Language, Migration and Social Inequalities

Reviews / Votes

This stimulating volume brings together classic strands of critical sociolinguistic work on how immigrants are disadvantaged in social gatekeeping institutions and the contemporary sociolinguistics of globalization. Taking a broad view of 'migrants' as sociolinguistically mobile citizens, the authors mobilize an impressive array of ideological, political and economic frameworks to explore the continuing power of institutions to confer and withhold status and opportunity as well as forms of resistance to these processes. -- Alexandra Jaffe, California State University, Long Beach, USA This major sociolinguistic contribution, with its wide-ranging and detailed ethnographic attention to the structures shaping migrant experiences of language, sheds innovative analytic light on the neoliberal regimentation of language at work, in school, and in bureaucratic processes, the commodification of language skills, and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism that shape linguistic practices and ideologies. -- Bonnie Urciuoli, Hamilton College, USA This book does a wonderful job of focusing critically on the sociolinguistics of migrant workers - the protagonists of the book - in various institutions and workplaces (or their exclusion from them). From the informal locutorios of Barcelona and Congolese la debrouille in Cape Town, to the decapitalisation of migrant students in Madrid schools and the mismatched aspirations and actual work of Japanese flight attendants, these studies focus both on local migrant sociolinguistics as well as wider social and economic orders. Making questions of the (re)production of linguistic, social and economic disparities central, this book thus provides vital insights into language, mobility and inequality. -- Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia This book contains a wealth of good scholarship and revealing critical analyses of the local ways in which social inequality is produced or contested. Each of the contributions has been very well written and the authors show a sincere commitment to learning how language issues affect people's life chances. -- Joan Pujolar, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain * Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2015-2016 (Volumes 19-20) *