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Language without Rights is a book-length critique of the concept of language rights. Synthesizing insights from a variety of disciplines, including linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology and political philosophy, Wee demonstrates how the appeal to language rights faces a number of conceptual and practical problems, particularly because the discourse of rights is fundamentally inconsistent with the socially variable nature of language. The book also explores an alternative that is more in tune with the complexities of language in social life by suggesting that issues involving language are better managed within a model of deliberative democracy.
An exploration of the controversies surrounding Singlish and how they illuminate wider issues of identity and language in the context of globalization.
The global spread of English both reproduces and reinforces oppressive structures of inequality. But such structures can no longer be seen as imposed from an imperial center, as English is now actively adopted and appropriated in local contexts around the world. This book argues that such conditions call for a new critique of global English, one that is sensitive to both the political economic conditions of globalization and speakers’ local practices. Linking Bourdieu’s theory of the linguistic market and his practice-based perspective with recent advances in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, this book offers a fresh new critique of global English. The authors highlight the m...
By drawing on multiple examples from healthcare, religion, service encounters and poetry, Lionel Wee presents rich insights into the use of automation in communication through a posthumanist lens. As communication becomes increasingly automated, the use of automation creates significant conceptual challenges for ideologies about language, beliefs about the nature of language, as well as assumptions about the roles that interpretation, anthropomorphism, and folk theories of mind play when language is used in communication. This book unravels the ideological implications of automation in communication and provides a new theoretical ground to address the major issues raised by automation. Wee discusses the importance of thinking carefully about how we identify and distinguish the roles of speaker and hearer. He also argues that we re-evaluate our understanding of the relationship between language and community. This book will be vital to students interested in studying the intersections of AI, language and communication, as well as researchers working in communication studies, linguistics and the broader sociology of language in the age of technological change.
This volume brings together contributions that explore the increasingly important roles that English plays in Asia, including its contribution to economic growth, national imaginaries and creative writing. These are issues that are political in a broad sense, but the diversity of Asian contexts also means that the social, political and cultural ramifications of the spread of English into Asia will have to be understood in relation to the challenges facing specific societies. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate this diversity by focusing on countries from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. Each country has two contributions devoted to it: one paper provides an overview of the country s language policy and its positioning of English, and another provides a critical discussion of creative expressions involving the use of English. Taken together, the papers in the volume detail the most recent developments concerning the politics of English in Asia."
A multimodal approach to linguistic landscapes that analyses the affective regimes of different landscape categories.
Singapore English: A grammatical description provides a vivid account of current, contemporary Singapore English, complementing older seminal accounts of this variety. Drawing primarily on the Grammar of Spoken Singapore English Corpus, which comprises naturally-occurring conversational speech, the contributions in this volume not only provide comprehensive and systematic descriptions of the structural features characterising colloquial Singapore English of the young, native speaker of today, but also propose the likely substrate sources of these features through insightful linguistic and historical examination. Clearly illustrating the particular rules of grammar that characterise Singapore English as a variety in its own right, this volume presents its evolution as a perfectly natural linguistic phenomenon which is best understood within the multiethnic and multilingual society that Singapore is and has been for the past two centuries. Theoretical linguists, sociolinguists, dialectologists, variationists, typologists and creolists, as well as those involved in education and policy-making, should find this description relevant and vital.
In this ground-breaking collection of essays, the editors and authors develop the idea of Linguistic Citizenship. This notion highlights the importance of practices whereby vulnerable speakers themselves exercise control over their languages, and draws attention to the ways in which alternative voices can be inserted into processes and structures that otherwise alienate those they were designed to support. The chapters discuss issues of decoloniality and multilingualism in the global South, and together retheorize how to accommodate diversity in complexly multilingual/ multicultural societies. Offering a framework anchored in transformative notions of democratic and reflexive citizenship, it prompts readers to critically rethink how existing contemporary frameworks such as Linguistic Human Rights rest on disempowering forms of multilingualism that channel discourses of diversity into specific predetermined cultural and linguistic identities.
How exactly do linguistic landscapes communicate and what theoretical significance might follow from such an inquiry? This book addresses these questions by taking as its starting point the insight that the individual or organisation that is responsible for the production of a sign may not be physically present at the landscape itself. The information to be conveyed is typically designed as a piece of signage to be emplaced at the site. Drawing on Goffman’s notion of a production format, the book argues that the constructed piece of sign and its intended placement within the landscape combine to constitute an animator complex. This raises the possibility of a disruption to the sign and its...
This original piece of research considers the ways in which modernity challenges and informs the language policies of various Southeast Asians nations. It combines theoretical arguments from policy studies, language policy and political theory, with quantitative figures where necessary. Succinctly and clearly written, this volume fills the research gap on the topic while bringing up to date the various political, social, and policy developments.