Everyday Languaging

This book contributes to current theory building within applied linguistics and sociolinguistics by looking at the role of language in the lives, realities, and understandings of real children and youth in an urban setting. Collectively the studies amount to a comprehensive account of how urban children and youth construct, reactivate, negotiate, contest, and navigate between different linguistic and sociocultural norms and resources.

This book contributes to current theory building within applied linguistics and sociolinguistics by looking at the role of language in the lives, realities, and understandings of real children and youth in an urban setting. Collectively the studies amount to a comprehensive account of how urban children and youth construct, reactivate, negotiate, contest, and navigate between different linguistic and sociocultural norms and resources.

This is a lively, practical guide that provides a fascinating linguistic description of six familiar text and discourse types, showing how language works in everyday life to perform its particular purpose. Through original examples, students are introduced to a wide-ranging repertoire of analytical concepts and techniques, described in basic, clear terms, and drawn from a broad range of areas of linguistics and language study. The aim of the book is to enable students to discover for themselves what is interesting about different language situations, and to begin to interrogate the relationship between language, society, and ideology. The Language of Everyday Life includes: topics for discussion; exercises and further readings; an extensive glossary of technical terms; and a practical guide to project work.

In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hillprovides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal theunderlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate inAmerican culture. provides a detailed background on the theory of race andracism reveals how racializing discourse—talk and text thatproduces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people tothem—facilitates a victim-blaming logic integrates a broad and interdisciplinary range of literaturefrom sociology, social psychology, justice studies, critical legalstudies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines that havestudied racism, as well as material from anthropology andsociolinguistics Part of the ahref="http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-410785.html"target="_blank"Blackwell Studies in Discourse and CultureSeries/a

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 course of a lifetime, as well how a repertoire perspective can lead to a rethinking of cultural diversity and human interaction, from categorizing people’s differences to understanding how our repertoires can expand and overlap with other, thereby helping us to find common ground and communicate in increasingly multicultural schools, workplaces, markets, and social spheres. Rymes affirms the importance of the communicative repertoires concept with highly engaging discussions and contemporary examples from mass media, popular culture, and everyday life. The result is a fresh and exciting work that will resonate with students and scholars in sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, applied linguistics, and education.

Typography and Language in Everyday Life provides a detailed look at graphic as well as linguistic aspects of language and suggests there is much to be gained from collaboration between typographers and applied linguists. The first part of the book provides an introduction to aspects of typographic theory and history and suggests some areas of applied linguistics that offer approaches to studying graphic language. The second part comprises case studies which look at the relationship between prescription and practice for visual organisation by considering everyday display typography, house style and typing manuals, and letter-writing. Each of these subjects is looked at from historical and theoretical perspectives. Aimed at those who may be unfamiliar with theoretical and historical perspectives on the graphic aspects of language, and with broad concepts in applied linguistics, the book also directs readers to areas of further reading in each of these fields. Extensively illustrated with examples of past and present graphic language, Typography and Language in Everyday Life is essential reading for students of typography, graphic design, applied linguistics and education, as well as the general reader.

Is Ebonics really a dialect or simply bad English? Do women and men speak differently? Will computers ever really learn human language? Does offensive language harm children? These are only a few of the issues surrounding language that crop up every day. Most of us have very definite opinions on these questions one way or another. Yet as linguist Donna Jo Napoli points out in this short and highly entertaining volume, many of our most deeply held ideas about the nature of language and its role in our lives are either misconceived or influenced by myths and stereotypes Napoli provides an entertaining tour through the world of language, examining these and other vexing and controversial language-related questions. Throughout, she encourages and leads the reader to use common-sense and everyday experience rather than preconceived notions or technical linguistic expertise. Both her questions and her conclusions are surprising, sometimes provocative, and always entertaining. This volume is sure to engage both general readers and students of language and linguistics at any level.

For years Richard Hoggart has observed the oddity of a common speech habit: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths, a disinclination to form our own sentences "from scratch," unless that becomes inescapable. But in this book he is interested in more specific questions. How far do the British, and particularly the English, share the same sayings across the social classes? If each group uses some different ones, are those differences determined by location, age, occupation or place in the social scale? Over the years, did such sayings indicate some of the main lines of their culture, its basic conditions, its stresses and strains, its indications of meaning, and significance? These and other concerns animate this fascinating exploration of how the English, and particularly working-class English, use the English language.Hoggart sets the stage by explaining how he has approached his subject matter, his manner of inquiry, and the general characteristics of sayings and speech. Looking back into time, he explores the idioms and epigrams in the poverty setting of the early working-class English. Hoggart examines the very innards of working-class life and the idioms, with the language that arose in relation to home, with its main characters of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, and children; the wars; marriage; food, drink, health, and weather; neighbors, gossip, quarrels, old age, and death. He discusses related idioms and epigrams and their evolution from prewar to present.Hoggart identifies the sayings and special nuances of the English working-class people that have made them identifiable as such, from the rude and obscene to the intellectual and imaginative. Hoggart also examines the areas of tolerance, local morality, and public morality, elaborating on current usage of words that have evolved from the fourteen through the eighteenth centuries. He touches on religion, superstition, and time, the beliefs that animate language. And finally, he focuses on aphorisms and social change and the emerging idioms of relativism, concluding that many early adages still in use seem to refuse to die.With inimitable verve and humor, Hoggart offers adages, apothegms, epigrams and the like in this colorful examination drawn from the national pool and the common culture. This volume will interest scholars and general readers interested in culture studies, communications, and education.