Throughout this book we have talked about how different resources (‘languages’, ‘dialects’, ‘styles’) are valued differently in different societies. The value assigned to different resources manifests not just in structural inequalities (see Chapter 2), but also in the pervasive everyday attitudes people have about particular ‘languages’ and ways of using language, and the acts of ‘othering’ and aggression that sometimes result from these attitudes. In this chapter we will focus on the study of language attitudes, exploring how and why people respond to other people’s communicative practices in negative or positive ways. The focal topic explores how the linguistic practices of certain groups of people are represented, mocked, and appropriated in ways that perpetuate racism and marginalisation.

In the , we have learned how to describe motion; we now want to explain it. In newtonian mechanics, we do this by defining quantities such as momentum, energy, force and so on. To what extent can we do this in the context of relativity, with our new 4-vector tools?

This chapter focuses on the mobility of communicative resources and the way they interact with and are influenced by different resources they come into contact with as a result of this mobility. It explores the different ways sociolinguists have addressed mobility, from more traditional approaches that focus on ‘language contact’ to more contemporary ones which attempt to trace the trajectories along which people and resources ‘flow’ through global networks. It then examines the communicative practices of global hip-hop artists as a case study in language and globalisation. The focal topic for this chapter is migration, specifically the communicative challenges migrants face and the strategies they deploy when they move from one place to another.

Having described motion, we can now explain it. We introduce the conserved 4-momentum, and with it the ideas of energy-momentum, conserved mass, and scattering.

We introduce the maths required to describe motion. We define 4-vectors, and specifically the velocity and acceleration 4-vectors. We can also define the frequency 4-vector, and using it straightforwardly deduce the relativistic Doppler shift.

In this chapter we will consider how people communicate not through ‘languages’ in the traditional sense, but through collections of resources – ‘pieces’ of language and other things like pictures, gestures, and clothing – which allow them to communicate not just what they mean but also who they are. Different people have access to different kinds of resources, which can create problems of inequality in society, an issue that we will take up in the focal topic section of this chapter.

An introduction to the book, covering key ideas and concepts.

But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled…. ‘Meters per second’ will integrate to ‘meters.’ The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.

In this chapter we will talk about how people use language and other communicative resources to show themselves to be ‘certain kinds of people’. We begin by discussing the notion of identity, arguing that people don’t just have one identity, but rather perform different identities in different situations by adopting different styles of speech and behaviour. We will then review the different ways sociolinguists have understood style, from perspectives which focus on how people adopt certain styles to fit the people they are talking to, to perspectives which focus on how people actively ‘style’ their identities in order to align to certain groups or to strategically manage different social situations. The focal topic features a discussion of how people use communicative resources to manage gender and sexual identities.