Description:
This book demonstrates the power and distinctiveness of the contribution that sociolinguistics can make to our understanding of everyday communicative practice under changing social conditions. It builds on the approaches developed by Gumperz and Hymes in the 1970s and 80s, and it not only affirms their continuing relevance in analyses of the micropolitics of everyday talk in urban settings, but also argues for their value in emergent efforts to chart the heavily securitised environments now developing around us. Drawing on 10 years of collaborative work and ranging across disciplinary, interdisciplinary and applied perspectives, the book begins with guiding principles and methodology, shifts to empirically driven arguments in urban sociolinguistics, and concludes with studies of (in)securitised communication addressed to challenges ahead.
Brief description: Ben Rampton is Professor of Applied & Sociolinguistics at King's College London. He does interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography, and his interests cover urban multilingualism, youth, ethnicity & social class, conflict & (in)securitization, and language education policy & practice. His books include Crossing: Language & Ethnicity among Adolescents(1996/2018) and Linguistic Practice in Changing Conditions (2022). He founded www.wpull.org and was founding convener of the Linguistic Ethnography Forum, directed the King's ESRC Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre from 2011-2014, and is regularly involved in adult migrant language teaching.
Review Quotes: Theoretically sound and methodologically rigorous, this book offers vibrant ethnographic descriptions of how people respond to (and take issue with) the rapidly changing conditions of late capitalist societies in the linguistic minutiae of their daily lives. Covering a wide range of phenomena, Ben Rampton (and colleagues) reimagines the role of sociolinguistics today, demonstrating the field's vitality to understand the relationship between language and society in a vertiginous world.-- "Rodrigo Borba, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil"