2020 has been a strange year for reading: some of us have had a lot more time for reading, others far less. Regardless whether you’ve been able to indulge or have missed out, most Language on the Move readers will be on the look-out for some good reads for the New Year ahead.
The Language on the Move team is here to help!
After the Language on the Move Reading Challenges of 2018, 2019, and 2020, this is the fourth time we are running the Language on the Move Reading Challenge.
This year, we have created a monthly calendar of reading recommendations to keep you company throughout the year.
As was the case previously, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021 is designed to encourage broad reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun. Anyone with an interest in the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life can join.
Throughout the year, make sure to watch out for in-depth reviews and interactive conversations related to each reading, both here on this site and over on Twitter @lg_on_the_move.
Enjoy the recommendations from our team and feel free to add your own recommendations in the comment section below! We are interested in any good reads illuminating the intersection of language and social life.
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January
JanuaryHanna Torsh recommends The Sydney Language by Jakelin Troy (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019, 2nd ed.).
“Jakelin Troy documents the language of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Sydney Region, which no longer has any speakers. Drawing on historical sources, the book provides a classic example of language contact and intercultural communication. Shadows of those encounters between Aboriginal people and colonizers continue to exist in the vocabulary of Australian English. “Waratah” is a good example. The flower to which it refers is the name of the NSW floral emblem and of a major rugby team.”
February
Pia Tenedero recommends Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown Publishing, 2012).
“I like having Reading Group via Zoom because I feel more confident to express myself in this digital platform than in our face-to-face meetings – possibly an indication of my introvert side. This is partly why Susan Cain’s exploration of communication styles and the stereotypes linked to them appeals to me. There is a dominant belief that the ideal self, successful students, model employees, or the best leaders enjoy the spotlight, act quickly, and talk fast, aloud, and a lot. Extroversion is also perceived as a “Western” communication style. As a result, those who do not fit the pattern are oftentimes viewed through a deficit lens, as I have found in my research with globalized accountants in the Philippines.”
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March
MarchVera Williams Tetteh recommends Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa by Nwando Achebe (Ohio University Press, 2020).
“In 2009, I gifted Ingrid (Piller) a glossy catalogue celebrating 50 years of Ghanaian history. She was puzzled at this short time span and asked where all the history before that was. Not having an answer at the time, I have become an avid reader of African history since. Nwando Achebe provides a brilliant African-centred history of women in leadership roles on the continent during pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. The book opens with my most favourite African proverb – “Until the lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” and, throughout, addresses the question: whose histories, whose stories, whose archives?”
April
Loy Lising recommends Challenging the Myth of Monolingual Corpora edited by Arja Nurmi, Tanja Rutten, and Paivi Pahta (Brill, 2017).
“This book addresses how the monolingual mindset pervades even the discipline of linguistics itself, specifically the sub-discipline of corpus linguistics. The monolingual mindset manifests in the compilation, annotation, and use of corpora, and multilingual practices are converted into monolingual corpora at each of these levels. As one of the contributors to the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English, I am concerned that any non-English data in that corpus are either marked as <indig>, if they are in a local language, or <foreign>, if they are in Spanish. The book offers many helpful lenses through which to query these practices and to consider how non-English elements could be better incorporated so that they can serve as meaningful evidence of language contact and language change.”
May
Madiha Neelam recommends Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches by Elana Shohamy (Routledge, 2006).
“This book inspires me to think more deeply about how language can serve as a means of control and categorisation. Shohamy explains how perceptions of language as a limited entity, governed by fixed boundaries, and strict rules of correctness make language amenable to manipulation for political, social, and economic purposes. Language tests, in particular, are powerful tools of control and social categorisation.”
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June
JuneSamar Al-Khalil recommends Neoliberalism and English Language Education Policies in the Arabian Gulf by Osman Z. Barnawi (Routledge, 2017).
“Barnawi shows how education in the Gulf region is changing as societies move from oil-based to knowledge-based economies. In this context, education has become entirely subject to the needs of the job market and economic agendas. This has resulted in a series of tensions as this form of neoliberal and globalized education comes into conflict with Islamic values and Arab identities. The book helps me to think more critically about the broader socioeconomic context in which my research about the promotional discourses of private English language teaching institutes in Saudi Arabia is embedded.”
July
Shiva Motaghi-Tabari recommends Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss (Black Inc., 2018).
“Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is an anthology of fifty short life stories written by Aboriginal people from all walks of life and spanning a variety of generations and regions. It is a compilation of diverse voices and perspectives which have identity, culture, and racism at their core. One of the themes that stands out throughout the book is the contributors’ struggles to understand their identity, and to find a sense of belonging and acceptance. The book enriched my own learning and understanding about Indigenous people in many ways, and I would recommend the book particularly to migrants to Australia, who can too easily avoid confronting Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing struggles of its First Nations people.”
August
Alexandra Grey recommends Language Investment and Employability: The Uneven Distribution of Resources in the Public Employment Service by Mi-Cha Flubacher, Alexandre Duchêne and Renata Coray (Palgrave, 2018).
“This book reports on a 9-month institutional ethnography inside various offices of Switzerland’s public employment service across the officially French-German bilingual Canton of Fribourg. It is a brilliant example of an institutional ethnography. The study demonstrates that language policy research should not always take a specific official language policy as its starting point. Instead, it is important for researchers to look at sites and processes where both overt and covert language policy is made and applied without taking on the official guise of ‘a policy about language’. Here, the rules, official policies and official discourses are, on their face, about eligibility for state assistance and employability, but the study shows how language practices, migration histories, and language repertoires are constructed within them.”
September
Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Home advantage: social class and parental intervention in elementary education by Annette Lareau (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 2nd ed).
“Working-class families want their children to succeed in school, just like middle-class families, but they are not endowed with the same resources. Lareau shows that social class has a powerful impact on educational success; that is, parental involvement in schooling correlates strongly to children’s educational attainment. For working-class families, school and family life are strictly separated. By contrast, school and family life are interconnected for middle class families. Parental possession and activation of cultural resources yields social and educational profits for middle class children, which results in the strong connection between social class and educational outcomes. The book challenges me to think more deeply about how the class-school relationship is complicated when linguistic difference and migrant status also come into play. Schools should help fill the gap by providing inclusive multilingual information.”
October
Jinhyun Cho recommends Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu (Polity, 1992).
“I have read this book numerous times and treat it as my sociolinguistic bible. I continue to find new perspectives and insights into the relationship between language and society at each reading. By shifting the focus from language per se to its situatedness in complex social relations, Bourdieu’s theory of language as capital works seamlessly in the theorisation of linguistic markets, in which a price is formed on language, and censorship operates in order to distinguish legitimate language from other varieties. Although Bourdieu’s theory was formed in the French context of the 2nd half of the 20th century, it has been foundational to my own research related to translation and interpreting in contemporary South Korea, where English serves as a key instrument of distinction.”
November
Tazin Abdullah recommends Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun (University of Queensland Press, 2019).
“Much of the narrative surrounding Australian immigrants posits migration as a recent phenomenon. Australianama (“The book of Australia”), in contrast, is a refreshing insight into the historic connection immigrants have had with land and people. Khatun traces the South Asian Muslim presence in Australia using literature in South Asian languages and stories found in Aboriginal accounts. She explains, convincingly, that an understanding of immigrant history is found not in languages associated with European/colonial knowledge systems, but within the literature of immigrant and Aboriginal languages. The stories that Khatun unearths definitively illustrate the influence of historical, social and cultural factors that produce the linguistic representation of immigrants. I thoroughly enjoyed this fresh perspective on the story of Australia.”
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December
DecemberIngrid Piller recommends The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad and with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat (Penguin, 2019).
“I’ve probably learned more about language – and life in general, I might add – from literature than from linguistics. And this anthology offers a kaleidoscope of the many facets in which language is entwined in the experience of migration. Ahmad has brought together a brilliant collection of migrant literature with pieces focused on the experience of leaving home, arriving in a destination, and creating, or trying to create, a new home. Although the US and UK still loom large among the destinations, Ahmad has made a huge effort to include a wide variety of origins and destinations. Another strength of the anthology is that, in addition to some well-known names, it features many newer writers who have not yet been widely anthologized – I’ve discovered a number of authors to add to my favorite writers list.”
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