Search results

Did you know that your answers to just a handful of questions can predict the zip code of where you grew up? In 2013 Josh Katz accumulated and visually mapped over 350,000 unique survey responses to questions about word choice and pronunciation throughout America. His dialect quiz quickly became the most viewed webpage in the history of the New York Times. In Speaking American Katz offers a visual atlas of the American vernacular—who says what, and where they say it—revealing the history of our...

This original, entertaining, and surprising book investigates verbal blunders: what they are, what they say about those who make them, and how and why we've come to judge them.Um... is about how you really speak, and why it's normal for your everyday speech to be filled with errors—about one in every ten words. In this charming, engaging account of language in the wild, linguist and writer Michael Erard also explains why our attention to some blunders rises and falls. Where did the Freudian slip...

In the remote highlands of the country of Georgia, a small group of mountaindwellers called the Khevsurs used to express sexuality and romance in ways that appear to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, their practices were romantic, but could never lead to marriage. On the other hand, they were sexual, but didn't correspond to what North Americans, or most Georgians, would have called sex. These practices were well documented by early ethnographers before they disappeared completely by the m...

In this companion volume to Reading the Popular, Fiske presents a radical theory of what it means for culture to be popular.

Topics in Spanish Linguistic Perceptions brings together the most current research on linguistic perceptions of varieties of Spanish. The book includes articles from a range of expert contributors using different methodologies and looking at diverse sociolinguistic settings. Readers will gain a rich understanding of the importance of linguistic perceptions and the societal attitudes they are linked to. Readers will also gain insight into the interplay between socioeconomic groups, and education...

No Dialect Please, You're a Poet is situated at the crossroads in research areas of literature and linguistics. This collection of essays brings to the forefront the many ways in which dialect is present in poetry and how it is realized in both written texts and oral performances. In examining works from a wide range of poets and poetries, from acclaimed poets to emerging ones, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to poetics of dialects from a variety of regions, across two centuries of...

Martin Burke traces the complicated history of the idea of class in America from the forming of a new nation to the heart of the Gilded Age. Surveying American political, social and intellectual life from the late-17th to the end of the 19th century, Burke examines the contested discourse about equality - the way Americans thought and wrote about class, class relations and their meaning in society. Burke explores a range of thought to establish the boundaries of class and the language used to de...

The rebirth of fundamentalism at the end of the 20th century is a striking feature of the time. This book examines the prevalence of fundamentalism and literalism and the unexpected forms they take in modern America, in both religious and secular life.

Politics of Language in the Ex-Soviet Muslim States offers a unique and timely analysis of language policies in the central Asian states of the former Soviet Union. The authors relate these policies to broad issues such as nation-building, language planning, and multilingualism. The book is a comprehensive survey of language policy in the five newly independent states with largely Turkic-speaking populations and in the Tajic republic, with its mainly Iranian-speaking population. It addresses eac...

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous. The book, the first in a five-volume series, deals with the two crucial concepts of environment and belief systems of indigenous peoples from all the continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts from around the globe, it presents a salient picture of the environments of indigenous p...

Bullshit isn’t what it used to be. Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data.   “A modern classic . . . a straight-talking survival guide to the mean streets of a dying democracy and a global pandemic.”—Wired Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup...

Exploring the ways in which the development of linguistic practices helped expand national politics in remote, rural areas of Venezuela, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta situates language as a mediating force in the creation of the 'magical state'. Focusing on the Waraos speakers of the Orinoco Delta, this book explores center-periphery dynamics in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic anthropological lens. Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduct...

Exploring narratives produced by different groups of MENA and SSA migrants or refugees of various backgrounds, this book focuses on the spatial and temporal aspects of their experiences. Using extensive research of narratives in a variety of different languages, it examines a wide range of accounts of journeys to the host country and memories (or recreations) of "home", the spaces that migrants occupy (or not) in their new country, spaces and times they share with local populations, and differen...