The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selected peer-reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind with other specially commissioned chapters. Like the conference, this book aims to enhance mutual understanding among researchers from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, offering a wealth of insights to a wide range of readers on recent culturally oriented cognitive studies of language.

Bringing together scholarship on issues relating to language, culture, and identity, with a special focus on Asian countries, this volume makes an important contribution in terms of analyzing and demonstrating how language is closely linked with crucial social, political, and economic forces, particularly the tensions between the demands of globalization and local identity. A particular feature is the inclusion of countries that have been under-represented in the research literature, such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Korea. The book is organized in three sections: Globalization and its Impact on Language Policies, Culture, and Identity Language Policy and the Social (Re)construction of National Cultural Identity Language Policy and Language Politics: The Role of English. Unique in its attention to how the domination of English is being addressed in relation to cultural values and identity by non-English speaking countries in a range of sociopolitical contexts, this volume will help readers to understand the impact of globalization on non-English speaking countries, particularly developing countries, which differ significantly from contexts in the West in their cultural orientations and the way identities are being constructed. Language Policy, Culture, and Identity in Asian Contexts will interest scholars and research students in the areas of language policy, education, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and critical linguistics. It can be adopted in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on language policy, language in society, and language education.

This state-of-the-art exploration of language, culture, and identity is orchestrated through prominent scholars’ and teachers’ narratives, each weaving together three elements: a personal account based on one or more memorable or critical incidents that occurred in the course of learning or using a second or foreign language; an interpretation of the incidents highlighting their impact in terms of culture, identity, and language; the connections between the experiences and observations of the author and existing literature on language, culture and identity. What makes this book stand out is the way in which authors meld traditional ‘academic’ approaches to inquiry with their own personalized voices. This opens a window on different ways of viewing and doing research in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. What gives the book its power is the compelling nature of the narratives themselves. Telling stories is a fundamental way of representing and making sense of the human condition. These stories unpack, in an accessible but rigorous fashion, complex socio-cultural constructs of culture, identity, the self and other, and reflexivity, and offer a way into these constructs for teachers, teachers in preparation and neophyte researchers. Contributors from around the world give the book broad and international appeal.

Examines how language shapes and is shaped by our identity.

This edited volume presents Alternative Voices in the contexts of present-day and historical globalisation, the emergence of the knowledge society, increased global-local or glocal migration flows, the explosion of social media, and disparate regional growth that have both impacted and shaped the sociocultural fabric of geopolitical spaces across the world. The volume builds upon twenty-seven contributions that focus upon issues related to language, culture and identity from a multidisciplinary nexus of historical, philosophical and empirically-based traditions. Positioned in post-colonial emic heritage, the research presented here challenges the “monolingual (including monocultural) bias” and the “linguacentric bias” in the Language Sciences. This volume is an important contribution in terms of analyzing and demonstrating issues related to the complexity of culture and language, and their links with social, political, economic forces, particularly the tensions related to glocal identity positions that are evoked and played out in geopolitically heterogeneous spaces. Given its multidisciplinary nature, this volume presents individual comprehensive accounts of complexities that have been poorly understood and inadequately covered in the existing literature – both in Southern and Northern contexts.

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.

Indigenous Education is a compilation of conceptual chapters and national case studies that includes empirical research based on a series of data collection methods. The book provides up-to-date scholarly research on global trends on three issues of paramount importance with indigenous education—language, culture, and identity. It also offers a strategic comparative and international education policy statement on recent shifts in indigenous education, and new approaches to explore, develop, and improve comparative education and policy research globally. Contributing authors examine several social justice issues related to indigenous education. In addition to case perspectives from 12 countries and global regions, the volume includes five conceptual chapters on topics that influence indigenous education, including policy debates, the media, the united nations, formal and informal education systems, and higher education.

This book explores the instrumentality of language in constructing identity in contemporary society. The processes of globalization, hyper-mobility, rapid urbanization, and the increasing desire of local populations to be linked to the global community have created a pressing need to reconfigure identity in this new world order. Following the digital revolution, both traditional and new media are dissolving linguistic boundaries. The centrality of language in organizing communities and groups cannot be overstated: our social order is developed alongside our linguistic allegiance, shared narratives, collective memories, and common social history. Keeping in mind the fluidity of identity, the book brings together fourteen chapters providing cultural and social perspectives. The ideas reflected here draw on a range of disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, the politics of language, and linguistic identity.

Language is integral to the construction of personal, socio-cultural and socio-political identities. Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture closely investigates the relationship between language and identities, offering a comprehensive yet progressive view of how linguistics relates to development and education, both in theoretical and real world applications. Progressing from a theoretical core examining the connection between language and individual identity, this book moves on to look at the wider socio-political discourse involving the marginalization and resistance of communities in the world. Beginning with the philosophical paradigms of language, Evans questions whether language shapes personal identities in its daily use or whether language is simply a tool for describing, rather than creating, the world. Extrapolating on this, the contributors utilise case studies from across the globe to see how these linguistic perspectives are played out in the real world, considering the role of language in issues surrounding power, colonization, marginalization and education. Language, Identity and Symbolic Culture offers a view of language identity conflicts around the world and an understanding of the opportunities of political and cultural emancipation created through language and open discourse.

Language, Culture and Identity is a collection of papers from the BAAL Annual Conference at the University of Bristol 2005. The thirteen papers, by researchers from Britain and across Europe, represent a range of research orientations within Applied Linguistics that connect in different ways with issues in culture and identity. Two plenary addresses from the conference, by Roz Ivanic and Srikant Sarangi, explore the themes of identity and culture in contexts of learning and of work. Papers addressing language planning and policy issues present recent analyses of francophone identity in Canada and Sami identity in Finland. The issues of culture and identity in writing are explored in different papers from the perspective of identity construction in academic writing, discipline cultures in higher education contexts, the consequences of these for interdisciplinary writers, and how writers construct audience identity though the linguistic choices they make. Empirical studies of language learning and teaching are also represented, with papers on Processing Instruction and Intercultural Pragmatics. The themes of identity and culture in these papers connect a range of sub-disciplines within Applied Linguistics, and also connect knowledge building in Applied Linguistics with pervasive themes in research across the social sciences, into the ways people as individuals and in communities understand, shape and represent their experiences of learning and work.