On April 24, 2013, Luci Tapahonso became the first poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, possibly the first Native American community to create such a post. The establishment of this position testifies to the importance of Navajo poets and poetry to the Navajo Nation. It also indicates the Navajo equivalence to the poetic traditions connected with the U.S. poet laureate and the poet laureate of the United Kingdom, author Anthony K. Webster asserts, as well as its separateness from those traditions. Intimate Grammars takes an ethnographic and ethnopoetic approach to language and culture in contemporary time, in which poetry and poets are increasingly important and visible in the Navajo Nation. Webster uses interviews and linguistic analysis to understand the kinds of social work that Navajo poets engage in through their poetry. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic and linguistic research, Webster’s book explores a variety of topics: the emotional value assigned to various languages spoken on the Navajo Nation through poetry (Navajo English, Navlish, Navajo, and English), why Navajo poets write about the “ugliness” of the Navajo Nation, and the way contemporary Navajo poetry connects young Navajos to the Navajo language. Webster also discusses how contemporary Navajo poetry challenges the creeping standardization of written Navajo and how boarding school experiences influence how Navajo poets write poetry and how Navajo readers appreciate contemporary Navajo poetry. Through the work of poets such as Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, Rex Lee Jim, Gloria Emerson, Blackhorse Mitchell, Esther Belin, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others, Webster provides new ways of thinking about contemporary Navajo poets and poetry. Intimate Grammars offers an exciting new ethnography of speaking, ethnopoetics, and discourse-centered examinations of language and culture.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion offers a variety of critical theoretical and methodological perspectives that interrogate the ways in which ideas about and experiences of emotion are shaped by linguistic encounters, and vice versa. Taking an interdisciplinary approach which incorporates disciplines such as linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication studies, education, sociology, folklore, religious studies, and literature, this book: explores and illustrates the relationship between language and emotion in the five key areas of language socialisation; culture, translation and transformation; poetry, pragmatics and power; the affective body-self; and emotion communities; situates our present-day thinking about language and emotion by providing a historical and cultural overview of distinctions and moral values that have traditionally dominated Western thought relating to emotions and their management; provides a unique insight into the multiple ways in which language incites emotion, and vice versa, especially in the context of culture. With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion is an indispensable resource for students and researchers who are interested in incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on language and emotion into their work.

On April 24, 2013, Luci Tapahonso became the first poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, possibly the first Native American community to create such a post. The establishment of this position testifies to the importance of Navajo poets and poetry to the Navajo Nation. It also indicates the Navajo equivalence to the poetic traditions connected with the U.S. poet laureate and the poet laureate of the United Kingdom, author Anthony K. Webster asserts, as well as its separateness from those traditions. Intimate Grammars takes an ethnographic and ethnopoetic approach to language and culture in contemporary time, in which poetry and poets are increasingly important and visible in the Navajo Nation. Webster uses interviews and linguistic analysis to understand the kinds of social work that Navajo poets engage in through their poetry. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic and linguistic research, Webster’s book explores a variety of topics: the emotional value assigned to various languages spoken on the Navajo Nation through poetry (Navajo English, Navlish, Navajo, and English), why Navajo poets write about the “ugliness” of the Navajo Nation, and the way contemporary Navajo poetry connects young Navajos to the Navajo language. Webster also discusses how contemporary Navajo poetry challenges the creeping standardization of written Navajo and how boarding school experiences influence how Navajo poets write poetry and how Navajo readers appreciate contemporary Navajo poetry. Through the work of poets such as Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, Rex Lee Jim, Gloria Emerson, Blackhorse Mitchell, Esther Belin, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others, Webster provides new ways of thinking about contemporary Navajo poets and poetry. Intimate Grammars offers an exciting new ethnography of speaking, ethnopoetics, and discourse-centered examinations of language and culture.

With The Book of Intimate Grammar, leading Israeli novelist David Grossman gives us the story of the greatest and most universal tragedy, the loss of the world of childhood. At twelve, Aron Kleinfeld is the ringleader among the boys in his Jerusalem neighborhood, their inspiration in dreaming up games and adventures. But as his friends begin to mature, Aron remains imprisoned for three long years in the body of a child. While Israel inches toward the Six-Day War, and the voices of his friends change and become strange to him, Aron lives in his child body as though in a nightmare. Like a spy in enemy territory, he learns to decipher the internal codes of sexuality and desire, to understand the unyielding bureaucracy of the human body. Hurled between childhood and adulthood, between the pure and the profane, he is like a volcano of emotions and impulses. But, like his hero Houdini, Aron still struggles to escape from the trap of growing up. The Book of Intimate Grammar is about the alchemy of childhood, which transforms loneliness and fear into creation, and about the struggle to emerge an artist. Funny, painful, and passionate, it is a work of enormous intensity and beauty.

In his most moving and most accessible novel yet, David Grossman, the leading Isreali novelist of his generation, gives us the story of that greatest and most universal tragedy, the loss of the world of childhood.

Revised and updated, the 2nd Edition of Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology presents an accessible introduction to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world through the contemporary theory and practice of linguistic anthropology. Presents a highly accessible introduction to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world Combines classic studies on language and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship and assumes no prior knowledge in linguistics or anthropology Features a series of updates and revisions for this new edition, including an all-new chapter on forms of nonverbal language Provides a unifying synthesis of current research and considers future directions for the field

More than 40 percent of the world’s estimated 7,100+ languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of this century. As with the decline of biodiversity, language loss has been attributed to environmental degradation, developmentalism, and the destruction of Indigenous communities. This book brings together leading experts and younger scholars across the humanities and social sciences to investigate what global language justice looks like in a time of climate crisis. Examining the worldwide loss of linguistic diversity, they develop a new conception of justice to safeguard marginalized languages. Global Language Justice explores the socioeconomic transformations that both accelerate the decline of minoritized languages and give rise to new possibilities through population movement, unexpected encounters, and technological change. It also critically examines the concepts that are typically deployed to defend linguistic diversity, including human rights, inclusiveness, and equality. Contributors take up topics such as mapping language communities in New York City or how Indigenous innovation challenges notions of linguistic purity. They demonstrate the need to reckon with linguistic diversity in order to achieve a sustainable global economic system and show how the concept of digital vitality can push language justice in new directions. Interspersed with their essays are multilingual works by world-renowned poets and artists that engage with and deepen the book’s themes. Integrating ambitious theoretical exploration with concrete solutions, Global Language Justice offers vital new perspectives on the place of linguistic diversity in ongoing ecological crises.

Over the past two decades, the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics have complicated traditional understandings of the relationship between language and identity. But while research traditions that explore the linguistic complexities of gender and sexuality have long been established, the study of race as a linguistic issue has only emerged recently. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race positions issues of race as central to language-based scholarship. In twenty-one chapters divided into four sections-Foundations and Formations; Coloniality and Migration; Embodiment and Intersectionality; and Racism and Representations-authors at the forefront of this rapidly expanding field present state-of-the-art research and establish future directions of research. Covering a range of sites from around the world, the handbook offers theoretical, reflexive takes on language and race, the larger histories and systems that influence these concepts, the bodies that enact and experience them, and the expressions and outcomes that emerge as a result. As the study of language and race continues to take on a growing importance across anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies, education, linguistics, literature, psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, and the academy as a whole, this volume represents a timely, much-needed effort to focus these fields on both the central role that language plays in racialization and on the enduring relevance of race and racism.

Comprehensive in scope yet full of ethnographic detail, this book examines the history of language policy by and for Native Americans, and contemporary language revitalization initiatives. Offering a critical-theory view and emphasizing the perspectives of revitalizers themselves, the book explores innovative language regenesis projects, the role of Indigenous youth in language reclamation, and prospects for Native American language and culture continuance.

How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century Britain While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied—from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period—less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. Strange Vernaculars delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the "common people" and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries—from The New Canting Dictionary to Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue—and in novels, poems, and songs, including works by Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Samuel Richardson, Robert Burns, and others. Janet Sorensen argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the "common people" within national culture, but only after representing their language as "strange." Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, Strange Vernaculars explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation. Examples of slang from Strange Vernaculars bum-boat woman: one who sells bread, cheese, greens, and liquor to sailors from a small boat alongside a ship collar day: execution day crewnting: groaning, like a grunting horse gentleman's companion: lice gingerbread-work: gilded carvings of a ship's bow and stern luggs: ears mort: a large amount thraw: to argue hotly and loudly