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English Language as Hydra argues that, far too often, the English language industry has become a swirling, beguiling monster, unashamedly intent on challenging local lingua-diversity and threatening individual identities. This book brings together the voices of linguists, literary figures and teaching professionals in a wide-ranging exposé of this enormous Hydra in action on four continents

This article reviews how the analytics of governmentality have been taken up by scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. It explores the distinctive logics of "linguistic governmentality" understood as techniques and forms of expertise that seek to govern, guide, and shape (rather than force) linguistic conduct and subjectivity at the level of the population or the individual. Governmentality brings new perspectives to the study of language ideologies and practices informing modernist and neoliberal language planning and policies, the technologies of knowledge they generate, and the contestations that surround them. Recent work in this vein is deepening our understanding of "language"—understood as an array of verbal and nonverbal communicative practices—as a medium through which neoliberal governmentality is exercised. The article concludes by considering how a critical sociolinguistics of governmentality can address some shortcomings in the study of governmentality and advance the study of language, power, and inequality.

Controversies and problems with regard to language policy and language education still exist in Malaysia. Despite the attempts of language policy makers to promote multilingualism, the implementation has been marred by political and religious affiliations. Malaysia is a melting pot of many different cultures and ethnicities, the three largest being Malay, Chinese and Indian. Therefore, an analysis of the language variation in this polyglot nation will help in understanding the variety of languages and those who speak them. This book gathers the work of researchers working in the field of language change in Malaysia for over two decades. As there is no book published internationally on the language policy in Malaysia and the effects on the language change in urban migrant populations, this book is a timely contribution not only to an understanding of Malaysian linguistic pluralism and its undercurrents, but also to an understanding of the Indian Diaspora.

Introduction1. Linguistics and literature2. Problematising the linguistic status quo -- The LeftHand of Darkness and Häutungen3. Proposing linguistic neutrality -- The Cook and theCarpenter and Woman on the Edge of Time4. Reversing the linguistic status quo -- Egalias døtre5. 'It's good to make people realise ... double standards' -- Evaluating the impact of literary texts thematising sex/gender and languageConclusionsWorks CitedIndex

The Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family includes the Sinitic languages (what for political reasons are known as Chinese 'dialects') and the 200 to 300 Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages. Geographically it stretches from Northeast India, Burma, Bangladesh, and northern Thailand in the southeast, throughout the Tibetan plateau to the north, across most of China and up to the Korean border in the northeast, and down to Taiwan and Hainan Island in the southeast. The family has come to be the way it is because of multiple migrations, often into areas where other languages were spoken (LaPolla, 2001).

AbstractSensitivity to and skillful use of language are core evaluation competencies. The language we use, both among ourselves and with stakeholders, necessarily and inherently shapes perceptions, defines "reality," and affects mutual understanding. Whatever we seek to understand or do, a full analysis will lead us to consider the words and concepts that undergird our understandings and actions—because language matters.

In the Swedish context, the discursive regime about linguistic phenomena is characterized by a 'matrix of intelligibility' (Butler 1999 [1990]) that promotes images of linguistic practices among adolescents in the suburbs not only as deviant and incomprehensible, but also as essentialized traits of ethnic Otherness, social and educational problems and, more recently, of an aggressive masculinity embodied in sexist and homophobic behaviour. Unlike dominant media representations which depict such linguistic practices as unintelligible as well as inherently sexist and homophobic, the aim of the present article is to take a queer stance and illustrate how ethnic insults, gay innuendos and misogynist talk are meaningful in the sense that they constitute a rich pool of interactional resources that allow the young men in our study to actively partake in the negotiation of a 'local masculine order' (Evaldsson 2005) in which positions of power, authority and solidarity are enacted and/or contested.

The impossibility of stating precisely how many "languages" or "dialects" are spoken in the world is due to the ambiguities of meaning present in these terms, which is shown to stem from the original use of "dialect" to refer to the literary dialects of ancient Greece. In most usages the term "language" is superordinate to "dialed," but the nature of this relationship may be either linguistic or social, the latter problem falling in the province of sociolinguistics. It is shown how the development of a vernacular, popularly called a dialect, into a language is intimately related to the development of writing and the growth of nationalism. This process is shown to involve the selection, codification, acceptance, and elaboration of a linguistic norm.