Drawing upon a unique forensic linguistic project on online undercover policing the authors further understanding of language and identity.

This book focuses on language and identity online within the context of running from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together digital ethnography, existential phenomenology, interpretative phenomenological analysis and sporting embodiment in the pursuit to explore runners’ lived experiences and identities online. Language, identity and identity online are often studied in broader social contexts such as education, culture and politics, and running is intimately related to key issues in contemporary society, such as health and exercise, sport and nationalism, embracing a variety of discourse types and having implications more generally for our identity as human beings. The evolving online media through which people make sense of who they are and which groups they belong to are enabling new ways of realising identities and relationships. This book will be of interest to applied linguists, discourse analysts, as well as those interested in sports, sports psychology, and identity enactment.

The language we use forms an important part of our sense of who we are - of our identity. This book outlines the relationship between our identity as members of groups - ethnic, national, religious and gender - and the language varieties important to each group. What is a language? What is a dialect? Are there such things as language 'rights'? Must every national group have its own unique language? How have languages, large and small, been used to spread religious ideas? Why have particular religious and linguistic 'markers' been so central, singly or in combination, to the ways in which we think about ourselves and others? Using a rich variety of examples, the book highlights the linkages among languages, dialects and identities, with special attention given to religious, ethnic and national allegiances.

This timely book examines language on social media sites including Facebook and Twitter. Studies from leading language researchers, and experts on social media, explore how social media is having an impact on how we relate to each other, the communities we live in, and the way we present a sense of self in twenty-first century society.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice. Taking Émile Durkheim's concept of the 'social fact' (social behaviours that we all undertake under the influence of the society we live in) as the point of departure, he first demonstrates how the facts of language and social interaction can be used as conclusive refutations of individualistic theories of society such as 'Rational Choice'. Next, he engages with theorizing the post-Durkheimian social world in which we currently live. This new social world operates 'offline' as well as 'online' and is characterized by 'vernacular globalization', Arjun Appadurai's term to summarise the ways that larger processes of modernity are locally performed through new electronic media. Blommaert extrapolates from this rich concept to consider how our communication practices might offer a template for thinking about how we operate socially. Above all, he explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and social practice In Durkheim and the Internet, Blommaert proposes new theories of social norms, social action, identity, social groups, integration, social structure and power, all of them animated by a deep understanding of language and social interaction. In drawing on Durkheim and other classical sociologists including Simmel and Goffman, this book is relevant to students and researchers working in sociolinguistics as well as offering a wealth of new insights to scholars in the fields of digital and online communications, social media, sociology, and digital anthropology.

Regulation, risk awareness and technological advances are more and more drawing identity search requirements into business, security and data management processes. Following years of struggling with computational techniques, the new linguistic identity matching approach finally offers an appropriate way for such processes to balance the risk of missing a personal match with the costs of overmatching. The new paradigm for identity searches focuses on understanding the influences that languages, writing systems and cultural conventions have on person names. A must-read for anyone involved in the purchase, design or study of identity matching systems, this book describes how linguistic and onomastic knowledge can be used to create a more reliable and precise identity search.

Second Language Identities examines how identity is an issue in different second language learning contexts. It begins with a detailed presentation of what has become a popular approach to identity in the social sciences (including applied linguistics) today, one that is inspired in poststructuralist thought and is associated with the work of authors such as Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Chris Weedon, Judith Butler and Stuart Hall. It then examines how in early SLA research focussing on affective variables, identity was an issue, lurking in the wings but not coming to centre stage. Moving to the present, the book then examines in detail and critiques recent research focussing on identity in three distinct second language learning contexts. These contexts are: (1) adult migration, (2) foreign language classrooms and (3) study abroad programmes. The book concludes with suggestions for future research focussing on identity in second language learning.

A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology provides a series of in-depth explorations of key concepts and approaches by some of the scholars whose work constitutes the theoretical and methodological foundations of the contemporary study of language as culture. Provides a definitive overview of the field of linguistic anthropology, comprised of original contributions by leading scholars in the field Summarizes past and contemporary research across the field and is intended to spur students and scholars to pursue new paths in the coming decades Includes a comprehensive bibliography of over 2000 entries designed as a resource for anyone seeking a guide to the literature of linguistic anthropology

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity provides a clear and comprehensive survey of the field of language and identity from an applied linguistics perspective. Forty-one chapters are organised into five sections covering: theoretical perspectives informing language and identity studies key issues for researchers doing language and identity studies categories and dimensions of identity identity in language learning contexts and among language learners future directions for language and identity studies in applied linguistics Written by specialists from around the world, each chapter will introduce a topic in language and identity studies, provide a concise and critical survey, in which the importance and relevance to applied linguists is explained and include further reading. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity is an essential purchase for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and TESOL. Advisory board: David Block (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats/ Universitat de Lleida, Spain); John Joseph (University of Edinburgh); Bonny Norton (University of British Colombia, Canada).

This edited collection examines how people use a range of different modalities to negotiate, influence, and/or project their own or other people's identities. It brings together linguistic scholars concerned with issues of identity through a study of language use in various types of written texts, conversation, performance, and interviews.