Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Politics

The study of language ideologies has become a key theme in sociolinguistics over the past decade. It is the study of the relationship between representations of language, on the one hand, and broader aesthetic, economic, moral and political concerns, on the other. Research into the particular role played by media discourse in the construction, reproduction and contestation of such ideologies has been widely scattered - this book brings together this emerging field. It considers how, in an era of global communication technologies, the media - by which we understand the press, radio, television, cinema, the internet and multimodal gaming - help to disseminate preferred uses of, and ideas about, language. The book is tightly focussed on the relationship between language ideologies and media discourse, together with the methods and techniques required for the analysis of that relationship. It also places emphasis on television and new-media texts, incorporating and expanding upon recent theoretical insights into visual communication and multimodal discourse analysis. International in scope, this book will also be of interest to students from a wide range of fields including linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology), modern languages, education, media studies, communication studies and cultural theory.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1. Tommaso M. Milani & Sally Johnson (University of Leeds, UK); Part I: Standards and Standarisation in National and Global Contexts; 2. Metalinguistic discourse in and about the media: some recent trends in Greek and German prescriptivism; Spiros Moschonas (University of Athens, Greece) & Jurgen Spitzmuller (University of Zurich, Switzerland); 3. Globalising standard Spanish: the promotion of 'panhispanism' in the Spanish press, Darren Paffey (University of Southampton, UK); 4. Language games on Korean television: between globalization, nationalism and authority, Joseph Sung-Yul Park (National University of Singapore, Singapore); Part II: Planning and Policy in Media Programming; 5. Planeta Brasil: language practices and the construction of space in Brazilian TV abroad, Iris Bachmann (University of Manchester, UK); 6. Sociolinguistic practices, media politics and Greek Cypriot TV series: reproducing language ideologies, Vasiliki Georgiou (University of Southampton, UK); 7. Language ideologies and state imperatives: the strategic use of Singlish in public media discourse, Michelle M. Lazar (National University of Singapore, Singapore); Part III. Media, Ethnicity and the Racialisation of Language; 8. Lost in translation? Racialisation of a debate about language in a BBC news item, Adrian Blackledge (University of Birmingham, UK); 9. Metadiscourses of race in the news: the Celebrity Big Brother row, Bethan Davies (University of Leeds, UK); 10. Ideologising ethnolectal German, Jannis Androutsopoulos (King's College London, UK); Part IV: Language Ideologies in New-Media Commentary; 11. 'Black and white': language ideologies in computer game discourse, Astrid Ensslin (University of Bangor, Wales); 12. Whose voices? A hypermodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC 'Voices' website, Sally Johnson, Tommaso M. Milani & Clive Upton (all University of Leeds, UK); 13. 'It's not a telescope, it's a telephone': encounters with the telephone on early commercial sound recordings, Richard Bauman (Indiana University, Bloomington, USA); Commentary; 14. Monica Heller (University of Toronto, Canada); Index Bibliography.