Language Assemblages (Key Topics in Applied Linguistics) - Softcover

Pennycook, Alastair

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1009348620 ISBN 13: 9781009348621

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2024

Synopsis

What are languages? An assemblage approach to language gives us ways of thinking about language as dynamic, constructed, open-ended, and in and of the world. This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways, presenting an innovative and provocative framework for a new understanding of language from within applied linguistics. The idea of assemblages allows for a flexibility about what languages are, not just in terms of having fuzzy linguistic boundaries but in terms of what constitutes language more generally. Languages are assembled from different elements, both linguistic elements as traditionally understood, as well as items less commonly included. Language from this point of view is embedded in diverse social and physical environments, distributed across the material world and part of our embodied existence. This book looks at what language is and what languages are with a view to understanding applied linguistics itself as a practical assemblage.

About this title

About the Author

Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney. His notable publications include The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (1994) (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic), Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (2007), Language and Mobility (2012) and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (2018) (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009348620
• ISBN 13: 9781009348621
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212