Employing Linguistics

Using insights drawn from the experiences of professional linguists working in a range of domains, this book is an essential resource to help you recognize the value and relevance of your skills and training as a linguist in the job market. No matter where you are in your career – just starting a first job or reflecting back on 30 years – this book provides an interpretive frame for catalyzing momentum around what comes next. Encouraging you to approach your career with agency and curiosity, Anna Marie Trester details the myriad ways that linguists can contribute meaningfully to the world of work. Exploring the connections between linguistics as a field of study and a way of thinking, she details the ways in which the powerful observational and analytical skills and abilities cultivated by a background in linguistics can be employed in a diverse range of professional workspaces. With activities, exercises, and a review of career literature, Employing Linguistics helps you seek and create opportunities as you choose what challenges to focus on next.

Using insights drawn from the experiences of professional linguists working in a range of domains, this book is an essential resource to help you recognize the value and relevance of your skills and training as a linguist in the job market. No matter where you are in your career – just starting a first job or reflecting back on 30 years – this book provides an interpretive frame for catalyzing momentum around what comes next. Encouraging you to approach your career with agency and curiosity, Anna Marie Trester details the myriad ways that linguists can contribute meaningfully to the world of work. Exploring the connections between linguistics as a field of study and a way of thinking, she details the ways in which the powerful observational and analytical skills and abilities cultivated by a background in linguistics can be employed in a diverse range of professional workspaces. With activities, exercises, and a review of career literature, Employing Linguistics helps you seek and create opportunities as you choose what challenges to focus on next.

Herbert Clark argues that language use is more than the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners, writers and readers perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles. In contrast to work within the cognitive sciences, which has seen language use as an individual process, and to work within the social sciences, which has seen it as a social process, the author argues strongly that language use embodies both individual and social processes.

This book is the first to explore the varied ways in which invented languages can be used to teach languages and linguistics in university courses. There has long been interest in invented languages, also known as constructed languages or conlangs, both in the political arena (as with Esperanto) and in the world of literature and science fiction and fantasy media - Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin, Dothraki in Game of Thrones, and Klingon in the Star Trek franchise, among many others. Linguists have recently served as language creators or consultants for film and television, with notable examples including Jessica Coons work on the film Arrival Christine Schreyers Kryptonian for Man of Steel, David Adgers contributions to the series Beowulf, and David J. Peterson's numerous languages for Game of Thrones and other franchises. The chapters in this volume show how the use of invented languages as a teaching tool can reach a student population who might not otherwise be interested in studying linguistics, as well as helping those students to develop the fundamental core skills of linguistic analysis. Invented languages encourage problem-based and active learning; they shed light on the nature of linguistic diversity and implicational universals; and they provide insights into the complex interplay of linguistic patterns and social, environmental, and historical processes. The volume brings together renowned scholars and junior researchers who have used language invention and constructed languages to achieve a range of pedagogical objectives. It will be of interest to graduate students and teachers of linguistics and those in related areas such as anthropology and psychology.

Understanding and addressing linguistic disadvantage must be a central facet of the social justice agenda of our time. This book explores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediates social justice in liberal democracies undergoing rapid change due to high levels of migration and economic globalization. Focusing on the linguistic dimensions of economic inequality, cultural domination and imparity of political participation, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice employs a case-study approach to real-world instances of linguistic injustice. Linguistic diversity is a universal characteristic of human language but linguistic diversity is rarely neutral; rather it is accompanied by linguistic stratification and linguistic subordination. Domains critical to social justice include employment, education, and community participation. The book offers a detailed examination of the connection between linguistic diversity and inequality in these specific contexts within nation states that are organized as liberal democracies. Inequalities exist not only between individuals and groups within a state but also between states. Therefore, the book also explores the role of linguistic diversity in global injustice with a particular focus on the spread of English as a global language. While much of the analysis in this book focuses on language as a means of exclusion, discrimination and disadvantage, the concluding chapter asks what the content of linguistic justice might be.

Language policies are political. They have political consequences as well as political origins. In State Traditions and Language Regimes, scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America shift focus from the consequences of language policies to how and why states make language policy choices. This shift, theorized through the concept of "language regime," inserts an urgently needed political science perspective into the current dialogue between sociolinguists, who research the societal effects of language policies, and political theorists of language rights, who analyze the normative implications of policies. New analytical tools drawn from comparative politics are showcased to analyze paths taken by different states in establishing language regimes, at times disrupted and redirected at critical junctures. Contributions to the volume include analyses of Canada's increasingly court-driven language policies, the United States' bifurcated language regime in the aftermath of 9/11, Ireland's conflicted protection of the Irish language, France's linguistic Jacobin tradition disrupted by Europeanization, the role of political parties and coalitions in language regime stability and change in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, Poland's war-torn history informing policy toward regional languages, and the role of English in international peace-building. While other books look at the political and societal effects of language policy, none seeks to employ a historical institutionalism approach which sets language policy choice in the context of power relations embedded in state traditions. State Traditions and Language Regimes offers a comparative politics perspective, one that enriches interdisciplinary debate on language policy.

This book provides a unique insight into negotiations around language investment for employability in the context of public employment services. Drawing on extensive ethnographical research carried out in Regional Employment Offices in Switzerland, the authors follow the stories of various job seekers. In doing so, they challenge the currently dominant assumption that investment in language competences leads to better employability. Arguing for a political economic perspective on these issues, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the connections between language and social inequality, as well as students and scholars of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.