How We Talk About Language

Download or read book How We Talk about Language written by Betsy Rymes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people talk about language, how we can participate in those conversations, and what we can learn from them about both language and our society. Along the way, we learn that knowledge about language and its connection to social life is not primarily produced and spread by linguists or sociolinguists, or even language teachers, but through everyday conversations, on-line arguments, creative insults, music, art, memes, twitter-storms - any place language grabs people's attention and foments more talk. An essential new aid to the study of the relationship between language, culture and society, this book provides a vision for language inquiry by turning our gaze to everyday forms of language expertise.