of social planning and to social change. The book is accessible and presupposes no special background in linguistics, sociology or political science. It will appeal to applied linguists and to those sociologists, economists and political scientists with an interest in language.




Language and Social Change in China


Book Description

Language and Social Change in China: Undoing Commonness through Cosmopolitan Mandarin offers an innovative and authoritative account of the crucial role of language in shaping the sociocultural landscape of contemporary China. Based on a wide range of data collected since the 1990s and grounded in quantitative and discourse analyses of sociolinguistic variation, Qing Zhang tracks the emergence of what she terms “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” as a new stylistic resource for a rising urban elite and a new middle-class consumption-based lifestyle. The book powerfully illuminates that Cosmopolitan Mandarin participates in dismantling the pre-reform, socialist, conformist society by bringing about new social distinctions. Rich in cultural and linguistic details, the book is the first of its kind to highlight the implications of language change on the social order and cultural life of contemporary China. Language and Social Change in China is ideal for students and scholars interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and Chinese language and society.




Language Use and Social Change


Book Description

The social implications of multilingualism is a field of study on whcih systematic research began only in the second half of the 20th century in Africa. This book, originally published in 1971, contains papers which concentrate on East Africa but it also discusses theoretical problems and methods arising from socio-linguistic studies outside the African field. These include studies on national languages and languages of wider communication in developing nations; the communication role of languages in multilingual societies; and social and cognitive aspects of bilingualism.




Language Revitalisation and Social Transformation


Book Description

This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of academic researchers in order to examine how and to what extent the challenge of language revitalisation should be reassessed and reconceptualised to take account of our fast-changing social context. The period of four decades between 1980 and 2020 that straddled the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is widely regarded as one that witnessed a series of fundamental social, economic and political transformations. Many societies have become increasingly individualistic, mobile and diverse in terms of ethnicity and identity; their economies have become increasingly interconnected; and their governance structures have become increasingly complex, incorporating a growing number of different levels and actors. In addition, rapid advancements with regard to automated, digital and communication technology have had a far-reaching impact on how people interact with each other and participate in society. The chapters in this book aim to advance an agenda of key questions that should concern those working in the field of language revitalisation over the coming years, and the volume will be of interest to students, scholars and policy-makers in related areas including sociolinguistics, education, sociology, geography, political science, law, economics, Celtic studies, and communication technology.




Classroom Talk for Social Change


Book Description

Learn how to foster critical conversations in English language arts classrooms. This guide encourages teachers to engage students in noticing and discussing harmful discourses about race, gender, and other identities. The authors take readers through a framework that includes knowledge about power, a critical learner stance, critical pedagogies, critical talk moves, and vulnerability. The text features in-depth classroom examples from six secondary English language arts classrooms. Each chapter offers specific ways in which teachers can begin and sustain critical conversations with their students, including the creation of teacher inquiry groups that use transcript analysis as a learning tool. Book Features: Strategies that educators can use to facilitate conversations about critical issues.In-depth classroom examples of teachers doing this work with their students.Questions, activities, and resources that foster self-reflection.Tools for engaging in transcript analysis of classroom conversations.Suggestions for developing inquiry groups focused on critical conversations.




Society and Language Use


Book Description

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this seventh volume underlines the mutually constitutive relation between society and language use. It highlights a number of the most prominent approaches of this relation and it draws attention to a selected number of topics that the study of language in its social context has characteristically brought to bear. Despite their theoretical and methodological differences, each of the chapters in this book assumes that it is necessary to look at society and language use as interdependent phenomena, and that by attending to microscopic linguistic phenomena one is also keeping a finger on the pulse of broader, macroscopic social tendencies that at the same time facilitate and constrain language use. The introduction provides a sketch of the intellectual antecedents of the volume’s two ‘mother disciplines’, viz., linguistics and social theory before pointing at recent common ground in the rising attention for discourse and what has come to be called ‘late-modernity’.




Language variation and change in social networks


Book Description

This monograph takes up recent advances in social network methods in sociology, together with data on economic segregation, in order to build a quantitative analysis of the class and network effects implicated in vowel change in a Southern American city. Studies of sociolinguistic variation in urban spaces have uncovered durable patterns of linguistic difference, such as the maintenance of blue collar/white collar distinctions in the case of stable linguistic variables. But the underlying interactional origins of these patterns, and the interactional reasons for their durability, are not well understood, due in part to the near-absence of large-scale network investigation. This book undertakes a sociolinguistic network analysis of data from the Raleigh corpus, a set of conversational interviews collected form natives of Raleigh, North Carolina, from 2008-2017. Acoustic analysis of the corpus shows the rapid, ongoing retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift and increasing participation in national vowel changes. The social distribution of these trends is explored via standard social factors such as occupation as well as innovative network variables, including a measure of nestedness in the community network. The book aims to pursue new network-based questions about sociolinguistic variation that can be applied to other corpora, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics as well as those interested in further understanding how existing quantitative network methods from sociological research might be applied to sociolinguistic data.




Language Activism


Book Description

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.




Language and Social Relations


Book Description

Provides a way of accounting for the relationship between language and a variety of social phenomena.