What effect has globalization had on our understanding of literacy? Grassroots Literacy seeks to address the relationship between globalization and the widening gap between ‘grassroots’ literacies, or writings from ordinary people and local communities, and ‘elite’ literacies.

Displaced from their original context to elite literacy environments in the form of letters, police declarations and pieces of creative writing, ‘grassroots’ literacies are unsurprisingly easily disqualified, either as ‘bad’ forms of literacy, or as messages that fail to be understood. Through...

Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society, reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and...

Organized thematically, this introduction outlines the basic principles and moves on to examine the methods and theory of CDA (critical discourse analysis). Topics covered include text and context, language and inequality, choice and determination, history and process, ideology and identity. Jan Blommaert focuses on how language can offer a crucial understanding of wider aspects of power relations, arguing that CDA should specifically analyze the effects of power.

In this book Jan Blommaert discusses the changes in human language in an age of globalization.