How We Talk about Language
Exploring Citizen Sociolinguistics

The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people talk about language, how we can participate in those conversations, and what we can learn from them about both language and our society. Along the way, we learn that knowledge about language and its connection to social life is not primarily produced and spread by linguists or sociolinguists, or even language teachers, but through everyday conversations, on-line arguments, creative insults, music, art, memes, twitter-storms - any place language grabs people's attention and foments more talk. An essential new aid to the study of the relationship between language, culture and society, this book provides a vision for language inquiry by turning our gaze to everyday forms of language expertise.

Introduction: How We Talk About Language: Citizen Sociolinguistics and its Study; 1. Citizen's arrest: the 'citizen' and sociolinguistic expertise; 2. Wonderment: the spark that starts talk about language; 3. Doing citizen sociolinguistics: the medium is the method; 4. Fomenting arrest and wonderment: citizen sociolinguistic feedback loops; 5. Citizen sociolinguistics and narrative; 6. Acts of citizen sociolinguistics; Conclusion: why we must talk about language.

Betsy Rymes is Professor of Educational Linguistics at The University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education.