Language, Writing, and Mobility


Book Description

This book explores the interaction between three key aspects of everyday life--language, writing, and mobility --with particular focus on their effects on language contact. While the book adopts an established view of language and society that is in keeping with the sociolinguistic paradigm developed in recent decades, it differs from earlier studies in that it assigns writing a central position. Sociolinguistics has long concentrated primarily on speech, but Florian Coulmas shows in this volume that the social importance of writing should not be disregarded: it is the most consequential technology ever invented; it suggests stability; and it defines borders. Linguistic studies have often emphasized that writing is external to language, but the discipline nevertheless owes its analytic categories to writing. Finally, the digital revolution has fundamentally changed communication patterns, transforming the social functions of writing and consequently also of language.




Language and Mobility


Book Description

This book looks at language in unexpected places. Through a series of personal and narrative accounts, it explores aspects of travel, mobility and locality to ask how languages, cultures and people turn up in unexpected places. What renders the unexpected so and how might we challenge our lines of expectation?




Literacy and Mobility


Book Description

Pushing forward research on emerging literacies and theoretical orientations, this book follows students from different tracks of high school English in a "failing" U.S. public school through their first two years in universities, colleges, and jobs. Analytical and methodological tools from new literacy and mobility studies are employed to investigate relations among patterns of movement and literacy practices across educational institutions, neighborhoods, cultures, and national borders. By following research participants’ trajectories in and across scenes of literacy in school, college, home, online, in transit, and elsewhere, the work illustrates how students help constitute and connect one scene of literacy with others in their daily lives; how their mobile literacies produce, maintain, and disrupt social relations and identities with respect to race, gender, class, language, and nationality; and how they draw upon multiple literacies and linguistic resources to accommodate, resist, and transform dominant discourses.




Exploring (Im)mobilities


Book Description

The impact of mobility and superdiversity in recent sociolinguistic research is well-established, yet very few studies deal with issues related to immobility. The chapters in this book focus on the sociolinguistic investigation of the dynamics between mobility and immobility as experienced by migrants, asylum seekers and members of minority or exploited groups. Central to the book is an exploration of how mobilities are affected by and in turn affect power relations and of the kinds of resources used by people to deal with (im)mobility processes. The book brings to light a new critical sociolinguistic imagination that is responsive to 21st century processes of (im)mobilities as socially, discursively and emotionally constructed and negotiated.




English Linguistic Imperialism from Below


Book Description

Imperialism may be over, but the political, economic and cultural subjugation of social life through English has only intensified. This book demonstrates how English has been newly constituted as a dominant language in post-market reform India through the fervent aspirations of non-elites and the zealous reforms of English Language Teaching experts. The most recent spread of English in India has been through low-fee private schools, which are perceived as dubious yet efficient. The book is an ethnography of mothering at one such low-fee private school and its neighboring state-funded school. It demonstrates that political economic transitions, experienced as radical social mobility, fuelled intense desire for English schooling. Rather than English schooling leading to social mobility, new experiences of mobility necessitated English schooling. At the same time, experts have responded to the unanticipated spread of English by transforming it from a second language to a first language, and earlier hierarchies have been produced anew as access to English democratized.




Mobility Work in Composition


Book Description

"Takes mobility to be the norm, rather than the exception to a norm of stasis and stability. Both in-depth investigations of specific forms of mobility work in composition, as well as and responses to and reflections on those explorations"--




Language in a Globalised World


Book Description

This book takes a critical look at the role of language in an increasingly diversified and globalised world, using the new framework of 'sociolinguistics of globalisation' to draw together research from human geography, sociolinguistics, and intercultural communication. It argues that globalisation has resulted in a destabilisation of social and linguistic norms, and presents a ‘language-in-motion’ approach which addresses the inequalities and new social divisions brought by the unprecedented levels of population mobility. This book looks at language on the individual, national and transnational level, and it will be of interest to readers with backgrounds in history, politics, human geography, sociolinguistics and minority languages.




Transcultural Italies


Book Description

The history of Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration, which have produced a range of narratives, inside and outside Italy. This collection interrogates the dynamic nature of Italian identity and culture, focussing on the concepts and practices of mobility, memory and translation. It adopts a transnational perspective, offering a fresh approach to the study of Italy and of Modern Languages.




Technology-Enhanced Language Learning for Specialized Domains


Book Description

Technology-Enhanced Language Learning for Specialized Domains provides an exploration of the latest developments in technology-enhanced learning and the processing of languages for specific purposes. It combines theoretical and applied research from an interdisciplinary angle, covering general issues related to learning languages with computers, assessment, mobile-assisted language learning, the new language massive open online courses, corpus-based research and computer-assisted aspects of translation. The chapters in this collection include contributions from a number of international experts in the field with a wide range of experience in the use of technologies to enhance the language learning process. The essays have been brought together precisely in recognition of the demand for this kind of specialised tuition, offering state-of-the-art technological and methodological innovation and practical applications. The topics covered revolve around the practical consequences of the current possibilites of mobility for both learners and teachers, as well as the applicability of updated technological advances to language learning and teaching, particularly in specialized domains. This is achieved through the description and discussion of practical examples of those applications in a variety of educational contexts. At the beginning of each thematic section, readers will find an introductory chapter which contextualises the topic and links the different examples discussed. Drawing together rich primary research and empirical studies related to specialized tuition and the processing of languages, Technology-Enhanced Language Learning for Specialized Domains will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, computer assisted language learning, languages and linguistics, and language teaching.




Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean


Book Description

Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean is the first volume to show the different ways in which surviving linguistic evidence can be used to track movements of people in the ancient world. Eleven chapters cover a number of case studies, which span the period from the seventh century BC to the fourth century AD, ranging from Spain to Egypt, from Sicily to Pannonia. The book includes detailed study of epigraphic and literary evidence written in Latin and Greek, as well as work on languages which are not so well documented, such as Etruscan and Oscan. There is a subject index and an index of works and inscriptions cited.