Language, Self and Society

The main aim of this volume is to examine the role of written and spoken language in shaping people's sense of reality, the exchanges in social life and in fashioning their sense of self. It develops a socio-historical approach to these issues, offering a range of studies in the social history of language. Following a section on the history of languages such as Latin and Hebrew, it discusses the politics of language, paying special attention to dialect and the relations between the languages of the conquerors and the conquered. In the third section, the relation between forms of expression and the development of personal self-definition is examined.