Read a lot, write a lot! Reading enhances your productivity as this selection (!) of recent books authored by Language-on-the-Move team members proves
Are you ready for the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020? After the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018 and 2019, this is the third time we are running the Language on the Move Reading Challenge. As was the case previously, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020 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.
Here is how it works: the challenge will run from February to November, or ten books over the course of the year. The challenge is to commit yourself to reading one item in each of the categories below. In each category, you can read the recommended title or replace it with another one of your choice.
We invite anyone who takes the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020 to write a review of a book they have read and submit it to Language on the Move to have it considered for publication.
Another way to share your progress is to tweet about it. Mention @lg_on_the_move as we will occasionally be gifting linguistic goodies to our interactive followers throughout the year. In fact, right now you have the chance to win one of five stylish Language on the Move t-shirts if you mention @lg_on_the_move or respond to one of our tweets in between now and January 20, 2020.
Enough introduction! Are you ready to take the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020?
February: A book about the climate emergency
We will start with a book about the perilous state of our planet. Not strictly about language but it is impossible to think about linguistics if your house is on fire.
Klein, Naomi (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.
This fellow is a regular visitor at our house. Sometimes we feed him, sometimes we don’t. When we don’t, he screeches “Tightarse dugai!” You’ll have to read “Mullumbimby” to find out what that means; although we are a fair way from Bundjalung country …
March: A novel providing an Indigenous perspective and some language learning opportunities
In This Changes Everything, you will have learned that the destruction of the planet is closely intertwined with colonialism and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, the second challenge will be to read a novel written by an Indigenous author and providing an Indigenous perspective on human relationships to country. Language is an important part of those relationships and the two recommended novels will give you a tantalizing taster of Bundjalung, an indigenous language of Northern NSW and southern Queensland. Both novels were written by the deadly Melissa Lucashenko (in case you did not know, you will also learn that “deadly” means “awesome, great, fantastic” in Australian Aboriginal English).
Lucashenko, Melissa (2013). Mullumbimby. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.
Lucashenko, Melissa (2018). Too Much Lip. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.
April: An ethnography of language death
Very early in Too Much Lip you will have encountered this scene:
The snake-crow tilted its mutant head at her.
‘Gulganelehla Bundjalung.’ Speak Bundjalung. A test of good character.
‘Bundjalung ngaoi yugam baugal,’ she said. My Bundjalung is crap. The bird hesitated.
‘It’s a trap, a trap, a trap!’ the other crows screeched.
Reflecting on the scene, you might ask yourself why a proud Bundjalung person would have a poor command of her own language. To find an answer, the April challenge is to read about why and how languages die.
Spoiler alert: the answer is ‘3Cs’ (capitalism, Christianity, colonialism).
The recommended title is by the anthropologist Don Kulick, and you will also learn how a white guy does – or does not – cope with fieldwork in a multilingual swamp village in Papua New Guinea.
Kulick, Don (2019). A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
May: A classic in urban sociolinguistics set outside the Anglophone world and written by a female academic
In A Death in a Rainforest, the Taiap language is not the only entity that dies. There are many deaths in the book, and one of these affects the village itself. This is in a line with the ongoing migration from rural to urban areas that started with the Industrial Revolution. Today, more than half the world’s population live in cities, and understanding language in urban settings constitutes a pressing issue – one that has been addressed by much of the classic work in sociolinguistics. Therefore, the May challenge will be to read a foundational book in urban sociolinguistics set outside the Anglophone world and written by a female academic.
My suggestion is Agathe Lasch’s Berlinisch.
Lasch, Agathe (1967 [1928]). Berlinisch: Eine berlinische Sprachgeschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
In this book, Agathe Lasch argued that ‘urban language is not, as is often claimed, a random, degenerate mix’ – a full forty years before Bill Labov! Unfortunately, this fact is pretty much universally ignored by sociolinguists; I have yet to see a sociolinguistics textbook that even mentions this pioneering sociolinguist.
Who said that "urban #language is not, as is often claimed, a random, degenerate mix"?
— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) February 3, 2019
If you do not read German – sadly, even if unsurprisingly, no English translation exists – or cannot get your hands on Berlinisch, I recommend these two excellent alternatives:
Dakubu, Mary Esther Kropp (1997). Korle Meets the Sea: A Sociolinguistic History of Accra. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haeri, Niloofar (1996). The Sociolinguistic Market of Cairo: Gender, Class, and Education. London: Kegan Paul.
June: An ethnography that makes the connection between urban sociolinguistics and multilingual education
Your May reading will have been primarily concerned with linguistic variation in the city. In June, you will need to read a title that explores the consequences of linguistic diversity for educational achievement. The recommended title is an exemplary ethnography of the tensions, struggles and contradictions involved in the literacy experiences of a number of families from different backgrounds.
Li, Guofang (2010). Culturally contested literacies: America’s” rainbow underclass” and urban schools. London: Routledge.
July: A book about language, migration, education, and class
Most of the families in Culturally contested literacies have high expectations of their children’s academic achievement. However, their capacity to translate those expectations into effective support differ widely. Particularly in migration contexts, the most frequent explanation for differential settlement outcomes is ‘culture’. Guofang Li, however, shows that what really matters is material resources – class background, in other words. Therefore, in July, the challenge is to read a book that systematically explores the intersection between class and education in a transnational context. The recommended reading, by the always highly readable Pei-Chia Lan, explores how global aspirations play out in the lives of middle-class and working-class Taiwanese families at home and abroad.
Lan, Pei-Chia (2018). Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
August: A memoir by an adult who was raised bilingually as a child
Many of the Taiwanese families you will have encountered in Raising global families aspire for their children to grow up speaking English – sometimes in addition to Mandarin, sometimes instead of Mandarin. Indeed, how to raise children bilingually has become a pressing question for many families around the world. While the literature on bilingual child rearing is exploding, we know far less about the actual consequences of bilingual child rearing. Therefore, the July challenge is to read a memoir of someone who was raised bilingually.
There are two suggestions because I can’t make up my mind – both will take you into worlds that no longer exist: highly multilingual upper-class European Jewry of the early 20th century and equally multilingual upper-class Palestinians before Israel.
Canetti, Elias (1999). The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood. London: Granta.
Said, Edward W. (2000). Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta.
September: A book about multilingual governance
Whether you will have read Elias Canetti or Edward Said in August, you likely will have been struck by the fact that both men experienced languages simultaneously as bridges and as barriers. If multilingualism creates tensions and contradictions for individuals, this is even more so true for societies. Managing multilingualism in a just and equitable manner constitutes a substantial policy challenge. The reading challenge for September is therefore to read a book that explores how multilingualism is managed in different polities around the world.
Leung, Janny H. C. (2019). Shallow Equality and Symbolic Jurisprudence in Multilingual Legal Orders. New York: Oxford University Press.
October: A history of a multilingual polity
One of the big questions of Shallow Equality and Symbolic Jurisprudence in Multilingual Legal Orders is whether identity rights are more important than other public interests. Janny Leung concludes that this is not automatically the case. The October challenge is to take that argument one step further through an exploration of the history of a multilingual polity with shifting identities.
Kulczycki, John J. (2016). Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
November: A book that explains why the 2020 Language on the Move Reading Challenge is important
A number of people have asked to make this year’s reading challenge about journal articles and book chapters. Many of our readers are PhD students and university-based academics; so setting journal articles and book chapters might make sense – this is stuff we have to read anyways. The reason I have resisted the call for shorter readings is that books constitute a higher-order challenge for our brain than shorter pieces. The final challenge therefore is to read about the importance of book reading for your intellectual, aesthetic and moral life.
Wolf, Maryanne (2008). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins.
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