Contact Talk: The Discursive Organization of Contact and Boundaries

Written by a wide range of highly regarded scholars and exciting junior ones, this book critiques and operationalizes contemporary thinking in the rapidly expanding field of linguistic anthropology. It does so using case studies of actual everyday language practices from an extremely understudied yet incredibly important area of the Global South: Indonesia. In doing so, it provides a rich set of studies that model and explain complex linguistic anthropological analysis in engaging and easily understood ways.

As a book that is both accessible for undergraduate students and enlightening for graduate students through to senior professors, this book problematizes a wide range of assumptions. The diversity of settings and methodologies used in this book surpass many recent collections that attempt to address issues surrounding contemporary processes of diversification given rapid ongoing social change. In focusing on the trees, so to speak, the collection as a whole also enables readers to see the forest. This approach provides a rare insight into relationships between everyday language practices, social change, and the ever-present and ongoing processes of nation-building.

Zane Goebel is Associate Professor in Indonesian and Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia.

Deborah Cole is Associate Professor in the Department of Language, Literature and Communication, College of Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Howard Manns is Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia.