Ben Rampton

King's College London | KCL · Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication

Britain and Ireland are home to a rich array of spoken and signed languages and dialects. Language is ever evolving, in its diversity, and in the number and the backgrounds of its speakers, and so, too, are the tools and methods used for researching language. Now in its third edition, this book brings together a team of experts to provide cutting-e...

What's the relevance of ‘Linguistic Citizenship' (LC), a concept developed in southern Africa, to language education in England? LC is committed to democratic participation and voice, to linguistic diversity and the value of sociolinguistic understanding (Stroud 2001), and it provides a framework for contesting linguistic conditions in England, whe...

On 7 January 2021, Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a ten-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic, and there have been a great many very moving personal accounts of how much Jan meant to the people he interacted with. I knew and worked with him for over twenty-five years, and during his protracted illness,...

Focusing on the role that language and language education can play in peace-building, this paper examines everyday practice through the lens of linguistic ethnography. It investigates Greek Cypriot teenagers learning Turkish, the language of the (former) enemy, and it asks: how were the Turkish language’s associations with violent conflict handled...

This collection sketches the use of the term rapport within the fields of anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Rather than leave the term uncritiqued or simply conceptualized as a type of positive social relationship that needs to be formed between researcher and consultant before research can...

Crossing involves the use of a language or variety that feels anomalously “other” for the participants in an activity, involving movement across quite sharply sensed social or ethnic boundaries, in ways that can raise questions of legitimacy. It has been widely described in multi‐ethnic neighborhoods, as well in the popular culture and mass and new...

It is often said that surveillance has massively transformed our social lives (Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball 2012: 1), but this claim is weakened by the admission that its “effects are difficult to isolate or observe, as they are embedded within many normal aspects of daily life.” Picking up this analytic challenge, this paper investigates the everyday...

This Journal of Sociolinguistics dialogue starts from the perception that existential threats to national security have become an increasingly pervasive concern in daily life, spreading fear and suspicion through civil society. Communicative practices play a central role in these processes of (in)securitization, but sociolinguists appear to have pa...

Written from the Global North, this paper offers an account of the interactional sociolinguistic underpinnings of research on language crossing, discusses the five papers in this special issue, and sets them both within the broader context of North/South knowledge production.

This study of language crossing moves away from the scenes of multi-ethnic heteroglossia that have dominated the research, and turns instead to a setting affected by major conflict where the language of the traditional enemy has been introduced to secondary schools as part of a reconciliation initiative. This generates a radically different view of...

Ethnography and ethnographic methods have increasingly become a feature of social inquiry in general, and sociolinguistics in particular (e.g. Ang, 1996; Bailey, 2007; Blommaert, 2013; Bucholtz & Hall, 2008; Clifford, 1986; Eckert, 2000; Johnstone, 2000; Rampton, 1995, 2007, 2008; Wei, 1994). The concept of rapport often accompanied this ethnograph...

The focus on ‘unimportant’ language in this collection is driven by major contemporary questions. In conditions of superdiversity, the old binaries—minority/majority, migrant/host etc.—can no longer account for the splits and alignments emerging in globalised environments and in response, social scientists have turned their attention to informal pr...

Research on stylisation and language crossing often underlines the agency of speakers, but how do these practices fit into larger systems and structures? Drawing on two substantial datasets, this chapter focuses on two pairs of contrasting styles—posh and Cockney, and Creole and Asian English—and its account of stylisation connects the ways that Br...

This chapter treats class as a fundamental source and sign of inequality in the contemporary world and its historical precursors. Drawing upon sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research, which demonstrates that language use is a highly sensitive index of social inequality and the prejudices that flow therefrom, we examine the interacti...

The focus on 'unimportant' language in this collection is driven by major contemporary questions. In conditions of superdiversity, the old binaries-minority/majority, migrant/host etc. -can no longer account for the splits and alignments emerging in globalised environments and in response, social scientists have turned their attention to informal p...

Call centres have been widely criticised as standardised workplaces, and the imposition of calling scripts is often characterised as dehumanising and deskilling. But these accounts lack close analysis of how scripts are actually produced, taken up, and used by call-centre workers, and they are generally locked into dualistic analyses of control and...

Sociolinguistics is a dynamic field of research that explains the role and function of language in social life. This book offers the most substantial account available of the core contemporary ideas and arguments in sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on innovation and change. Bringing together original writing by more than twenty of the field's mos...

This paper addresses potentially problematic classroom episodes in which someone foregrounds a social division that is normally taken for granted. It illustrates the way in which linguistic ethnography can unpack the layered processes that collide in the breaking of silence, showing how linguistic form and practice, individual positioning, local in...

This article explores the fit between orthodox ideas about intercultural language education and situations of acute insecurity. It describes the teaching of Turkish to Greek-Cypriots, introduced in 2003 by the Republic of Cyprus as part of a de-securitization policy. Although these classes were optional, many students regarded Turks as enemies, and...

The language of young people is central in sociolinguistic research, as it is seen to be innovative and a primary source of knowledge about linguistic change and the role of language. This volume brings together a team of leading scholars to explore and compare linguistic practices of young people in multilingual urban spaces, with analyses ranging...

This chapter provides a sketch of the assumptions, values, frameworks and techniques that currently characterise linguistic ethnography. In keeping with the dynamic that makes it a productive and appealing perspective, we ground our account in a series of historical, institutional and/or methodological encounters, looking at the questions and possi...

As Coupland and others show, Bauman’s account of ‘performance’ provides a valuable perspective on speech stylisation across a range of public contexts. However, this chapter explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylisation in everyday practice, and although recognising other frames as well, it dwells instead on Goffma...

A long-standing challenge in quantitative sociolinguistic analysis is identifying fine speaker meanings in interaction while retaining the ability to draw wider group comparisons. To bridge these goals, we propose a methodology for quantitative discourse analysis. In data from the Punjabi community in London, we initially find comparable group rate...

This article analyses the styles of English produced by an adult migrant who started to speak the language later in life, and it approaches them from the perspective of quantitative style-shifting and discursive stylization. After defining style and the procedures needed to justify the term ‘L2,’ the study describes the focal informant's diasporic...

Rather than attempting a panoramic overview, this paper looks at knowledge construction in applied linguistics through the prism of a piece of data. It follows the analysis of this data into an academic argument, into a research training programme, and into professional development materials for teachers, and it argues that this empirically driven...

This chapter examines the relation between language learning and intercultural communication by exploring the interface of language, identity and culture in conflict-ridden contexts. Focusing on languages associated with interethnic animosity, it aims to identify the challenges to established theories of language and culture teaching presented by c...

Research on crossing and stylisation among young people in multi-ethnic urban areas of Britain during the 1980s and 1990s pointed to the emergence of new ethnicities with social class underpinnings, and these mixed language practices have now been a feature of the urban landscape for at least 30years. But how far are they confined to youth? Are the...

Research on stylisation and language crossing often underlines the agency of speakers, but how do these practices fit into larger systems and structures? Drawing on two substantial datasets, this paper focuses on two pairs of contrasting styles – posh and Cockney, and Creole and Asian English – and its account of stylisation connects the ways that...

This commentary initially addresses Hymes's uncompromising scrutiny of the institutions of research, ceaselessly setting there alongside the people and processes that academics study. Turning then to the articles in this collection, it links this critical reflexivity to ethnopoetics as a project in the recovery of voices encrypted in the scholarly...

As Coupland and others show, Bauman’s account of “performance” provides a valuable perspective on speech stylization across a range of public contexts. This article explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylization in everyday practice, and although recognizing other frames as well, it dwells on Goffman’s interaction r...

What can the close study of everyday interactional life in a multi-ethnic urban setting reveal to us about contemporary ethnicity? Both in public debate and social science research over the last 50 years or so in the UK, the discussion of race and ethnicity has centred on conflict, discrimination, racism/anti-racism, equal opportunities policies an...

This article is based on sociolinguistic research on multilingual adolescent friendship groups in England. It first describes some of the ways in which youngsters made use of one another's languages. It then discusses the relationship between this ‘language crossing’ and racism, suggesting that these processes of linguistic exchange point to the em...

In Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s, a number of researchers committed to countering racism argued that during the previous decade, anti-racism had been too doctrinaire, and that instead, it was essential to listen carefully to what people actually say and do in their everyday lives. The work I shall describe in this article follows this line, b...

This paper describes the development of ‘linguistic ethnography’ in Britain over the last 5–15 years. British anthropology tends to overlook language, and instead, the U.K. Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF) has emerged from socio- and applied linguistics, bringing together a number of formative traditions (inter alia, Interactional Sociolinguistic...

This chapter charts deteriorating state school provision for speakers of languages other than English in the years between 1984, when the first edition of Language in the British Isles was published, and 2002. It focusses primarily on England and it addresses the teaching of English as a second/additional language (ESL/EAL) as well as the teaching...

What do we now mean by the term ‘applied linguistics’? Can we provide a coherent characterisation that says it's more than simply all and anything that isn't ‘autonomous’/‘core’? Should we even try? Nik Coupland's paper, “Language, ageing and ageism: a project for applied linguistics?”, provides a focus for reflection on this issue, and the present...

This chapter provides an overview of linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, two closely related perspectives on communication, and in order to develop an account of their relevance to 'real world issues', it discusses their contribution to the study of 'identity'. Both in research and public debate, identity is a major focus of...

Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics.

This broadly-drawn paper tries to avoid a reductive analysis of ethnolinguistic processes. It begins which some reflections on the ways in which a notion often closely tied to ethnicity – “speech community” – has been displaced in recent years by research on “language ideologies” and “communities of practice”, and it raises questions about the prio...

The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out in an inner-city high school. Through his vivid analysis of classroom talk, he offers answers to...

This important volume on the critical pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Critical pedagogies are instructional approaches aimed at transforming existing social relations in the interest of greater equity in schools and communities. This paperback edition on the...

Abstract 1 Focusing on issues of class identity, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and Raymond Williams’ view of hegemony as “relations of domination and subordination… [that saturate] the whole process of living…: Our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world” (1977: 109-110)....

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This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly in a foreign language class, and then using the language to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teacher's pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons...

This paper considers the ethnography of communication, conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics as frameworks for the analysis of classroom discourse. It discusses their basic assumptions, some of the similarities and differences between them, and their different strengths and weaknesses as resources for applied linguistic problem&...

■ It is sometimes suggested that creole language study provides important concepts and metaphors for the analysis of cultural processes within globalization and transnational flow. This article argues, however, that although it may have served as a useful heuristic in certain cases, most of creole linguistics has been grounded in a set of assumptio...

This article looks at issues of critique from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistic (IS) discourse analysis. Using a small case study of the ways in which social class is both reproduced and problematized in the speech of inner London adolescents, it elaborates on the tensions between ???behavioural??? and ???established ideology??? that...

With the emergence of ‘new ethnicities’ as its central empirical focus, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistic discourse analysis on the one hand, and research on youth in cultural studies, anthropology and sociology on the other. After a brief sketch of some major trends in the study of youth, the paper focuses on recent Euro...

There has been a remarkable neglect of instructed foreign languages in sociolinguistics, and this can be attributed to a traditionally ‘reflectionist’ view of the relationship between language and social structure, to a preoccupation with the home-school interface, and to the dominance of what Bernstein (1996) calls the ‘social logic of competence’...

This article questions the distinction between 'natural' and 'instructed' language learning. It first of all introduces two extracts in which adolescents use Panjabi as a second language in peer group recreation, and then shows how these contradict orthodox images of natural acquisition and classroom learning. But rather than simply dismissing the...

TESOL practice in the schooling sector in England has implicitly assumed that ESL students are linguistic and social outsiders and that there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between ethnicity and language. This perspective has tended to conceptualise L2 learners as a linguistically diverse group (from non-English-speaking backgrounds) but with...

This paper first describes the way in which fluent vernacular English-speaking adolescents of South Asian descent made strategic use of Indian English, and it compares this with the classic accounts of Asian-Anglo intercultural communication in interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, Roberts & Jupp 1979; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b). It identifies both c...

A great deal has happened in the study and understanding of multilingualism in England since it was last considered in ARAL (Reid 1985). To examine these changes, this review will concentrate on the dynamic and contested relationships among 1) educational policy, 2) academic discourse, and 3) everyday sociolinguistic practice. Our account is limite...

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventio...

This article focuses on interethnic interactions in which adolescents of Asian descent put on strong Indian English accents when addressing Anglo teachers and adults, and it discusses the extent to which these code switchings constitute acts of resistance within a racist society. The article recognises the ambiguity in the relationship between resi...

LANGUAGE CROSSING AND THE PROBLEMATISATION OF ETHNICITY AND SOCIALISATION Ben Rampton This paper begins in Section 1 by noting two processes that have been generally overlooked in sociolinguistics. Firstly, the prevailing approaches to ethnicity have tended to neglect the processes through which individuals can either adopt someone else's ethnicity...

This paper begins by noting the way in which social processes, sociology, anthropology, and media studies recently seem to have replaced pedagogy, linguistics, and psychology as the major preoccupations in British applied linguistics (AL) To try to make sense of this shift, it first borrows Street's (1984) notions of ‘autonomous’ and ‘ideological’...

Discusses "Researching Language," a full-length study dealing with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics. The discussion asks whether the balance of power between researchers and research subjects can be altered. (VWL)

Several sociologists have noted the emergence of syncretic multiracial youth cultures in Britain and addressed its political significance. Most discussion has focused on Afro-Caribbean influences, but this article considers Asian involvement by analyzing the use of Panjabi by black and white adolescents in a mixed peer group. Informant reports sugg...