Language as a Local Practice addresses the questions of language, locality and practice as a way of moving forward in our understanding of how language operates as an integrated social and spatial ...activity.
By taking each of these three elements – language, locality and practice – and exploring how they relate to each other, Language as a Local Practice opens up new ways of thinking about language. It questions assumptions about languages as systems or as countable entities, and suggests instead that language emerges from the activities it performs. To look at language as a practice is to view language as an activity rather than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on, as a material part of social and cultural life rather than an abstract entity.
Language as a Local Practice draws on a variety of contexts of language use, from bank machines to postcards, Indian newspaper articles to fish-naming in the Philippines, urban graffiti to mission statements, suggesting that rather than thinking in terms of language use in context, we need to consider how language, space and place are related, how language creates the contexts where it is used, how languages are the products of socially located activities and how they are part of the action.
Language as a Local Practice will be of interest to students on advanced undergraduate and post graduate courses in Applied Linguistics, Language Education, TESOL, Literacy and Cultural Studies.
1. Introduction: Language as a Local Practice 2. 'Press 1 for English': Practice as the ‘Generic Social Thing’ 3. The Reverend on Ice Again: Similarity, Difference and Relocalization 4. Talking in the City: The Linguistic Landscaping of Locality 5. Kerala Tuskers: Language as Already Local 6. Alibangbang and Ecologies of Local Language Practices. 7 "Molding Hearts… Leading Minds… Touching Lives" Practice as the new discourse? 8. Conclusion: Language as a Local Practice
" Language as a Local Practice is one of the most refreshing linguistics books to appear in a decade. Weaving together different strands of current research, Alastair Pennycook provides new framings and directions for the study of language." - David Barton, University of Lancaster , UK
Global linguistic flows Pennycook, Alastair; Ibrahim, Awad; Alim, H. Samy
2009., 2009, 20081001, 2008, 2008-10-01, 2008-09-04
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"The book engages complex processes such as transnationalism, (im)migration, cultural flow, and diaspora in an effort to expand current theoretical approaches to language choice and agency, speech ...style and stylization, codeswitching and language mixing, crossing and sociolinguistic variation, and language use and globalization. Moving throughout the Global Hip Hop Nation, through scenes as diverse as Hong Kong's urban center, Germany's Mannheim inner-city district of Weststadt, the Brazilian favelas, the streets of Lagos and Dar es Salaam, and the hoods of the San Francisco Bay Area, this global intellectual cipha breaks new ground in the ethnographical study of langauge and popular culture."--BOOK JACKET.
By extending the notion of metroethnicity, this paper proposes the notion of metrolingualism, creative linguistic practices across borders of culture, history and politics. Metrolingualism gives us a ...way to move beyond current terms such as 'multilingualism' and 'multiculturalism'. It is a product of modern and often urban interaction, describing the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language. The focus is not so much on language systems as on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction. Looking at data from workplaces where metrolingual language use is common, we show how the use of both fixed and fluid linguistic and cultural identities is part of the process of language use. The notion of metrolingualism gives us ways of moving beyond common frameworks of language, providing insights into contemporary, urban language practices, and accommodating both fixity and fluidity in its approach to language use.
Abstract
Posthumanism urges us to reconsider what it means to be human. From proclamations about the death of ‘Man’ to investigations into enhanced forms of being, from the advent of the Anthropocene ...(human-induced planetary change) to new forms of materialism and distributed cognition, posthumanism raises significant questions for applied linguistics in terms of our understandings of language, humans, objects, and agency. After reviewing the broad field of posthumanist thought, this paper investigates—through an overview of a series of recent research projects—the notion of repertoire, to show how this can be better understood by stepping out of the humanist constructs of the individual and the community and looking instead at the notion of distributed language and spatial repertoires. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of posthumanism for applied linguistics, in particular the ways we understand language in relation to people, objects, and place.
This book questions assumptions about the nature of language and how language is conceptualized. Looking at diverse contexts from sign languages in Indonesia to literacy practices in Brazil, from ...hip-hop in the US to education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book forcefully argues that a critique of common linguistic and metalinguistic suppositions is not only a conceptual but also a sociopolitical necessity. Just as many notions of language are highly suspect, so too are many related concepts premised on a notion of discrete languages, such as language rights, mother tongues, multilingualism, or code- switching. Definitions of language in language policies, education and assessment have material and often harmful consequences for people. Unless we actively engage with the history of invention of languages in order to radically change and reconstitute the ways in which languages are taught and conceptualized, language studies will not be able to improve the social welfare of language users.
This paper asks what translanguaging could start to look like if it incorporated an expanded version of language and questioned not only to the borders between languages but also the borders between ...semiotic modes. Developing the idea of spatial repertoires and assemblages, and looking at data from a Bangladeshi-owned corner shop, this paper suggests on the one hand that it is important to include a wide range of semiotic possibilities in any analysis. On the other hand, however, we cannot merely add more semiotic items to our translinguistic inventories, but need instead to seek out a way of grasping the relationships among a range of forms of semiosis. The notion of assemblages allows for an understanding of how different trajectories of people, semiotic resources and objects meet at particular moments and places, and thus helps us to see the importance of things, the consequences of the body, and the significance of place alongside the meanings of linguistic resources.
A central goal of language education is the development of resourceful speakers, people who have both good access to a range of linguistic resources and are good at shifting between styles, ...discourses, registers and genres. Communication becomes possible not because we adhere to global or even regional norms, but because language users are able to bring their communication into alignment with each other. Drawing on a series of studies of both online and face-to-face interaction in different cities in Asia, this paper suggests that to understand communication in contexts of diversity, we need to focus less on a supposed shared code and more on the interactions among language resources, activities and space. This in turn suggests that in order to pursue intelligibility in multilingual contexts we need a model of principled polycentrism, not the polycentrism of a World Englishes focus, with its established norms of regional varieties of English, nor the reduced communicative domain of the English as a lingua franca framework, but a more fluid yet principled approach to the diversity of contemporary contexts of communication.
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