Language and Mobility

Alastair Pennycook

ISBN 10: 1847697631 / ISBN 13: 9781847697639

Published by Channel View Publications Ltd, GB, 2012

About this Item

This book looks at language in unexpected places. Drawing on a diversity of materials and contexts, including farewell addresses to British workers in colonial India, letters written from parents to their children at home, a Cornish anthem sung in South Australia, a country fair in rural Australia, and a cricket match played in the middle of the 19th century in south India, this book explores many current concerns around language, mobility and place, including native speakers, generic forms, and language maintenance. Using a series of narrative accounts - from a journey to southern India to eating cheese in China, from playing soccer in Germany to observing a student teacher in Sydney - this book asks how it is that language, people and cultures turn up unexpectedly and how our lines of expectation are formed.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781847697639

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Language and Mobility
• Publisher: Channel View Publications Ltd, GB
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847697631
• ISBN 13: 9781847697639
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 278 grams

About this title

Synopsis

This book looks at language in unexpected places. Drawing on a diversity of materials and contexts, including farewell addresses to British workers in colonial India, letters written from parents to their children at home, a Cornish anthem sung in South Australia, a country fair in rural Australia, and a cricket match played in the middle of the 19th century in south India, this book explores many current concerns around language, mobility and place, including native speakers, generic forms, and language maintenance. Using a series of narrative accounts – from a journey to southern India to eating cheese in China, from playing soccer in Germany to observing a student teacher in Sydney – this book asks how it is that language, people and cultures turn up unexpectedly and how our lines of expectation are formed.

About the Author

Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney. His work has focused on language, colonialism and knowledge disparities, concerns highlighted in The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places, and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize).  In Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South, (with Sinfree Makoni) – he has argued for the need for epistemological rethinking from the Global South. His most recent book – Language Assemblages (Cambridge University Press, 2024) – makes the case for a pluriversal and decolonial understanding of language and being.