Bloomsbury Linguistics

Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Welsh

To kick start our new weekly blog series, Bloomsbury Linguistics’ Five Fun Facts about Languages, we've chosen five fun, or at least vaguely interesting, facts about Welsh for your entertainment. Remember, you can share any of your fun facts about Welsh by tweeting us @BloomsburyLing, #5funfacts. So, here we go!

1) Welsh, or Cymraeg, is spoken by 19% of Wales’ total population of around 3 million, according to the 2011 census. This is down from 20.8% in 2001. However, in the sixth century AD Welsh was spoken in most of Britain, and until the twentieth century some shepherds in Cumbria were still counting their sheep in Welsh.

2) Welsh orthography uses 28 letters from the Latin alphabet to write native Welsh words, including 8 digraphs:

a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y

‘Offically’ there are no letters “j”, "k", "q", "v", "x", and "z", although they can be used for borrowed words or some technical terms. “K” was in fact common until the sixteenth century but was dropped when the New Testament was translated into Welsh. William Salesbury explained: "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth".

3) Similar to languages such as Arabic, Classical Hebrew, and Mayan, the canonical word order in Welsh is verb–subject–object. This is unlike English and most other European Languages, which tend to use SVO.

4) The town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch has the longest place name in the UK. This is not an authentic Welsh toponym, but was artificially created in the 1860’s as a publicity stunt. At 58 letters long, ‘Lanfairpg’ is often mistakenly thought to be the longest place name in the world. With 85 letters Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaun-gahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, the Māori name for a hill in New Zealand, holds the record.

5) In January 2014 it was reported that the Welsh language ‘faces emergency’, due to the inability of many who want to live their lives through the medium of Welsh to access Welsh in public services. However, the Welsh government insists that it is committed to promoting the Welsh language and "to ensuring that people are able to use it in all aspects of their daily lives".

Make sure to come back next Thursday for five fun facts about 'Jafaican' English!

Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics 

Bloomsbury Linguistics’ Five Fun Facts about Languages

Hello, and welcome to the first entry in what will be a series of short blog posts giving you five fun(ish) facts about languages from across the globe. From dead ancient languages to emerging new dialects, join Bloomsbury Linguistics on a journey of discovery as we seek some interesting facts about just a few of the rich and diverse languages that have graced planet Earth! You can join in too, by tweeting us any interesting facts about the languages we cover @BloomsburyLing, #5funfacts.

So, where to start? Well, as our Linguistics team is mostly based in London, we thought that we’d look to our own shores first. However, thinking that starting with English might be a little too obvious, we looked to our western borders, and we'll work our way on a generally eastward trajectory from there. So, make sure that you check back later today for…

Bloomsbury Linguistics’ Five Fun Facts about Welsh!

Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics

An Interview with Neil Cohn, author of The Visual Language of Comics

Today sees the much anticipated release of Neil Cohn’s The Visual Language of Comics!

Packed full of illustrations, many drawn by Neil himself - which really pop from the page - this beautiful book presents Cohn’s provocative theory that drawings and sequential images are structured the same way as language - that comics use their own visual language. The latest addition to the 'Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics' series, this pioneering work promises to become a key text for anybody interested in language and visual studies, as well as comic studies more generally.

The Visual Language of Comics has already generated a huge amount of interest. In addition to an article discussing Neil's work in the Guardian, the book has also recieved fantastic endorsements from both academics working in the fields of linguistics and psychology and from authors and professionals working with comics. Here are some of our favourites:

"In this pioneering book, Neil Cohn opens up a whole new domain of cognitive science: the study of how we derive meaning from sequential images... His results illuminate the parallels and sharpen the differences among different human cognitive systems." - Ray Jackendoff, Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, USA

"Cohn explores the analogies between comics and verbal language with exciting results. By unveiling patterns in all stylistic dimensions of comics’ visuals, this book is not just indispensable reading for comics scholars, but also constitutes a major contribution to the discipline of visual studies more generally." - Charles Forceville, Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

"Neil Cohn thinks about the comics medium and visual literacy on very deep and enlightening levels. In The Visual Language of Comics, Cohn shares his research and insights on how the mind works when processing sequential visuals. It's fascinating reading for anyone interested in visual communication." - Carl Potts, Former Executive Editor, Marvel Comics and Author of 'The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics: Inside the Art of Visual Storytelling'

To see all the endorsements, and to buy a copy of the book, click here.

To celebrate the publication of this long awaited book, we asked Neil some questions about this work and his plans for the future:

1. What particular areas of linguistics interest you and why?

I’ve always been partial to conceptual/cognitive semantics and syntax, and I primarily study narrative structure (but in a “syntax” sort of way). However, all areas of language fascinate me. I’m most interested in developing a subfield of “visual language linguistics” though, which applies linguistic and psycholinguistic principles and methods to graphic communication. Because of that overarching goal, I’ve had to consider how linguistic structure might be applicable (or not applicable) to the visual-graphic modality.  This applies both to various levels of linguistic structure and to issues like acquisition, psychology, development, sociolinguistics and others. So, they all interest me, though I usually put a unique spin on them.

2. How would you describe The Visual Language of Comics in one sentence?

The Visual Language of Comics explores how the structure of graphic communication—drawing and visual narrative—is similar in structure and cognition of language, thereby posing challenges to the broader understanding of language and the mind.

3. When did you start researching for this book?

It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly the research for this specific book began. I started doing research on “visual language” when I was a college student, in 1999. So, the seeds of this research began all the way back then, and elements of these past 14 years appear throughout the book. Of course, many of the ideas changed over that time period. That’s one very nice thing about this book—it provides an introductory overview of the broader ideas that comprise this theory, which are finally all presented in one place.

4. Which part of writing The Visual Language of Comics have you enjoyed most?

The most exciting sections for me were the ones that I hadn’t explored much before writing the book. Some chapters present things I’ve been immersed in over the past several years, but others were necessary for the broader theory, despite not having been explored as much for other papers and projects. For example, I hadn’t really detailed the chapter on the “visual lexicon” of drawings, in particular the discussion of “closed class” visual vocabulary: What are visual affixes? How does reduplication or suppletion work in drawings? There are a lot of fun, quirky aspects of the visual vocabulary, like how lightbulbs float above heads to show inspiration, how dotted lines replace solid lines to show invisibility, or how hearts might substitute for eyes to show lust. All of these things appear to follow rules and constraints that are systematic. It was quite fun to write about them in detail for the first time—and to draw the examples!

5. Any tips for people reading the book?

I’d encourage readers to think broadly about the ideas I’m proposing. What are the ramifications of the theory of visual language? What other ways could we test it? Are there aspects of this research that they might think would be interesting and worth pursuing? This book is meant as the start to a bigger and longer conversation, and I hope they engage with those questions, since I believe the book challenges a lot of assumptions that are held about graphic communication, drawings, and language.

6. Where will your research go from here?

I have several different tracks of research progressing right now. My biggest line of inquiry explores the narrative grammar of visual narrative—how we make meaning out of a sequence of images. I have a series of papers I’m planning on doing that will vastly expand the scope of my theoretical model on this, and I’ve really been looking forward to getting them out there. I’m also engaged in on-going research looking at how the brain processes visual narrative, mostly by examining brainwaves (i.e., “event related potentials” or “ERPs”). The theory and the experiments usually go hand-in-hand in developing our understanding of this cognitive system.

I’m also very interested in pursuing more studies that actively code comics of the world for various theoretically defined properties (many of which are described in the book). The book actually devotes three whole chapters to looking at the systems of different visual languages in the world—the systems used in American and Japanese comics, and those used in Australian Aboriginal sand narratives. So, I have a great interest in the cross-cultural diversity in these systems, exploring what might be universal and what might be culturally relative.

However, at present we know very little about what is actually going on in the structure of comics (and drawing systems) across the world, because very few researchers have attempted to sit down and carefully code each panel in books to get the data. So far I’ve done two corpus studies, but only a few other researchers have pursued empirical research like this. I’d really like to start a massive corpus analysis project that starts gathering data from books across the globe. Doing this sort of nitty-gritty research is the only way we’ll really know how these systems work, and how to begin addressing these sorts of cross-cultural questions. I’m excited to see what that might turn up!

7. If you could have dinner with one linguist, living or dead, who would it be?

I’ve been very lucky in life that I’ve gotten to meet, have dinner with, and/or work with all my biggest linguistics inspirations. I imagine that dinner with Benjamin Lee Whorf would have been quite entertaining though—he was supposedly quite the character!

The Visual Language of Comics publishes today in the UK and Australia and on 30^th January 2014 in the United States, and is available in hardback, paperback and as an ebook. To buy your copy now, click here and to find out more about Neil and his work, go to his website - www.visuallanguagelab.com

Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics

New release - Language in Education

They say that you should never judge a book by its cover. But whoever said that perhaps hadn’t seen the cover for Language in Education, which publishes in the UK today!

Here are some nice things people have said:

“An invaluable resource for learning, reflection and enrichment about the infinitely complex and fascinating dimensions of language in education” - Joseph Lo Bianco, Professor of Language and Literacy Education, University of Melbourne, Australia

“It will have particular value for teachers wishing to improve their understandings of language and its role in teaching and learning” - Jean Conteh, Senior Lecturer in Primary Education, Leeds University, UK

“This book brings into immediate focus the importance of language in education” - Robyn Cox, Associate Professor of Literacy Education, Australian Catholic University, Australia

Vibrant, inspiring and with a huge amount going on (and don’t even get me started on the cover!), this is one of our linguistics list highlights for this year. Filling a gap in the market, Language in Education  is the ideal textbook for anyone looking for an informative yet highly readable introduction to the roles that knowledge of language plays in education. To help you understand and (hopefully) join in our excitement, we thought we’d share a preview. Check it out by clicking on the cover above.

Last week, I wrote about a stalwart pillar of the Linguistics list at Bloomsbury – Forensic Linguistics 3e. But while refreshing and revitalising such mainstay texts is a key part of our vision, the search for new and exciting projects is something that habitually drives us forward. Language teaching and language acquisition are always areas that we’re keen to develop, so when the proposal for Language in Education arrived, with its promise of offering an excellent introduction to, and real foundational knowledge of, these areas, we knew that we’d found one of those special projects.

But why, I hear you ask? What exactly is so different about this book? It is true that there are a number of textbooks available in the field, yet, from a linguists point of view, a lot of these tend to be a bit too ‘education-y.’ Linguists were crying out for something with more of a linguistic edge and so the editors of Language in Education stepped up to the mark to produce a book which strikes the perfect balance between education and linguistics. Whilst targeted at students, the usefulness of this work to practitioners already working in the field was very much kept in mind. The result is a short yet comprehensive, highly readable and highly useful resource that will set a benchmark for all future textbooks in this area to live up to.

To achieve this, the two editors, Rita Elaine Silver and Soe Marlar Lwin, both of whom are based at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, put together an enviable team of academics and practitioners from across the world, with strong backgrounds in linguistics, educational linguistics and language studies. These practitioners are all used to writing accessibly and also have the advantage of being very tapped into networks in the discipline, with an awareness of the most interesting work that’s happening in the field, especially in Asia. This pooling of talent from a variety of countries and research backgrounds lends the book a truly global sweep, resulting in a very readable yet also very topical and up to date textbook. 

The book provides foundational knowledge for those learning to teach (or who are teaching already) who want to find out more about exactly how language is learnt and how it is used in educational environments, with a particular focus on the social implications of language in education. The chapters have been carefully designed to offer answers to some of the key questions for teachers, such as ‘How is language used in classrooms?’ and ‘How is language learned at home and school?’ The chapters feature examples to help readers understand language in action, highlighting key points and providing a deeper understanding through analysis of language of the complex dimensions of language in education. There are also suggestions for further reading and online viewing, along with a full glossary of terms, which all add up to make this an invaluable resource.

If this wasn’t enough, Language in Education also boasts a comprehensive companion website. With chapter summaries, expanded further reading suggestions, dedicated glossaries and fuller contributor biographies for each chapter, this site is a ‘companion’ to the book in the fullest sense of the word. Whilst it can be used independently of the main work, when used in conjunction with the book, it really comes into its own, providing further clarification and even more avenues for further research and analysis.

Click here to buy your copy of Language in Education, and if you are thinking of using it on your course, you can get in touch with us to request an inspection copy at: inspectioncopies@bloomsbury.com

Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics

Coming soon! - Forensic Linguistics, third edition

Bloomsbury Linguistics is delighted to announce the arrival of the first advance copies of the latest edition of Forensic Linguistics!

Publishing in the UK in early December, the third edition of John Olsson’s seminal work, co-authored by June Luchjenbroers, is (we think) the best practical introduction to forensic linguistics available. Revised, expanded and updated right the way through, FL3e is essential reading for students and researchers encountering this tricky branch of applied linguistics for the first time. Being as we have a tendency towards nostalgia, and with the exciting release of the new edition only weeks away, the time seemed right to have a look back over the development of this much-loved textbook.

 

Forensic Linguistics has certainly come a long way from its first incarnation, published nearly 10 years ago, in March 2004, by Continuum. Intended to be the core undergraduate text for forensic linguistics, John Olsson used his extensive experience as a practising consultant forensic linguist to create an authoritative textbook, which had a practical 'hands-on' appeal to linguists and non-linguists alike. It certainly reviewed well, with Language Policy calling it ‘unquestionably one of the most definitive introductions to the dynamic intersection between language, crime, and the law.’

To read more reviews of the first edition, click here.

 

The first edition did phenomenally well, reprinting three times in three years, being translated into Arabic and seeing adoptions on courses around the world. But no book is an island! The field of forensic linguistics moves on at a rapid pace, and so, by 2008, it was time for an update. In addition to new content, including new chapters on language in the justice system and forensic transcription, this was also the perfect opportunity for us to give the book a bit of a makeover. Pages were given an attractive new layout, and the final product was something that much more closely resembled a student friendly resource while at the same time being much more useful to practitioners.

To read reviews of the second edition, click here.

 

We still felt that there was more work to do. Linguistics moves on quickly and new technologies give us new ways to solve crime. Therefore, in July 2011, we contracted the third edition of Forensic Linguistics with a view to it being the definitive work in the field. From the outset, we knew that this was going to be something special. This time around, John brought in a co-author, June Luchjenbroers, whose research into the language used to and by criminals, witnesses and legal professionals was an invaluable contribution to the creation of this book.

The third edition has been extensively revised, expanded and updated, and includes new chapters on identifying forensic texts and important interactional aspects of the language used in legal contexts. World renowned forensic phonetician, Harry Hollien, has contributed a substantial chapter on forensic phonetics, and the book includes an appendix of forensic texts for student study, along with even more exercises and suggestions for further reading. There’s also a huge Companion website (details below!). The successful combination of Olsson's extensive experience as a practising forensic linguist and lecturer with Luchjenbroers’ research has resulted in a field defining work, which we have no doubt will become essential reading for both students and researchers alike.

Click here to pre-order your copy of Forensic Linguistics, third edition now! 

To accompany the third edition, Bloomsbury Linguistics has set up one of its most ambitious companion websites to date. Featuring over 300 texts and transcriptions from the corpus of the Forensic Linguistics Institute, including final statements, suicide notes and witness statements, this is an absolutely invaluable resource, giving students and practitioners the opportunity to work with and investigate primary material, and offering them the unique chance to look at images of actual texts. With material including first hand statements from the Hillsborough disaster, the final statements of death row prisoners in the USA and translations of Hitler’s suicide note, this website is a priceless companion to an already formidable book.

A link to the Companion website can be found here.

If you need any more persuading, this is what an academic at one of the top linguistics departments in the world had to say:

“This book is vital reading for students and researchers of forensic linguistics and will undoubtedly help to cement interest in the field. It is stunningly comprehensive, addressing a generous range of forensic-related themes and issues: from cyber-terrorism to suicide notes. It takes in spoken, written and computer-mediated communication, examines, in detail, key studies and cases, and is written in a limpid and engaging style. The book also usefully includes a number of practical exercises and insightful commentaries which will prove invaluable to readers wishing to sharpen their forensic analytical sensibilities. This new edition of Forensic Linguistics is a joy to read, and I will be recommending it to all of my students interested in the interface between language and society.” - Kevin Harvey, Lecturer in Applied Sociolinguistics, University of Nottingham, UK

To find out more about John Olsson and his work, click here.

To find out more about June Luchjenbroers and her research, click here.

Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics

Coffee and Collage

Last week I had the chance to meet with Maria-Carolina Cambre, author of our forthcoming Semiotics of Che Guevara.  She was in London courtesy of her winning a prize, and we always like to shout about it when our authors win prizes for being excellent.  Her book is part of our Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics series, about which you can find more details here.

The prize is the 2013 Rieger Award for Thesis/Disseration and it was awarded for Maria-Carolina's work on 'The Politics of the Face: Manifestations of Che Guevara's Image and Its Collage of Renderings and Agency'.  There are more details here.

Maria-Carolina took me through her ideas for the book and we also spoke about how she could edit her manuscript to make it more readable and compelling.  I am a firm believer that academic discourse is written to inform but also to entertain.  When an academic or a student parts with their money and takes receipt of a book from my list, I want them to learn something (hopefully whatever they bought to book to learn) but also to feel as if they are getting some kind of entertainment.  There is no real reason why an academic book can't have good prose, clear writing and, even, an arc to the 'narrative', such as it is.  Constructing a book with 80,000 words leaves plenty of room to make sure that you are enriching someone's daily lived experience when they read your work.  Authors take their readers from one point of knowledge to the next and that is movement, of a sort: what this movement needs is structure.

We finished up our coffees at the very chic Store Street Espresso and M-C headed off.  You can hear her talk about her work in this pod cast, hosted by the Toronto Review of Books.

Also: if you're writing an academic book and you want guidance on structure and style, why not get in touch?

GM. 

AAAL 2013 Program Ad Preview

We are getting ready for the American Associaton for Applied Linguistics conference in Dallas this year. We just finalized our first program ad as Bloomsbury. We're offering a 35% discount on displayed titles. Highlights include second editions of textbooks Understanding Language and Discourse Analysis. Check it out here. 

Bloomsbury AAAL 2013 Ad

 

Latest titles from Bloomsbury Linguistics

To round off a fantastic year of publishing, I am pleased to bring you a round-up of our latest titles, including two new coursebooks and a great selection of in-depth research works.

First up, the latest addition to our fabulous Advances in Semiotics series, Semiotics of Religion by Robert A. Yelle.

This book integrates structural and historical perspectives on the semiotics of religion and gives an account of the distinctive features of religious language and symbolism.

We have recieved some wonderful endorsements, including this from Webb Keane, University of Michigan, USA- "This book is vast in scope, deep in implications, and admirably clear and forthright in exposition.The study of religion has needed a work of this kind, which brings together several research traditions and pushes the resulting synthesis in new directions.The result is an agenda-setting project of huge ambition." 

Check out window 8 on the Bloomsbury advent calendar to win copies of the first three books to publish in this exciting new series, including Semiotics of Religion.

Next up, the latest offering from Brian Tomlinson, Applied Linguistics and Materials Development.

This book focuses for the first time on materials development and applications of current research and theory for the main areas of applied linguistics (e.g. second language acquisition, pragmatics, vocabulary studies).

"For many years Brian Tomlinson has led the way internationally in the field of materials development. This edited book by him is another example of innovative, research-based exploration of materials for language teaching that never loses sight of the classroom nor of the need for pedagogy that is reflective, informed and learner-sensitive. And there is a great cast-list of contributors. Highly recommended." - Professor Ronald Carter, School of English, University of Nottingham, UK

Both books are available on inspection for lecturers. More information on the inspection copy process can be found here.

We also have a number of new monographs publishing this month, including the following two additions to our well-established Bloomsbury Advances in Translation series (formerly Continuum Advances in Translation).

Music, Text and Translation by Helen Julia Minors

Explores the roles that translation plays in a musical context, questioning the transference of sense between music and text.

'This volume issues a powerful challenge to everyone who uses the word “translation” in relation to music. The sheer diversity of its essays demonstrates, as no previous book has, the extraordinary intellectual and artistic fertility of bringing together the notions of music and translation – and the dangers of thinking we know what we’re talking about.' - Peter Dayan, The University of Edinburgh, UK

The Pragmatic Translator by Massimiliano Morini

Showcases a descriptive theory of translation based on pragmatics, describing all processes and products of translation on the performative, interpersonal and locative axes.

Presents a full and up to date view of translation that takes into account thirty years of research in the field of Descriptive Translation Studies. Unlike DTS, the theory provides an account of products and processes. This publication exhibits the need for and usefulness of such a theory, and will be essential reading for scholars involved in translation and interpreting studies.

 Also publishing:

I. A. Richards and the Rise of Cognitive Stylistics by David West (part of our Advances in Stylistics series):

'Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. This is a convincing revaluation of Richards’ significance; it is a perfect example of the rational cognitive turn in the arts; and it is an unanswerable polemic for a science of literary study.' - Professor Peter Stockwell, Chair in Literary Linguistics, University of Nottingham, UK

The Syntax of Mauritian Creole by Anand Syea, (from the Bloomsbury Studies in Theoretical Linguistics series):

'Anand Syea's book, the result of over twenty years of research, has everything one could wish for: abundant and reliable examples, a firm but accessible theoretical foundation, a transparent structure and line of argumentation.’ - Pieter Muysken, Professor, Department of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

The Semantic Representation of Natural Language by Michael Levison, Geg Lessard, Craig Thomas and Matthew Donald:

‘At last a book on natural language semantics that tackles semantics all the way up to texts of considerable length and fictional statements. The proposed formalism brings together well tried solutions for specific linguistic phenomena with a structural approach based on programming languages that makes it user friendly and gives it tremendous expressive power. A very useful contribution for natural language generation and the representation of narrative.’ - Pablo Gervás, Associate Professor, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

To mark the launch of our new website, all of our books are available at a 25% discount (excluding US, Canada and Australia unfortunately), so you can currently buy all of the above titles at bargain prices!

Best wishes,

Ellena

Book Launch - Analysing English as a Lingua Franca: A Corpus-driven Investigation

The Bloomsbury Linguistics team had a great evening at the launch of the coursebook Analysing English as a Lingua Franca last night. 

Hosted by authors Martin Dewey and Alessia Cogo, the launch was held at a lovely venue in Somerset House- looking wonderfully festive at the moment as you can see below! 

The book was introduced by guest speaker Professor Jennifer Jenkins from the University of Southampton, UK, who has already supplied a magnificent endorsement (read this in full on our website). Gurdeep, our Senior Commissioning Editor also said a few words. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to Martin and Alessia for organising the event. The wine and canapés were lovely!

Click here for more information on this great book, which is now available at a 25% discount on UK orders (along with all of our books) to celebrate the launch of our new website.

Best wishes,

Ellena

 

The social life of language- an author blog post by John Edwards

I write this – on Guy Fawkes Day – having just returned from a week of lecturing in Beijing.  The overall theme of my talks was the ‘social life of language’, and I selected five aspects that I hoped were both timely and of broad appeal. 

I began with what some might imagine to be a rather ‘fringe’ topic: the very longstanding interest in a universal language.  In fact, however, whether attempting to capture the original human language – the language of Eden – or trying to construct a medium more logical and regular than ‘natural’ languages, the long historical search tells us a great deal about the aspirations for a language that would help to unite us all.  My audience agreed that – almost wholly unsuccessful as attempts have been over the centuries – the impulse is a valiant one, perhaps a noble one. 

I then moved on to the difficulties of teaching and learning languages – particularly ‘small’ languages – in a world where something like a de facto universal language has in fact arrived; I refer of course to English.   Discussion here led inexorably to broader matters of the relationship between language and power, the subject of the third lecture.   Of particular interest were the distinctions drawn between the assumption of power by ‘large’ languages – as an inevitable symptom of the dominance of their speakers, of course – and the empowerment of smaller communities that so often rests upon the liberal leanings (where they exist) of larger ones.  While there is a great deal of contemporary talk about empowerment, it is clearly not as robust or, indeed, as desirable a quantity as its rather rawer rival.  

The fourth talk attempted some general contextualisation, with special attention given to current discussions under the rubric of ‘the ecology of language’.  I encouraged my audience to understand that many modern treatments are not, in fact, about ecology in the widest and most accurate sense of the word.  That is, they tend not to dwell upon the more inclusive picture that shows – that must show – languages in all their interrelationships, for good or ill.  Rather, they focus almost exclusively upon arguments in favour of the maintenance of small or flagging varieties.  Not an ignoble stance, to be sure, but one that is impoverished through neglect of the fuller and more Darwinian nexus in which languages mingle and rub up against one another.  And finally, I spoke about the longstanding urge to protect languages, to keep them free from both internal and external contamination.  Prescriptivist impulses, while anathema to many modern linguists, are in fact still very much with us.  Indeed, those same linguists who reject ‘interference’ with the ebb and flow of language, and who argue that language change and variation should be allowed to ‘naturally’ well up from below and not be imposed by fiat from above, make linguistic prescriptions all the time – most notably under headings like ‘language planning.’

I was glad to discover – although not really surprised, I suppose – that the members of my audience, many of whom were from Chinese ethnolinguistic minority groups, attested to the relevance of these lecture topics across a wide range of contexts.  They confirmed my sense that, while every language-contact situation is unique, its uniqueness does not rest upon the presence of elements seen nowhere else: on the contrary, the important components of the ‘social life of language’ are remarkably similar in different settings.   What we see in each, then, is a unique configuration of these social and linguistic constituents.  This has important ramifications for academic study – and, of course, for the intended beneficiaries of that study.

 - John Edwards, author of Multilingualism.

Click on the 'preview' link to read an extract from John's fantastic book. Don't just take my word for it- read what the Times Higher Education had to say below!

Best wishes,

Ellena