The Business of Words

Book excerpt: The Business of Words 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. 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. 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.