This chapter explores how important it is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in particular to have access to studying their own languages across all jurisdictions in Australian education. It also explores the increasing options available to teachers to provide these opportunities for students from Foundation to Year 12. The value is not limited to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students; all students in Australian schools can benefit from the deeper understanding of Indigenous peoples, cultures and histories that develops through the study of Indigenous languages. Language is the vehicle of cultural expression, and when a language is no longer spoken by its people all humanity is diminished by the loss of cultural transmission that occurs when a language ‘goes to sleep’. Teachers are very well positioned to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to help wake up the sleeping Australian languages and to maintain those that are still languages of everyday communication.

This chapter provides an account of how literary criticism, especially the one associated with F. R. Leavis and the Cambridge school worked, or failed to work, in an African context and the role this critical tradition played in the mapping of African writing in the postcolonial period. Focusing on the critical work of Abiola Irele, perhaps the most dominant figure in African literary critical studies in the second half of the twentieth century, the chapter looks at how the use of African literature as a primary body of reference led to the questioning of the key concepts defining literary criticism including the notion of tradition, literary genealogies, and the relation between language and identity. The chapter explores how Irele, working within three distinct cultural formations, namely the English, the French, and the Yoruba, positioned literary criticism as both an affirmation of tradition and a critique of traditionalism. Tracing the evolution of Irele’s critical thinking as he moved from universities in West Africa to the United States, the chapter provides an account of the relation between criticism, institutions, and audiences.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a leading postcolonial literary voice, advocating for the centrality of indigenous languages. His central argument is that since language was a fundamental instrument of colonisation, it is equally integral to the process of decolonisation. This has resonated among intellectuals and writers from formerly colonised societies who seek to redress legacies of colonialism. During the transitional period in South Africa, Ngugi became the most sought-after speaker on the preservation and development of African languages, shaping the discourse about language, culture and identity. Ngugi’s language ethos played a critical role in the recognition of indigenous languages in the constitution of South Africa. This chapter traces the impact of Ngugi’s language activism, particularly as it has shaped the author’s own development as a writer in both English and IsiXhosa. Through an autoethnographic lens, this chapter foregrounds personal reflection on Ngugi’s influence. It challenges the reductive tendency to confine Ngugi’s legacy solely to his direct intellectual and literary output, arguing for a more expansive appraisal of his enduring influence in shaping and sustaining language discourse among the formerly colonised. It recognises the evolution of Ngugi’s ideas over time and attributes this to his responsiveness to the shifting dynamics of contemporary society and global discursive formations.

Both linguistic and psychological constructionist approaches to emotion research recognize the crucial role of language in shaping emotion experience and communication. Multilingual individuals navigate multiple languages, and often multiple cultures, making it essential to understand how emotions are perceived, processed, experienced, and communicated in first and later learned languages. This chapter reviews previous findings from linguistics and psychology, shedding light on the complex and multifaceted relationships among emotion, language, and culture. While it is clear that multilinguals perceive, process, experience, and communicate emotions differently across their various languages, the chapter outlines possible directions for future research to further explore the impact of multilingualism and multiculturalism on emotions.

Beyond Words is a book of big questions about language. What is language? Where did it come from? How do we learn our mother tongue? How do we learn other languages in addition to our mother tongue? How do we use and understand language? How do we lose language? Collectively, these topics fall under the umbrella of psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics is the marriage of linguistics and psychology. It is a branch of language science that explores the relationship between language and the human mind. This is a book that takes us down many rabbit holes. It is filled with astonishing research and surprising discoveries. It is about fierce debate and contentious topics that have fascinated us since ancient times and continue to do so today. Language is weird, but also wonderful. Language is intricate and innovative, confusing and complex, mysterious and most of all, it is multifaceted. Language is beyond words.

An introduction to the general properties of communication and the differences between language and communcation. Includes discussion of medium of communication, purpose, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, etc.

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.

This chapter discusses the dazzling array of creativity that is language and metaphor in Pindar, in terms of its impact on us as its consumers and in terms of the questions that aspects of lyric diction and style ask of us. The discussion reaffirms the importance of close reading from the inside out as the key to appreciating the nature and challenge of Pindaric lyric. It assesses the powers and risks that come with lyric language in detail and across time, as readers and audiences are stopped in their tracks. The chapter discusses the experiential potential of a representative selection of examples taken from across the corpus, in three sections. Section 1, ‘Options’, investigates how Pindaric lyric fosters both a freedom of expression and an encouragement to audiences and readers to keep their minds open in response. Section 2, ‘Colours of Desire’, explores the sustained intensificatory effects of marked imagery in one extended example from Olympian 6. Section 3, ‘Access and Appropriateness’, explores how the hyperbolic nature of lyric imagery may raise further questions about our commitments to the sentiments that Pindaric lyric finds itself able to project.

This chapter compares the commonly assumed view of language as a linear sequence of words (or sounds) to the “flat earth theory”.

The timing of acoustic events in relation to different levels of structure building is a fundamental task in both language and music. While in music the timing of sounds and their relation to an abstract metrical grid is often used to create aesthetic effects, timing relations in language are commonly grammaticalized for the conventional construction of different levels of meaning, leaving only a narrow margin for rhythmic preferences of other sorts. Our chapter reviews functions of timing, and, specifically, metrical structure, in both music and language, suggests a unified form of representation inspired by autosegmental-metrical phonology and thereby directs the attention to principles of time-related structure building that are relevant for both communicative sound systems.

Music, like language, relies on listeners’ ability to extract information as it unfolds in time. One key difference between music and language is the strong rhythmic regularities of music relative to language. Despite a wealth of literature describing the rhythms of song as regular and the rhythms of speech as irregular, the acoustic features and neural processing of rhythmic regularity in song and (lack thereof) in speech are poorly understood. This chapter examines acoustic, behavioral, and neural indices of rhythmic regularity in speech and song. Our goal is to review which features induce rhythmic regularity and examine how regularity impacts attention, memory, and comprehension. This work has the potential to inform a wide range of areas, including clinical interventions for speech and reading, best practices for teaching and learning in the classroom, and how attention is captured in real-world scenarios.