The Mother Tongue
The Mother Tongue

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2015-06-02

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0062417444

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“Vastly informative and vastly entertaining…A scholarly and fascinating book.” —Los Angeles Times With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries.

Beyond the Mother Tongue
Beyond the Mother Tongue

Author: Yasemin Yildiz

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0823241300

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Monolingualism-the idea that having just one language is the norm is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.

The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-09-21

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1101502738

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“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.

Your Mother's Tongue
Your Mother's Tongue

Author: Stephen Burgen

Publisher:

Published: 1996-02-01

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 9780756774622

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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."

Word from the Mother
Word from the Mother

Author: Geneva Smitherman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-26

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1000472523

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This classic text by Geneva Smitherman, pioneering scholar of Black Talk, is a definitive statement on African American Language (AAL). Enriched by her inimitable writing style, the book outlines past debates on the speech of African Americans and provides a vision for the future. As global manifestations of AAL increase, she argues that we must broaden our conception of the language and its speakers, and further examine the implications of gender, age and class on AAL. Perhaps most of all we must appreciate the "artistic and linguistic genius" of AAL, from Hip Hop lyrics to the rhyme and rhetoric of the broader Black speech community. Smitherman explores AAL's contribution to American English, includes a summary of expressions as a suggested linguistic core of AAL, and features cartoons that educate readers on the broader relationship between language, race, and racism. This classic edition features a new foreword by H. Samy Alim, celebrating Smitherman's continuing impact on Black Language scholarship and her influence on the future of the field. Word from the Mother is an essential read for students of African American speech, language, culture and sociolinguistics, as well as the general reader interested in the worldwide "crossover" of Black popular culture.

Finding Our Tongues
Finding Our Tongues

Author: Dean Falk

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-10

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1458758842

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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 Rise of English
The Rise of English

Author: Rosemary C. Salomone

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 0190625619

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A sweeping account of the global rise of English and the high-stakes politics of languageSpoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca- - its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "riseof English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign colleagues. Business interests can flourish in the global economy.But the rise of English has very real downsides as well. In Europe, imperatives of political integration and job mobility compete with pride in national language and heritage. In the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages.And in countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency.In The Rise of English, Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business. From the inner workings of the European Union to linguistic battles over influence inAfrica, Salomone draws on a wealth of research to tell the complex story of English - and, ultimately, to argue for English not as a force for domination but as a core component of multilingualism and the transcendence of linguistic and cultural borders.

Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts
Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts

Author: Aneta Pavlenko

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9781853596469

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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.