Orthography as Social Action

Alexandra Jaffe, California State University Long Beach, USA; Jannis Androutsopoulos, University of Hamburg, Germany; Mark Sebba, Lancaster University, UK; Sally Johnson, University of Leeds, UK.

The chapters in this edited volume explore the sociolinguistic implications of orthographic and scriptural practices in a diverse range of communicative contexts, ranging from schoolrooms to internet discussion boards. The focus is on the way that scriptural practices both index and constitute social hierarchies, identities and relationships and in some cases, become the focus for public language ideological debates. Capitalizing on the now robust body of literature on orthographic choice and debate in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, the volume addresses a number of cross-cutting themes that connect orthographic practices to areas of contemporary interest in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. These themes include: the different social implications of self vs. other representation and the permeability of the personal/social and the public/private; how scriptural practices ("inscription") serve as sites for social discipline; the historical and intertextual frameworks for the meaning potentials of orthographic choice (relating to issues of genre and style); and writing as a broader semiotic field: the visual and esthetic dimensions of texts and metalinguistic "play" in spelling and its ambiguous implications for writer stance.

The series contributes to the development of promising new approaches to the sociolinguistic, sociohistorical and linguistic anthropological study of social issues that centrally involve language. In particular, while still addressing the fundamental insights gleaned from variationist studies, foremost among which is the open-ended, heterogeneous nature of human language in all its varieties, it focuses on new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, in the social and cultural study of language that go beyond the more traditional concerns of sociolinguistics (for example, social networks, communities of practice, global population movements, the historical and present-day significance of demography for situations of language contact, the spatial dimensions of language, language and ideology, new dialect formation, historical sociolinguistics). The series includes monographs as well as edited volumes.