Jaffe Alexandra

This leading team of scholars presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users. The authors refer to this network of interlinked changes as the new conditions surrounding small languages (Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh) in peripheral sites. Starting from the conviction that peripheral sites can and should inform the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the book explores how new modes of reflexivity, more transactional frames for authenticity, commodification of peripheral resources, and boundary-transgression with humour, all carry forward change. These types of change articulate a blurring of binary oppositions between centre and periphery, old and new, and standard and non-standard. Such research is particularly urgent in multilingual small language contexts, where different conceptualisations of language(s), boundaries, and speakers impact on individuals' social, cultural, and economic capital, and opportunities.

Teaching in Two Languages is an ethnographic study of linguistic and social practices in a bilingual Corsican school. Drawing on traditions of research in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistic studies of classroom discourse and power, the emphasis of this book is on the way the interactional order of the classroom engages with the wider social, political and sociolinguistic context. Alexandra Jaffe does not take 'bilingualism' to be a self-evident category or goal, but rather, looks at the way that school practices embody and promote particular images of what it means to be a bilingual person or society. Teaching in Two Languages is also centrally concerned with processes of social and linguistic change, and how the introduction of a minority language like Corsican into the school constitutes and potentially reconfigures social and linguistic identities and relationships. Both an landmark ethnography and a major contribution to theory, this book is essential reading for all those wanting to keep up to date with advances in bilingualism, multilingualism and sociolinguistics.

Teaching in Two Languages is an ethnographic study of linguistic and social practices in a bilingual Corsican school. Drawing on traditions of research in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistic studies of classroom discourse and power, the emphasis of this book is on the way the interactional order of the classroom engages with the wider social, political and sociolinguistic context. Alexandra Jaffe does not take 'bilingualism' to be a self-evident category or goal, but rather, looks at the way that school practices embody and promote particular images of what it means to be a bilingual person or society. Teaching in Two Languages is also centrally concerned with processes of social and linguistic change, and how the introduction of a minority language like Corsican into the school constitutes and potentially reconfigures social and linguistic identities and relationships. Both an landmark ethnography and a major contribution to theory, this book is essential reading for all those wanting to keep up to date with advances in bilingualism, multilingualism and sociolinguistics.