book notice: Language Anxiety: Machan

[Harold Schiffman]

Language Anxiety: Machan

Title: Language Anxiety
Subtitle: Conflict and Change in the History of English
Published: 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
                http://www.oup.com/us

Book URL: http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199232123

Author: Tim William Machan
Abstract:

This book looks at the ever-present anxieties associated with language
change. Focusing on English from Alfred the Great to the present, Tim
Machan offers a fresh perspective on the history of language. He reveals
amusing and sometimes disconcerting aspects of our linguistic and social
behavior and suggests that anxiety about language has sometimes allowed us
to avoid the issues we really find disturbing: when speakers of English
worry over grammar, sounds, or words the real source of their anxiety is
often not language at all but issues like immigration or social instability.

Drawing on an array of evidence from archives, literature, history,
polemics, and the press, as well as centuries of legislation, Tim Machan
uncovers the perennial nature of concerns about the poverty and purity of
English. There has never been a time, he shows, when we weren't worried
about the corruption of language and its apparent connections with
educational standards, the morality of youth, the integrity of society, and
the identity of our nations. This is a fascinating story, told here in
consummate fashion, combining insight and anecdote, and learning with wit -
a book for everyone interested in languages and the people who speak them.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-3597.html

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