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Liquid Languages

Liquid Languages

Liquid Languages

Constructing Languages in Late Modern Cultures of Diffusion
Britta Schneider, European University Viadrina
August 2025
Hardback
9781009249874
£100.00
GBP
Hardback

    Which ideas about language are prevalent in cultures that are not framed in Western nationalist and literate traditions? How do people conceptualise language if speakers of the same community are multilingual, have access to different language resources and only partially share ideas about what is right and wrong in language? This book explores the 'liquid' properties of language, highlighting how languages, as discursive-material assemblages, can differ in their degree of fixity. It provides a linguistic anthropological study of the language ideologies in Belize, where ethnic belonging and language practice do not necessarily match and where stable language norms are not always considered a value. Scrutinising ethnographic data and examinations of local performances of English, it shows that languages emerge in relation to belonging, prestige and material culture. Bringing to the fore liquid language cultures, it provides important additions to our understanding of late modern language assemblages in a globalising world.

    • Gives detailed insight into language ideologies in a multilingual Caribbean society
    • Discusses a wealth of ethnographic material, visual data and interview data
    • Provides a radical constructivist, assemblage approach to languages as discursive, non-essentialist but socially salient categories

    Product details

    August 2025
    Hardback
    9781009249874
    314 pages
    229 × 152 mm
    Not yet published - available from August 2025

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Liquid languages: studying languages under conditions of complexity
    • 2. Constructing languages, constructing social life: linguistic anthropological, sociolinguistic, and posthumanist perspectives on languages as discourse constructs
    • 3. Language ideologies and the Creole context
    • 4. Insights into language ideologies, methodological steps and analytical approaches
    • 5. A diverse Caribbean island: historical, social, and linguistic perspectives on a Belizean village
    • 6. Language ideologies of belonging
    • 7. Language ideologies of prestige
    • 8. Material language culture between ideologies of fixity and resistance
    • 9. Public English: syntactical, phonetic, and prosodic variation in a formal genre
    • 10. Liquid languages – languages as socio-material processes in a polycentric world.
      Author
    • Britta Schneider , European University Viadrina

      Britta Schneider is a Professor in the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences at European University, Viadrina. Her research examines the intersection of language ideology, material culture and technology.