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Language and Hegemony in Gramsci
Peter Ives
Pluto Press, 2004
Language and Hegemony in Gramsci introduces Gramsci’s social and political thought through his writings on language. It shows how his focus on language illuminates his central ideas such as hegemony, organic and traditional intellectuals, passive revolution, civil society and subalternity. Peter Ives explores Gramsci’s concern with language from his university studies in linguistics to his last prison notebook. Hegemony has been seen as Gramsci’s most important contribution, but without knowledge of its linguistic roots, it is often misunderstood.

This book places Gramsci’s ideas within the linguistically influenced social theory of the twentieth century. It summarizes some of the major ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, language philosophy and post-structuralism in relation to Gramsci’s position. By paying great attention to the linguistic underpinnings of Gramsci's Marxism, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci shows how his theorization of power, language and politics address issues raised by post-modernism and the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau.
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Language and Power in the Modern World
Mary Talbot
University of Alabama Press, 2003

An accessible overview of five major issues in sociolinguistics and the relationship between language and power

This book analyzes the key ways in which language constitutes and conveys power and social relationships in modern society. It offers selected readings that illustrate the thematic introductions and a set of tasks designed to guide linguistic analysis of data and to stimulate student discussion, in five specific areas:

• Multilingualism, Identity, and Ethnicity: examines the phenomena of linguistic diversity from the perspective of language planning and language policies, with emphasis on personal, psychological, educational, cultural, and political issues.

• Language and Youth: examines the languages of old age and the language of youth subcultures.

• Language and Gender: explores the claim that men and women use interactional communication styles based on power and solidarity, respectively.

• Language and the Media: considers the extent to which verbal interaction through mass media differs from other kinds of communication and its consequences in terms of power relations.

• Language and Organizations: explores the use of language as a tool of power in public institutions and bureaucracies and how control over individuals is articulated through a range of different discourse structures and strategies.

With a unique combination of selected readings and student-centered tasks in a single volume, Language and Power in the Modern World covers contemporary issues of communication theory and sociolinguistics, ranging from the global to the interpersonal.

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Language and Sexuality
Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice
Edited by Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew
CSLI, 2001
Language and Sexuality explores the question of how linguistic practices and ideologies relate to sexuality and sexual identity, opening with a discussion of the emerging field of "queer linguistics" and moving from theory into practice with case studies of language use in a wide variety of cultural settings. The resulting volume combines the perspectives of the field's top scholars with exciting new research to present new ideas on the ways in which language use intersects with sexual identity.
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Language and the Law in Deaf Communities
Ceil Lucas
Gallaudet University Press, 2003
The ninth volume in the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series focuses on forensic linguistics, a field created by noted linguist Roger Shuy, who begins the collection with an introduction of the issue of language problems experienced by minorities in legal settings. Attorney and linguist Rob Hoopes follows by showing how deaf people who use American Sign Language (ASL) are at a distinct disadvantage in legal situations, such as police interrogations, where only the feeblest of efforts are made to ensure that deaf suspects understand their constitutional rights. Susan Mather, an associate professor of linguistics and interpretation, and Robert Mather, a federal disability rights attorney, examine the use of interpreters for deaf jurors during trials. They reveal the courts' gross misunderstandings of the important differences between ASL and Signed English. Sara S. Geer, an attorney at the National Association of the Deaf for 20 years, explains how the difficulty in understanding legal terminology in federal law is compounded for deaf people in every ordinary act, including applying for credit cards and filling out medical consent forms. Language and the Law in Deaf Communities concludes with a chapter by George Castelle, Chief Public Defender in Charleston, West Virginia. Although he has no special knowledge about the legal problems of deaf people, Castelle offers another perspective based upon his extensive experience in practicing and teaching law. Ceil Lucas is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Interpretation at Gallaudet University. ISBN 1-56368-143-9, 6 x 9 casebound, 200 pages, tables, references, index
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Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community
Joseph Christopher Hill
Gallaudet University Press, 2012

In a diverse signing community, it is not unusual to encounter a wide variety of expression in the types of signs used by different people. Perceptions of signing proficiency often vary within the community, however. Conventional wisdom intimates that those who learned at an early age at home or in school know true standard American Sign Language, while those who learned ASL later in life or use contact or coded signs are considered to be less skillful. Joseph Christopher Hill’s new study Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community explores the linguistic and social factors that govern such stereotypical perceptions of social groups about signing differences.

       Hill’s analysis focuses on affective, cognitive, and behavioral types of evaluative responses toward particular language varieties, such as ASL, contact signing, and Signed English. His work takes into account the perceptions of these signing types among the social groups of the American Deaf community that vary based on generation, age of acquisition, and race. He also gauges the effects of social information on these perceptions and the evaluations and descriptions of signing that results from their different concepts of a signing standard. Language Attitudes concludes that standard ASL’s value will continue to rise and the Deaf/Hearing cultural dichotomy will remain relevant without the occurrence of a dramatic cultural shift.

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Language for Specific Purposes
Trends in Curriculum Development
Mary K. Long, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2017

In the United States today there is lively discussion, both among educators and employers, about the best way to prepare students with high-level language and cross-cultural communication proficiency that will serve them both professionally and personally in the global environment of the twenty-first century. At the same time, courses in business language and medical language have become more popular among students. Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), which encompasses these kinds of courses, responds to this discussion and provides curricular models for language programs that build practical language skills specific to a profession or field. Contributions in the book reinforce those models with national survey results, demonstrating the demand for and benefits of LSP instruction. 

With ten original research-based chapters, this volume will be of interest to high school and university language educators, program directors, linguists, and anyone looking to design LSP courses or programs in any world language.

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A Language for the World
The Standardization of Swahili
Morgan J. Robinson
Ohio University Press, 2022

This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond.

Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories.

Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili’s standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa.

The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.

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Language Policy and Planning for Sign Languages
Timothy G. Reagan
Gallaudet University Press, 2010

This volume addresses the burgeoning need for language policy and language planning for the sign languages used by deaf people. Author Timothy Reagan writes for two audiences in his new book, those who know language policy and language planning but not the Deaf World, and those well-versed in the Deaf cultural community but unfamiliar with language planning studies. To begin, Chapter 1 presents an overview of the Deaf World and a brief introduction to sign language in general. The second chapter outlines a broad overview of language policy and language planning studies both as an academic discipline and an applied type of social engineering.

     In Chapter 3, Reagan examines the specifics of American Sign Language in terms of the history of language policy and planning from the nineteenth century to the post-Congress of Milan period and its form in recent years. The fourth chapter critically examines the creation of manual codes used in deaf education in the U.S. and elsewhere. Chapter 5 analyzes language policy and planning in settings around the world, and the final chapter recommends steps and methods for future language policy and planning efforts for sign language. The cohesive rationale offered in Language Policy and Planning for Sign Languages will prove to be invaluable to all administrators and educators working with populations that use sign languages.


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Latin
Story of a World Language
Jürgen Leonhardt
Harvard University Press, 2013

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome’s fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this “dead language” is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt has written a full history of Latin from antiquity to the present, uncovering how this once parochial dialect developed into a vehicle of global communication that remained vital long after its spoken form was supplanted by modern languages.

Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around Rome, and became widespread as that city’s imperial might grew. By the first century BCE, Latin was already transitioning from a living vernacular, as writers and grammarians like Cicero and Varro fixed Latin’s status as a “classical” language with a codified rhetoric and rules. As Romance languages spun off from their Latin origins following the empire’s collapse—shedding cases and genders along the way—the ancient language retained its currency as a world language in ways that anticipated English and Spanish, but it ceased to evolve.

Leonhardt charts the vicissitudes of Latin in the post-Roman world: its ninth-century revival under Charlemagne and its flourishing among Renaissance writers who, more than their medieval predecessors, were interested in questions of literary style and expression. Ultimately, the rise of historicism in the eighteenth century turned Latin from a practical tongue to an academic subject. Nevertheless, of all the traces left by the Romans, their language remains the most ubiquitous artifact of a once peerless empire.

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The Legacy Of Language
A Tribute To Charlton Laird
Phillip C. Boardman
University of Nevada Press, 1987

In this tribute to Charlton Laird, ten scholars in the fields of language and linguistics provide ordinary readers with new insight into the workings of the English language. Laird, one of Nevada's treasured authors, was a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.

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The Lettered Mountain
A Peruvian Village’s Way with Writing
Frank Salomon and Mercedes Niño-Murcia
Duke University Press, 2011
Andean peoples joined the world of alphabetic literacy nearly 500 years ago, yet the history of their literacy has remained hidden until now. In The Lettered Mountain, Frank Salomon and Mercedes Niño-Murcia expand notions of literacy and challenge stereotypes of Andean “orality” by analyzing the writings of mountain villagers from Inka times to the Internet era. Their historical ethnography is based on extensive research in the village of Tupicocha, in the central Peruvian province of Huarochirí. The region has a special place in the history of Latin American letters as the home of the unique early-seventeenth-century Quechua-language book explaining Peru’s ancient gods and priesthoods. Granted access to Tupicocha’s surprisingly rich internal archives, Salomon and Niño-Murcia found that legacy reflected in a distinctive version of lettered life developed prior to the arrival of state schools. In their detailed ethnography, writing emerges as a vital practice underlying specifically Andean sacred culture and self-governance. At the same time, the authors find that Andean relations with the nation-state have been disadvantaged by state writing standards developed in dialogue with European academies but not with the rural literate tradition.
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