What's Language Got to Do with It?

In the Mideast, words shoot to kill. On the pages of the New Yorker, Romeo IMs Juliet. In India, operators in customer service call centers are required to speak English with an American accent and to be able to make small talk about the Super Bowl. Closer to home, ABC News offers up a linguistic profiling quiz. And George Orwell continues to lament the state of politics and the English language.

This is just some of what you’ll find in What’s Language Got to Do with It?, a thought-provoking new reader that introduces some of the most important language issues facing us today―and prompts students to think hard about their own use of language.

Keith Walters is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University, where he teaches sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Previously, he taught in the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas at Austin and in the English Department at The Ohio State University. Much of his research has focused on issues of language and identity in Tunisia, where he served as a Peace Corps volunteer, and in the Arab world more broadly. He’s the coauthor of two other textbooks, Everything’s an Argument with Readings and What’s Language Got to Do with It?

Michal Brody is a linguist, independent scholar, and lecturer. She was a founding faculty member of the Universidad de Oriente in Yucatán, Mexico. She has taught language-related courses in the Departments of English, Communication Studies, and MATESOL at San Francisco State University and Sonoma State University. Her scholarly work centers on language pedagogy and politics in the United States and Mexico. She’s the author (with Keith Walters) of What’s Language Got to Do with It? and coauthor (with Richard Bullock and Francine Weinberg) of The Little Seagull Handbook, and has been a contributor to LetsTalkLibrary, Everyone’s an Author Tumblr site and They Say / I Blog.