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New book by Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas

Posted on 16 October 2014

A new book "Language, Borders and Identity" edited by Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas has just been published

Drawing on a broad, geographically diverse spectrum of studies of language use and attitudes in a variety of border contexts, Language, Borders and Identity takes an integrative interdisciplinary approach by combining sociolinguistic research with insights and investigative techniques from human geography, anthropology and social psychology. The book illustrates a range of methodological approaches used by researchers in the field and examines socio-psychological and 'relic' borders alongside the contemporary political borders that divide monoglossic and heteroglossic territories.

Using international case studies and examples throughout, this book also looks to symbolic borders, which may be encoded via the semiotic manipulation of the linguistic landscape. It further assesses the linguistic implications of the presence of borders in applied contexts, including language planning and policy (e.g. in multilingual education or for the protection of minority languages) and the role of linguistic behaviour in enforcement of border controls.

Language, Borders and Identity develops and refines models of how language is used to construct borders, and how it serves to index how speakers place themselves with respect to these boundaries. Through exploration of the tensions between essentialist and constructionist approaches to identity, this book brings into focus the dual reactive and proactive functions that language fulfils in this respect, and offers a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics and the sociology of language.

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