An extremely funny history of so-called bad language by a European author. He asserts that Europeans try to get along but keep treading on each other's toes. In this tour of anger, exasperation, prejudice, irony and loathing as expressed in some 20 European tongues, we learn that what is invective in one country is sweet talk in another. A single currency in Europe? Yes. A common language? Not on your life. The Guardian review states that the book's "His gently comic tone recognizes how funny, how much of a release, much bad language can be." "Entertaining, widely informed."

I don't know fo sho coss I will be commin by the bus... Author Cynthia (Toni) Ligon's mother, Luzetta, always had a very unique way of speaking. For Luzetta, who was raised in the South during the Great Depression, this was a language steeped in tradition, history, family, and community. While Ligon knew that her mother's grammar, syntax, and style were special, she didn't fully understand the dialect's rich context until she started studying linguistics and cultural anthropology as a college student. It was then that she realized that Luzetta's dialect was preserving a way of life long forgotten. It was emblematic of a certain time, place, and people. Now, in My Mother's Tongue: Luzetta, Ligon celebrates her mother's language and its place in her own life. The study combines personal history with contextual information to create a stirring ode to one woman's voice. Ligon infuses her work with warmth and love for her mother and the lessons she taught her. Luzetta, now eighty-five and still thriving, also has lessons to teach you about language, dialect, and cultural memory.

Scientists have long theorized that abstract, symbolic thinking evolved to help humans negotiate such classically male activities as hunting, tool making, and warfare, and eventually developed into spoken language. In Finding Our Tongues, Dean Falk overturns this established idea, offering a daring new theory that springs from a simple observation: parents all over the world, in all cultures, talk to infants by using baby talk or ''Motherese.'' Falk shows how Motherese developed as a way of reassuring babies when mothers had to put them down in order to do work. The melodic vocalizations of early Motherese not only provided the basis of language but also contributed to the growth of music and art. Combining cutting-edge neuroscience with classic anthropology, Falk offers a potent challenge to conventional wisdom about the emergence of human language.

“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

This volume highlights the role of language ideologies in the process of negotiation of identities and shows that in different historical and social contexts different identities may be negotiable or non-negotiable.

Mary Higgins Clark, Amy Tan, Joyce Carol Oates and Maya Angelou are among the gifted writers who share their personal reflections on mother in this exceptiolnal collection of fiction, essays and poetry. From a woman's choice to become a mother to the inner workings of a mother's relationship with her children, the full cycle of motherhood is brought to life in these touching works.

The story to be written -- Missing -- At Hobby Lobby -- Dear María -- Voice activation -- Heritage speaker -- My body's production -- Offering -- Purity & danger: a performance -- This is not the end of my film career -- The 11th day of Occupy Wall Street -- Natural disaster: a dream -- Mother, monster: a lecture -- Questionnaire -- Projection -- Trace of lovers -- Paramour -- Getting around the subject -- Dear stranger -- Pedagogy: a dream -- Training -- Visitors log -- Archaeology of vestments -- Mise en garde -- Voice: an essay -- Ghost song.

'An ode to the ocean, and the generations of women drawn to the waves or left waiting on the shore' Guardian In Salt On Your Tongue, Charlotte Runcie explores what the sea means to us, and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages. In mesmerising prose, she explores how the sea has inspired, fascinated and terrified us, and how she herself fell in love with the deep blue. This book is a walk on the beach with Turner, with Shakespeare, with the Romantic Poets and shanty-singers. It’s an ode to our oceans – to the sailors who brave their treacherous waters, to the women who lost their loved ones to the waves, to the creatures that dwell in their depths, to beachcombers, swimmers, seabirds and mermaids. Navigating through ancient Greek myths, poetry, shipwrecks and Scottish folktales, Salt On Your Tongue is about how the wild untameable waves can help us understand what it means to be human.

The Kitchen Table Translation issue of Aster(ix) explores the connections between translation (the movement of texts) and migration (the movement of bodies). It features immigrant and diasporic translators, and brings together personal, cultural, and political dimensions of translation with the literary and aesthetic aspects of the work.

A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.