Singular and Plural Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia
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Biographical note
Kathryn Woolard is a linguistic anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Woolard is author of Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia (Stanford 1989, reissued 2015) and co-editor of Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (Oxford, 1998) and Language and Publics (St. Jerome 2001; Routledge 2014). She is past president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Singular and Plural Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia
This book is remarkable for its clarity of theory, the crystalline writing style, the beautiful use of vast amounts of quite different sorts of evidence, the way it draws the reader in with humor and irony and the careful politics of analysis. These qualities, I have found, make it an exemplary resource for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. I love to teach this book because it teaches all the right things.
Susan Gal, Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Chicago
ReadingSingular and Pluralis a singular opportunity to follow a historical trajectory of the politics of a minority language over three decades of research that couples the study of public language, policy, and practice ... with compelling accounts of the lived experience of language in the lives of speakers over time. ... I am absolutely sure that it will become a foundational text for future research in many currents of scholarship focused on bilingual practices and politics in situations of contact and conflict....this complex, nuanced, and analytically sophisticated account of continuity and change in the political landscape of Catalan is rendered in clear and elegant style; it is simply a pleasure to read on every level.
Anthropology News
This book conveys a (professional) lifetime of research on the politics of language in Catalonia as well as [Woolard's] specific way of deploying the model of 'linguistic ideologies' that she and her colleagues developed through a number of seminal works in the early 1990s. ...The review of [the] language debates is impressive: extensive, detailed and up to date virtually until the book was printed. ... The result is a nuanced critique of processes that are complex and contradictory, with a wealth of information that has no equal on the matter (including in publications in Catalan or Spanish).
Journal of Sociolinguistics
This book is remarkable for its clarity of theory, the crystalline writing style, the beautiful use of vast amounts of quite different sorts of evidence, the way it draws the reader in with humor and irony and the careful politics of analysis. These qualities, I have found, make it an exemplary resource for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. I love to teach this book because it teaches all the right things.
Susan Gal, Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Chicago
ReadingSingular and Pluralis a singular opportunity to follow a historical trajectory of the politics of a minority language over three decades of research that couples the study of public language, policy, and practice ... with compelling accounts of the lived experience of language in the lives of speakers over time. ... I am absolutely sure that it will become a foundational text for future research in many currents of scholarship focused on bilingual practices and politics in situations of contact and conflict....this complex, nuanced, and analytically sophisticated account of continuity and change in the political landscape of Catalan is rendered in clear and elegant style; it is simply a pleasure to read on every level.
Anthropology News
This book conveys a (professional) lifetime of research on the politics of language in Catalonia as well as [Woolard's] specific way of deploying the model of 'linguistic ideologies' that she and her colleagues developed through a number of seminal works in the early 1990s. ...The review of [the] language debates is impressive: extensive, detailed and up to date virtually until the book was printed. ... The result is a nuanced critique of processes that are complex and contradictory, with a wealth of information that has no equal on the matter (including in publications in Catalan or Spanish).
Journal of Sociolinguistics