Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Sociolinguistics

It began with some graffiti on a wall: "A toda madre o un desmadre." Liza Bakewell was in Mexico doing research for her PhD, and although she thought her Spanish was fluent, she had never seen the expression before. When she asked what it meant, she was told that it wasn't proper for a woman to use those words.

Intrigued with the way Mexicans shape their language and how language in turn shapes them, Bakewell developed a long list of "madre" expressions over the years. How can "me vale madre" mean worthless and " que padre " mean marvelous? Why does "madre" mean whore as much as...

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...

This text describes and evaluates recent language planning and policy in the British Isles. Issues including minority language rights, language resources for the state and the citizen, and problems such as the standard English battle and policy for Welsh and Gaelic are analysed against the background of detailed study of contemporary British society and politics.

This volume covers the language situation in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation, including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages. The authors are indigenous and have been participants in the language planning context.

This book explores the social construction of age in the context of EFL in Mexico. It is the first book to address the age factor in SLA from a social perspective. Based on research carried out at a public university in Mexico, it investigates how adults of different ages experience learning a new language and how they enact their age identities as language learners. By approaching the topic from a social constructionist perspective and in light of recent work in sociolinguistics and cultural studies, it broadens the current second language acquisition focus on age as a fixed biological or...

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,...

As populations become more mobile, so interest grows in bi- and multilingualism, particularly in the context of education. This volume focuses on the singular situation in Israel, whose complex multiculturalism has Hebrew and Arabic as official languages, English as an academic and political language, and tongues such as Russian and Amharic spoken by immigrants.

Presenting research on bi- and trilingualism in Israel from a multitude of perspectives, the book focuses on four aspects of multilingualism and literacy in Israel: Arabic-Hebrew bilingual education and Arabic literacy...

This book explores the meaning of modernization in contemporary Chinese education. It examines the implications of the implementation of reforms in English language education for experimental-urban schools in the People's Republic of China.

Perez-Milans sheds light on how national, linguistic, and cultural ideologies linked to modernization are being institutionally (re)produced, legitimated, and inter-personally negotiated through everyday practice in the current context of Chinese educational reforms. He places special emphasis on those reforms regarding English language education,...

This new book offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires, resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the nicknames we coin, and the mass media references we make and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. Rymes also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the...

This new book offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires, resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about - not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the nicknames we coin, and the mass media references we make - and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. Rymes also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the...

Working from a unique theoretical foundation that combines linguistic anthropology, Asian American studies, and education, and using rigorous linguistic anthropological tools to closely examine video- and audio- recorded interactions gathered during the video-making project (in which teen participants learned the...