The Invention of Monolingualism

The Invention of Monolingualism PDF Author: David Gramling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150131808X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Winner of the 2018 Book Award awarded by the American Association for Applied Linguistics The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what "monolingual” means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers-Turkish, Latin-American, German, and English-language-have in recent decades confronted monolingualism in their texts, and how they have critiqued the World Literature industry's increasing hunger for “translatable” novels.

The Invention of Monolingualism

The Invention of Monolingualism PDF Author: David Gramling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150131808X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the 2018 Book Award awarded by the American Association for Applied Linguistics The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what "monolingual” means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers-Turkish, Latin-American, German, and English-language-have in recent decades confronted monolingualism in their texts, and how they have critiqued the World Literature industry's increasing hunger for “translatable” novels.

The Invention of Multilingualism

The Invention of Multilingualism PDF Author: David Gramling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108804624
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Multilingualism is a meaningful and capacious idea about human meaning-making practice, one with a promising, tumultuous, and flawed present - and a future worth caring for in research and public life. In this book, David Gramling presents original new insights into the topical subject of multilingualism, describing its powerful social, economic and political discourses. On one hand, it is under acute pressure to bear the demands of new global supply-chains, profit margins, and supranational unions, and on the other it is under pressure to make way for what some consider to be better descriptors of linguistic practice, such as translanguaging. The book shows how multilingualism is usefully able to encompass complex, divergent, and sometimes opposing experiences and ideas, in a wide array of planetary contexts - fictitious and real, political and social, North and South, colonial and decolonial, individual and collective, oppressive and liberatory, embodied and prosthetic, present and past.

The Invention of Monolingualism

The Invention of Monolingualism PDF Author: David Gramling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501318055
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The first book in the humanities and social sciences to offer an extensive conceptual definition of monolingualism, based on literary, applied-linguistic, technological, and translational examples.

The Golden Mean of Languages

The Golden Mean of Languages PDF Author: Alisa van de Haar
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004408592
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both French and Dutch were spoken as local tongues.

Learning Languages in Early Modern England

Learning Languages in Early Modern England PDF Author: John Gallagher
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198837909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In 1578, the Anglo-Italian author, translator, and teacher John Florio wrote that English was 'a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing'. Learning Languages in Early Modern England is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of continental vernacular languages in the period between 1480 and 1720. English was practically unknown outside of England, which meant that the English who wanted to travel and trade with the wider world in this period had to become language-learners. Using a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, from multilingual conversation manuals to travellers' diaries and letters where languages mix and mingle, Learning Languages explores how early modern English-speakers learned and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in the past. Beginning with language lessons in early modern England, it offers a new perspective on England's 'educational revolution'. John Gallagher looks for the first time at the whole corpus of conversation manuals written for English language-learners, and uses these texts to pose groundbreaking arguments about reading, orality, and language in the period. He also reconstructs the practices of language-learning and multilingual communication which underlay early modern travel. Learning Languages offers a new and innovative study of a set of practices and experiences which were crucial to England's encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. Interdisciplinary in its approaches and broad in its chronological and thematic scope, this volume places language-learning and multilingualism at the heart of early modern British and European history.

Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents

Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents PDF Author: Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816537496
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Spanish and English have fought a centuries-long battle for linguistic dominance in the Southwest North American Region. Covering the time period of 1540 to the present, Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents provides a deep and broad understanding of the contradictory methods of establishing language supremacy in this U.S.-Mexico transborder region and the manner in which those affected have responded and acted, often in dissatisfaction and at times with inventive adaptations. Well-regarded author Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez details the linguistic and cultural processes used by penetrating imperial and national states. He argues that these impositions have been not linear but hydra-headed, complex and contradictory, sometimes accommodated and sometimes forcefully imposed. Such impositions have created discontent resulting in physical and linguistic revolts, translanguage versions, and multilayered capacities of use and misuse of imposed languages—even the invention of community-created trilingual dictionaries. Vélez-Ibáñez gives particular attention to both sides of the border, explaining the consequences of the fragile splitting of the area through geopolitical border formation. He illustrates the many ways those discontents have manifested in linguistic, cultural, educational, political, and legal forms. From revolt to revitalization, from silent objection to expressive defiance, people in the Southwest North American Region have developed arcs of discontent from the Spanish colonial period to the present. These narratives are supported by multiple sources, including original Spanish colonial documents and new and original ethnographic studies of performance rituals like the matachines of New Mexico. This unique work discusses the most recent neurobiological studies of bilingualism and their implications for cognitive development and language as it spans multiple disciplines. Finally, it provides the most important models for dual language development and their integration to the "Funds of Knowledge" concept as creative contemporary discontents with monolingual approaches.

The Translation Zone

The Translation Zone PDF Author: Emily Apter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400841216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature. Organized around a series of propositions that range from the idea that nothing is translatable to the idea that everything is translatable, The Translation Zone examines the vital role of translation studies in the "invention" of comparative literature as a discipline. Apter emphasizes "language wars" (including the role of mistranslation in the art of war), linguistic incommensurability in translation studies, the tension between textual and cultural translation, the role of translation in shaping a global literary canon, the resistance to Anglophone dominance, and the impact of translation technologies on the very notion of how translation is defined. The book speaks to a range of disciplines and spans the globe. Ultimately, The Translation Zone maintains that a new comparative literature must take stock of the political impact of translation technologies on the definition of foreign or symbolic languages in the humanities, while recognizing the complexity of language politics in a world at once more monolingual and more multilingual.

English as a Local Language

English as a Local Language PDF Author: Christina Higgins
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1847696937
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
When analyzed in multilingual contexts, English is often treated as an entity that is separable from its linguistic environment. It is often the case, however, that multilinguals use English in hybrid and transcultural ways. This book explores how multilingual East Africans make use of English as a local resource in their everyday practices by examining a range of domains, including workplace conversation, beauty pageants, hip hop and advertising. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality, the author uses discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches to demonstrate the range of linguistic and cultural hybridity found across these domains, and to consider the constraints on hybridity in each context. By focusing on the cultural and linguistic bricolage in which English is often found, the book illustrates how multilinguals respond to the tension between local identification and dominant conceptualizations of English as a language for global communication.

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention PDF Author: Daniel L. Everett
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 087140477X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
How Language Began revolutionizes our understanding of the one tool that has allowed us to become the "lords of the planet." Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” (Tom Wolfe, Harper’s), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today. Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett’s discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup. Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60,000 generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue. Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect. In the book’s final section, Cultural Evolution of Language, Everett takes the ever-debated “language gap” to task, delving into the chasm that separates “us” from “the animals.” He approaches the subject from various disciplines, including anthropology, neuroscience, and archaeology, to reveal that it was social complexity, as well as cultural, physiological, and neurological superiority, that allowed humans—with our clawless hands, breakable bones, and soft skin—to become the apex predator. How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.

English as a Global Language

English as a Global Language PDF Author: David Crystal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107611806
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.