Business of Words

<p><em>The Business of Words</em> examines the practices of ‘high-end’ language workers or wordsmiths where we find words being professionally designed institutionally managed and inevitably objectified for status and profit.</p><p>Aligned with existing work on language and political economy in critical sociolinguistics and discourse studies the volume offers a novel complementary insight into the relatively elite practices of language workers such as advertisers dialect coaches publishers judges translators public relations officers fine artists journalists and linguists themselves. In fact the book considers what academics might learn about language from other wordsmiths opening a space for ‘dialogue’ between those researching language and those who also stake a claim to linguistic expertise and a way with words.</p><p>Bringing together an array of leading international scholars from the cognate fields of discourse studies sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology this book is an essential resource for researchers advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of English language linguistics and applied linguistics communication and media studies and anthropology.</p>