Description: What are languages? An assemblage approach to language gives us ways of thinking about language as dynamic, constructed, open-ended, and in and of the world. This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways, presenting an innovative and provocative framework for a new understanding of language from within applied linguistics. The idea of assemblages allows for a flexibility about what languages are, not just in terms of having fuzzy linguistic boundaries but in terms of what constitutes language more generally. Languages are assembled from different elements, both linguistic elements as traditionally understood, as well as items less commonly included. Language from this point of view is embedded in diverse social and physical environments, distributed across the material world and part of our embodied existence. This book looks at what language is and what languages are with a view to understanding applied linguistics itself as a practical assemblage.
Brief description: Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney. His notable publications include The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (1994) (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic), Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (2007), Language and Mobility (2012) and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (2018) (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize).
Review Quotes: 'The assemblage envisions languages and texts as, in Pennycook's words, 'constantly under construction', enabling an analysis of 'how they are put together through social processes'. This conceptual framework, which a few years ago occupied an avant-garde niche within applied linguistics, has become indispensable. Pennycook's brilliant and lucid study incorporates assemblage at many levels, from the everyday practice of translanguaging and the contexts it occurs in, to the field of applied linguistics itself, as an assemblage of concepts and methods which, far from being a mere application of linguistic theory, is generating increasingly rich and ambitious theories of its own.' John E. Joseph, Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh