Books in the Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language series

A study of African American language in the United States looks at the grammar, speech, and verbal genres within the African American and American speech communities, as well as various historical strands that help to understand its development and the current political and educational debates about its dialectical status.

In this book, Joseph Errington analyses the role of language in development in Indonesia. His analysis of 'shifting languages' in two Javanese villages examines changing conversational practices in relation to questions of ethnicity, nationalism, and political culture. The theoretical implications extend beyond Indonesia and South East Asia, to the developing world in general.

How does language influence our perception of the world? How do children learn to use language appropriately? How far does language contribute to the formation of our personalities? In what ways does language make us human? This volume brings together a team of leading specialists to discuss these important questions.

Language is a means we use to communicate feelings; we also reflect emotionally on the language we and others use. This book analyses the signals people use to express emotion, looking at the social, cultural and political functions of emotional language around the world.

How does language influence our perception of the world? How do children learn to use language appropriately? How far does language contribute to the formation of our personalities? In what ways does language make us human? This volume brings together a team of leading specialists to discuss these important questions.

Languages die for political, economic and cultural reasons, and can disappear remarkably quickly. Between ten and fifty per cent of all languages currently spoken can be considered endangered, but it is only in the past ten years or so that due importance has been given to the study of contracting and dying languages.

This collection of classic case studies in ethnography provides a broad, cross-cultural survey of the use, role and function of language and speech in social life. Scholars and students whose backgrounds may be in literature, speech communication, performance studies or ethnomusicology will equally welcome this edition.

Languages die for political, economic and cultural reasons, and can disappear remarkably quickly. Between ten and fifty per cent of all languages currently spoken can be considered endangered, but it is only in the past ten years or so that due importance has been given to the study of contracting and dying languages.

Interviews play a crucial role in social scientific research. But, as Charles Briggs argues in this work, received interviewing techniques rest on fundamental misapprehensions about the nature both of the interview as a communicative event, and of the nature of the data that it produces.

Explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on authentic data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how we use language to formulate and transmit models of social life and conduct.

Although much has been written about the ceremonial exchange systems of New Guinea highlanders, this 1991 book is the first to concentrate on exchange events and the elaborate oratory used at them. Francesca Merlan and Alan Rumsey advance our understanding of the interaction between social structures and historical events, and of the crucial role of talk.

The spread of the national language in Indonesia has threatened local languages. On Sumba a tradition of ritual poetic speech has waned, although new hybrid forms of poetic expression are emerging. Political coercion is a partial explanation, but so is the role of linguistic ideologies.

This innovative volume places the analysis of language and gender in the context of a biocultural framework, examining both cultural and biological sources of gender differences in language, as well as the interaction between them.

Jeff Siegel's fascinating book provides a sociolinguistic history of language contact in Fiji where, from the 1860s until 1920, some 90,000 labourers from other Pacific islands and from India worked on the European-owned plantations. It focuses on the pidgins and other language varieties developed to meet the needs of peoples from different linguistic backgrounds and different cultures.

Literacy and Literacies is an engaging account of literacy and its relation to power. The book develops a synthesis of literacy studies, moving beyond received categories, and exploring the domain of power through questions of colonialism, modern state formation, educational systems and official versus popular literacies. Collins and Blot offer in-depth critical discussion of particular cases and discuss the role of literacies in the formation of class, gender, and ethnic identity. Through their analysis of two domains - those of literacies and power, and of literacies and subjectivity - they challenge received assumptions about literacy, intellectual development and social progress and argue that neither 'universalist' nor 'particularist' accounts offer satisfactory approaches to the phenomenon. This is a sustained exploration of the domain of power in relation to literacy. It will be welcomed by students and researchers in anthropology, linguistics, literacy studies and history.

The essays in this collection critically re-examine the concept of context from a variety of different angles.

In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of the Polynesian community of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context.

Twelve prominent linguists and linguistic anthropologists examine 'responsibility', 'authority', and 'knowledge', all central, but problematic concepts in contemporary anthropology. Their detailed case studies analyse diverse forms of oral discourse n from everyday conversation and conversational narrative to divination and ritual poetry n in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

Linguistic relativity is the claim that culture, through language, affects the way in which we think, and especially our classification of the experienced world. This book reexamines ideas about linguistic relativity in the light of new evidence and changes in theoretical climate.

Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and economics in the making of the modern world. This reading of over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology, folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers, country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies, privileged linguistic codes, and political concepts and practices shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. This 2003 book demonstrates that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, it suggests strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.

Children's acquisition of language and the acquisition of culture are processes that have usually been studied separately. In exploring cross-culturally the connections between the two, this volume provides a new, alternative, integrated approach to the developmental study of language and culture.

This book, first published in 1992, is an anthropological study of language and cultural change among the people of Gapun, a small community in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea.

Illustrates the new approach to empirical research on the linguistic relativity hypothesis which Lucy develops in a companion volume Language Diversity and Thought.

The Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that the grammar of the particular language we spwak affects the way we think about reality. This book reviews the various lines of empirical inquiry which arose in America in response to this hypothesis, and proposes a new approach to future empirical research.

As children are learning to become competent members of their society, so also are they learning to become competent speakers of their language. In other words socialisation and language acquisition take place at the same time in a child's experience. In this book, Elinor Ochs explores the complex interaction of these two processes.