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177 results in Linguistic anthropology

Page 1 of 9

Language and Social Issues
  • An Investigator's Toolkit
  • Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson, Shiloh Drake, Amy Fountain
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • This engaging textbook provides a unique introduction to language and society, by showing students how to tap into the linguistic resources of their communities. Assuming no prior experience of linguistics, it begins with chapters on introductory methods and ethics, creating a foundation for students to think of themselves as linguists. It then offers students the sociolinguistics tools they need to look both locally and globally at language and the social issues with which it interacts. The book is illustrated throughout with examples from 98 distinct languages, enabling students to connect their local experiences with global ones, and each chapter ends with classroom and community-focused exercises, to help them discover the underlying rules that shape language use in their own lives. Students will gain a greater appreciation for, and understanding of, the linguistically diverse and culturally complex sociolinguistic issues around the world, and how language interacts with multiple domains of society.

Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation
  • 2nd edition
  • Sali A. Tagliamonte
  • Published online:
    19 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Now in its second edition, this is an invaluable manual for teaching and learning variation analysis, the quantitative study of linguistic variation and change. Written by a leading scholar in the field with over thirty years of experience, it provides an insider's view of the methodology through practical, 'hands-on' advice, including straightforward instructions for conducting analyses using the R programming language, the new gold standard for analysis. It leads readers through each phase of a research study based on data gathered in sociocultural contexts, beginning with the selection and sampling of a data source, to hints on successful project design, interview techniques, data management, analysis and interpretation, with systematic procedures provided at each step of the process. This edition has been fully updated, with new insights and explanations in line with recent discoveries in the field, making it essential reading for anyone embarking on their own sociolinguistic research project.

Language Activism
  • The Role of Scholars in Linguistic Reform and Social Change
  • Edited by Cecelia Cutler, Unn Røyneland, Zvjezdana Vrzić
  • Published online:
    31 May 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Bringing together a renowned group of scholars from a range of disciplines – sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, philosophy of language, and language documentation – this book explores the role academics can play in language activism. It surveys the most common tensions that language researchers experience in their attempts to enact social change through their work, such as how far they can become politically involved, how they can maintain objectivity in an activist role, whether their work can ever be apolitical, and what ideologies they propagate. In a series of concise original chapters, each author discusses their own experiences and personal concerns; some offering more theoretically informed elaborations on the topic of language activism. Showcasing the state-of-the-art in language activism, this book is essential reading for anyone considering the need for scholarly engagement with the public and the communities in which they work, and the impact that this activism can have on society.

Voices of Immigration
  • A Serial Narrative Ethnography of Language Shift
  • Agnes Weiyun He
  • Published online:
    20 December 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • What does immigration do to our languages and identities? What factors contribute to the maintenance or loss of immigrant languages? This book highlights theoretical and typological issues surrounding heritage language development, specifically focusing on Chinese-speaking communities in the USA. Based on a synthesis of observational, interview, reported, and audio/video data, it builds a composite, serial narrative of immigrant language and life. Through the voices of first- and second-generation immigrants, their family members and their teachers, it highlights the translingual practices and transforming interactional routines of heritage language speakers across various stages of life, and the congruencies between narrated perspectives and lived experiences. It shows that language, culture and identity are intricately interwoven, making it essential reading for students and scholars in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Literacies of Migration
  • Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence
  • Patriann Smith
  • Published online:
    30 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • Drawing on the lived experiences of high school-aged young Black immigrants, this book paints imaginaries of racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing, leveraged transnationally by teenagers across the Caribbean and the United States. The Black Caribbean youth reflect a full range of literacy practices – six distinct holistic literacies – identified as a basis for flourishing. These literacies of migration encapsulate numerous examples of how the youth are racialized transgeographically, based on their translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes, both institutionally and individually. In turn, the book advances a heuristic of semiolingual innocence containing eight elements, informed by the Black immigrant literacies of Caribbean youth. Through the eight elements presented – flourishing, purpose, comfort, expansion, paradox, originality, interdependence, and imagination – stakeholders and systems will be positioned to better understand and address the urgent needs of these youth. Ultimately, the heuristic supports a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence for Black Caribbean immigrant and transnational youth, as well as for all youth.

Dementia and Language
  • The Lived Experience in Interaction
  • Edited by Peter Muntigl, Charlotta Plejert, Danielle Jones
  • Published online:
    21 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • Bringing together cutting-edge research from a group of international scholars, this innovative volume examines how people with dementia interact with others in a variety of social contexts, ranging from everyday conversation to clinical settings. Drawing on methods from conversation analysis, it sheds light on how people with dementia accomplish relevant goals in interaction, as well as how changes in an individual's discursive abilities may affect how conversationalists negotiate a world in common and continue to build their social relationships. By exploring interaction, this book breaks new ground in challenging the commonplace assumptions about what constitutes typical or atypical interactions in communication involving people with dementia, and further demonstrates the unique and creative strategies all speakers employ to facilitate better and more collaborative communication. It is essential reading for academic researchers and advanced students across sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and conversational analysis, as well as health care practitioners.

Speech and the City
  • Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University
  • Yaron Matras
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • The Brexit debate has been accompanied by a rise in hostile attitudes to multilingualism. However, cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarisation by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. In this timely book, Yaron Matras describes the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard multilingualism as deficient citizenship. Drawing on his research in Manchester, he examines the 'multilingual utopia', looking at multilingual spaces across sectors in the city that support access, heritage, skills and celebration. The book explores the tensions between decolonial approaches that inspire activism for social justice and equality, and the neoliberal enterprise that appropriates diversity for reputational and profitability purposes, prompting critical reflection on calls for civic university engagement. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about ways to protect cultural pluralism in our society.

Linguistic Landscapes
  • A Sociolinguistic Approach
  • Jeffrey L. Kallen
  • Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023
  • Visible language is widespread and familiar in everyday life. We find it in shop signs, advertising billboards, street and place name signs, commercial logos and slogans, and visual arts. The field of linguistic landscapes draws on insights from sociolinguistics, language policy and semiotics to show how these public forms of language relate to multiple issues in language policy, language rights, language and education, language and culture, and globalization. Stretching from the earliest stone inscriptions, to posters and street signs, and to today's electronic media, linguistic landscapes sit at the crossroads of language, society, geography, and visual communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book-length synthesis of this exciting, rapidly-developing field. Using photographic evidence from across three continents, it demonstrates the methodology and approaches used, and summarises its findings and developments so far. It also seeks to answer common questions from its critics, and to suggest new directions for further study.

Encounters at the Counter
  • The Organization of Shop Interactions
  • Edited by Barbara Fox, Lorenza Mondada, Marja-Leena Sorjonen
  • Published online:
    19 January 2023
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023
  • Bringing together a diverse collection of studies from a team of international scholars, this pioneering volume focuses on interactions in shops, exploring the dynamics of conversation between sellers and customers. Beginning with the emergence of a 'need' for a product before the request to a seller is actually made, all the way through to the payment phase, it explores the rich and deeply methodical practices employed by customers and sellers as they go about the apparently mundane work of buying and selling small items. It looks at how seller and customer interact both verbally, and by means of manipulating the material objects involved, across a range of different kinds of purchase. Providing new insights into multimodal human interaction and the organisation of the commercial activity, it aims to bring about a new understanding of the fundamental ways in which economic value, possession and ownership is achieved.

Language in Culture
  • Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language
  • Michael Silverstein
  • Published online:
    22 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael Silverstein (1945–2020) was at the forefront of the study of language in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people say but how we say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of activity. Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples – from brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau's pantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefining how we think about language and culture.

The Anthropology of Intensity
  • Language, Culture, and Environment
  • Paul Kockelman
  • Published online:
    05 May 2022
    Print publication:
    19 May 2022
  • What counts as too close for comfort? How can an entire room suddenly feel restless at the imminence of a yet unknown occurrence? And who decides whether or not we are already in an age of unliveable extremes? The anthropology of intensity studies how humans encounter and communicate the continuous and gradable features of social and environmental phenomena in everyday interactions. Focusing on the last twenty years of life in a Mayan village in the cloud forests of Guatemala, this book provides a natural history of intensity in exceedingly tense times, through a careful analysis of ethnographic and linguistic evidence. It uses intensity as a way to reframe Anthropology in the age of the Anthropocene, and rethinks classic work in the formal linguistic tradition from a culture-specific and context-sensitive stance. It is essential reading not only for anthropologists and linguists, but also for ecologically oriented readers, critical theorists, and environmental scientists.

Action Ascription in Interaction
  • Edited by Arnulf Deppermann, Michael Haugh
  • Published online:
    17 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022
  • Bringing together a team of global experts, this is the first volume to focus on the ways in which meanings are ascribed to actions in social interaction. It builds on the research traditions of Conversation Analysis and Pragmatics, and highlights the role of interactional, social, linguistic, multimodal, and epistemic factors in the formation and ascription of action-meanings. It shows how inference and intention ascription are displayed and drawn upon by participants in social interaction. Each chapter reveals practices, processes, and uses of action ascription, based on the analysis of audio and video recordings from nine different languages. Action ascription is conceptualised in this volume as not merely a cognitive process, but a social action in its own right that is used for managing interactional concerns and guiding the subsequent course of social interaction. It will be essential reading for academic researchers and advanced students interested in the relationship between language, behaviour and social interaction.

Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation
  • Theorizing the Third Wave
  • Edited by Lauren Hall-Lew, Emma Moore, Robert J. Podesva
  • Published online:
    30 July 2021
    Print publication:
    12 August 2021
  • The 'third wave' of variation study, spearheaded by the sociolinguist Penelope Eckert, places its focus on social meaning, or the inferences that can be drawn about speakers based on how they talk. While social meaning has always been a concern of modern sociolinguistics, its aims and assumptions have not been explicitly spelled out until now. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive overview of the central tenets of variation study, examining several components of dialects, and considering language use in a wide variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. Each chapter, written by a leader in the field, posits a unique theoretical claim about social meaning and presents new empirical data to shed light on the topic at hand. The volume makes a case for why attending to social meaning is vital to the study of variation while also providing a foundation from which variationists can productively engage with social meaning.

The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies
  • Edited by Anna De Fina, Alexandra Georgakopoulou
  • Published online:
    28 September 2020
    Print publication:
    15 October 2020
  • Discourse studies, the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts, is a fast-moving and increasingly diverse field. With contributions from leading and upcoming scholars from across the world, and covering cutting-edge research, this Handbook offers an up-to-date survey of Discourse Studies. It is organized according to perspectives and areas of engagement, with each chapter providing an overview of the historical development of its topic, the main current issues, debates and synergies, and future directions. The Handbook presents new perspectives on well-established themes such as narrative, conversation-analytic and cognitive approaches to discourse, while also embracing a range of up-to-the-minute topics from post-humanism to digital surveillance, recent methodological orientations such as linguistic landscapes and multimodal discourse analysis, and new fields of engagement such as discourses on race, religion and money.

Language in the Trump Era
  • Scandals and Emergencies
  • Edited by Janet McIntosh, Norma Mendoza-Denton
  • Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    03 September 2020
  • Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted that 'I know words. I have the best words', yet despite these assurances his speech style has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. If the Trump era feels like a political crisis to many, it is also a linguistic one. Trump has repeatedly alarmed people around the world, while exciting his fan-base with his unprecedented rhetorical style, shock-tweeting, and weaponized words. Using many detailed examples, this fascinating and highly topical book reveals how Trump's rallying cries, boasts, accusations, and mockery enlist many of his supporters into his alternate reality. From Trump's relationship to the truth, to his use of gesture, to the anti-immigrant tenor of his language, it illuminates the less obvious mechanisms by which language in the Trump era has widened divisions along lines of class, gender, race, international relations, and even the sense of truth itself.

How We Talk about Language
  • Exploring Citizen Sociolinguistics
  • Betsy Rymes
  • Published online:
    07 September 2020
    Print publication:
    24 September 2020
  • The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people talk about language, how we can participate in those conversations, and what we can learn from them about both language and our society. Along the way, we learn that knowledge about language and its connection to social life is not primarily produced and spread by linguists or sociolinguists, or even language teachers, but through everyday conversations, on-line arguments, creative insults, music, art, memes, twitter-storms - any place language grabs people's attention and foments more talk. An essential new aid to the study of the relationship between language, culture and society, this book provides a vision for language inquiry by turning our gaze to everyday forms of language expertise.

The Language of Hunter-Gatherers
  • Edited by Tom Güldemann, Patrick McConvell, Richard A. Rhodes
  • Published online:
    26 February 2020
    Print publication:
    27 February 2020
  • Hunter-gatherers are often portrayed as 'others' standing outside the main trajectory of human social evolution. But even after eleven millennia of agriculture and two centuries of widespread industrialization, hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist. This volume, using the lens of language, offers us a window into the inner workings of twenty-first-century hunter-gatherer societies - how they survive and how they interface with societies that produce more. It challenges long-held assumptions about the limits on social dynamism in hunter-gatherer societies to show that their languages are no different either typologically or sociolinguistically from other languages. With its worldwide coverage, this volume serves as a report on the state of hunter-gatherer societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and readers in all geographical areas will find arguments of relevance here.

Language Endangerment
  • David Bradley, Maya Bradley
  • Published online:
    11 November 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019
  • Up to ninety percent of humanity's traditional languages and cultures are at risk and may disappear this century. While language endangerment has not achieved the publicity surrounding environmental change and biodiversity loss, it is just as serious, disastrously reducing the variety of human knowledge and thought. This book shows why it matters, why and how it happens, and what communities and scholars can do about it. David and Maya Bradley provide a new framework for investigating and documenting linguistic, social and other factors which contribute to languages shifting away from their cultural heritage. Illustrated with practical in-depth case studies and examples from the authors' own work in Asia and elsewhere, the book encourages communities to maintain or reclaim their traditional languages and cultures.

How Mediation Works
  • Resolving Conflict Through Talk
  • Angela Cora Garcia
  • Published online:
    29 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 August 2019
  • Using conversation analysis to study the interaction between mediators and disputants, this study shows how mediation is used to resolve conflict in small claims and divorce mediation sessions. Angela Garcia explores the techniques mediators use to help disputants tell their stories, make and respond to complaints and accusations, and come up with ideas for resolving the dispute. By analyzing these techniques in their interactional context, she shows how they impact the experience and responses of disputants, and demonstrates that mediator techniques can empower disputants, maximize disputant autonomy, and display mediator's neutrality while in some cases, the organization of talk in mediation may work against these goals. This book is the first to use conversation analysis to study how mediation works and how mediators can best help disputants.This book is no. 34 in the Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics series. In some copies, it has mistakenly been printed as no. 33.

Signs of Difference
  • Language and Ideology in Social Life
  • Susan Gal, Judith T. Irvine
  • Published online:
    17 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019
  • How are peoples' ideas about languages, ways of speaking and expressive styles shaped by their social positions and values? How is difference, in language and in social life, made - and unmade? How and why are some differences persuasive as the basis for action, while other differences are ignored or erased? Written by two recognised authorities on language and culture, this book argues that ideological work of all kinds is fundamentally communicative, and that social positions, projects and historical moments influence, and are influenced by, people's ideas about communicative practices. Neither true nor false, ideologies are positioned and partial visions of the world, relying on comparison and perspective; they exploit differences in expressive features - linguistic and otherwise - to construct convincing stereotypes of people, spaces and activities. Using detailed ethnographic, historical and contemporary examples, this outstanding book shows readers how to analyse ideological work semiotically.

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