The Papers
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Showing 1–20 of 26 results
WP293 Sociolinguistics and (in)securitisation as another mode of governance
2022
This paper argues that (in)securitisation-"making 'enemy' and 'fear' the integrative, energetic principle of politics" (Huysmans 2014:3)-now calls for much fuller attention than it has hitherto received in sociolinguistics, and that it should figure …
Key words: insecuritisation, sociolinguistics
WP290 Sociolinguistics: 50+ years in under 10 minutes
2021
This short talk sketches some major shifts - past, recent and emergent - in sociolinguistics, focusing on its engagement with the state, the economy and security, concluding with some comments on its continuing relevance.
Key words: sociolinguistics
WP280 Jan Blommaert and the use of sociolinguistics: Critical, political, personal
2021
Jan Blommaert was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic ? warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising. In addition, he was profoundly committed to a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to Dell Hymes.? A number of this …
Key words: sociolinguistics
WP276 Participatory pedagogy, sociolinguistics and the total linguistic fact
2020
This short paper takes a sociolinguistic look at participatory pedagogy and argues that participatory pedagogy offers a fuller and more creative exploration of language than many other types of language teaching.? The central sociolinguistic idea is …
Key words: pedagogy, sociolinguistics
WP206 Sociolinguistics and epistemic reflexivity
2017
In this brief paper, I argue that some sociolinguistic research seems to end up showing and saying exactly what one would have expected it to show and say, based on the position ? social, academic or otherwise ? from which the research was produced. …
Key words: epistemic reflexivity, sociolinguistics
WP171 Double edged risk: Disabled people?s negotiation of status in Adult Protection proceedings
2015
This paper reports the fine grained discourse analysis of how disabled and non-disabled members of a research team negotiated disclosure of harm, a practice that emerges within risk assessment procedures involving disabled people. It describes a …
Key words: disability, sociolinguistics
WP162 Post-panoptic standard language?
2015
This paper follows Coupland (2010), who raises a number of doubts about the continuing power of standard English and its historic correlation with gradations of social class and linguistic insecurity, pointing instead to globalisation, to changes in …
Key words: class, globalisation, sociolinguistics
WP152 Superdiversity and sociolinguistics
2015
This paper is the introduction to a book that brings together some of the work developed in a network of sociolinguistic research groups that have collaborated for several years with ?language and superdiversity? as a broad thematic heading.? It …
Key words: sociolinguistics, superdiversity
WP144 Negotiating race and belonging in post-Apartheid South Africa: Bernadette's stories
2014
Post-structuralist perspectives on race view it as a social construct, an outcome of a colonial project which sought to categorise and rank people in a hierarchy naturalising a view of whites or Europeans as superior to other races. Although …
Key words: belonging, race, sociolinguistics
WP140 Conviviality and phatic communication?
2014
Low-key everyday ?conviviality? is quite often invoked as a vital source of social cohesion in superdiverse urban environments, while claims about the democratic potential of social media are confronted by the argument that much of the traffic is …
Key words: online communication, sociolinguistics
WP132 "It's just taking our souls back": Apartheid and race in the discourses of young South Africans
2014
Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the issue of race as a primary identity marker has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life in a post-apartheid South Africa. This paper seeks to understand how youth at two South …
Key words: sociolinguistics, South Africa
WP103 Critical sociolinguistics and critical pedagogy: Dialogue in a multilingual Hong Kong school
2013
In its understanding of social reality as discursively constructed, critique has illuminated how social inequality works at the local level, while also facilitating the development of transformational projects aimed at empowering certain social …
Key words: pedagogy, sociolinguistics
WP98 Drilling down to the grain in superdiversity.
2012
This paper tackles the traditional split between sociolinguistics and second language research with a fine-grained but integrated account of linguistic form, language ideology and situated practice ? what Silverstein calls the ?total linguistic fact? …
Key words: SLA, sociolinguistics
WP97 Writing as a sociolinguistic object.
2012
Writing has never been a core object of sociolinguistics, and this paper argues for a mature sociolinguistics of writing. From a sociolinguistic viewpoint, writing needs to be seen as a complex of specific resources subject to patterns of …
Key words: sociolinguistics
WP88 Learning a supervernacular: textspeak in a South African township
2012
In this paper, we will focus on the way in which a woman we call Linda acquires, maintains and deploys a ?supervernacular? (Blommaert 2011), and how she does this in conditions of extreme marginalization. The supervernacular in question is a variety …
Key words: sociolinguistics
WP85 Sociolinguistics and English language studies
2012
Like every disciplinary label, ?sociolinguistics? covers a tremendous variety of approaches. In some corners of sociolinguistics, it looks as very little has happened for the past couple of decades; in others however, new developments are emerging at …
Key words: ESL, sociolinguistics
WP81 Supervernaculars and their dialects
2011
This paper introduces the term ?supervernacular? as a descriptor for new forms of semiotic codes emerging in the context of technology-driven globalization processes. Supervernaculars are widespread codes used in communities that do not correspond to …
Key words: sociolinguistics
WP75 Language, social categories and interaction.
2011
This short paper considers the treatment of identity in sociolinguistics, advocating an interactional approach that reckons with social indexicality; it draws on research on language, ethnicity and class; and it proposes a solution to the problem of …
Key words: identity, sociolinguistics
WP67 Repertoires revisited: 'Knowing language' in superdiversity
2011
Repertoire belongs to the core vocabulary of sociolinguistics, yet very little fundamental reflection has been done on the nature and structure ofrepertoires. In early definitions, repertoires was seen as a triad of language resources, knowledge of …
Key words: competence, globalization, indexical biography, language learning, repertoire, sociolinguistics, subjectivity, super-diversity