Maria Rieder

University of Limerick | UL · School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics

This volume follows on from The Lesser-Known Varieties of English (Cambridge University Press, 2010), by documenting a further range of varieties that have been overlooked and understudied. It explores varieties spoken by small groups of people in remote regions as diverse as Malta, Bermuda, the Netherlands Antilles, Brazil, the Cook Islands, and P...

This chapter continues the review of research and discussion of key features of economic news and how economic ideas and practices are shaped by the media. The focus falls on communication channels and the various ways in which language is used to construct certain perceptions of society and the economy. In particular, it introduces social semiotic...

Chapter 6 at first introduces the design of the empirical study (research agenda, approach, and methods adopted) of newspaper coverage of economic inequality in four countries. It describes the key selections and methods which defined the corpus of empirical materials at the heart of the authors’ original primary research. It then provides a summar...

This chapter presents an analysis of the corpus of newspaper articles focused on how news media engage with themes and issues related to redistribution policies. One frequently posed question in this context concerns the feasibility and effectiveness of enhanced redistribution policies. Another set of questions concern the scope, role, and optimal...

Despite the rediscovery of the inequality topic by economists and other social scientists in recent times, relatively little is known about how economic inequality is mediated to the wider public. That is precisely where this book steps in: it examines how mainstream news media discuss, respond to, and engage with such important trends. The book ad...

There is considerable evidence that suitable preparation for the Erasmus experience can make a significant difference to students. Often, however, institutions have to battle to provide in-depth pre-departure training, and re-entry events or training are too seldom available. Following Erasmus there is rarely space in the curriculum of the home uni...

The continued rise of socio-economic inequality over the past decades with its connected political outcomes such as the Brexit vote in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump are currently a matter of intense debate both in academia and in journalism. One significant sign of the heightened interest was the surprise popularity of Thomas Piketty’s C...

The issue of socio-economic inequality has after many decades of benign neglect, in both the academy and journalism, become an increasingly important question. The economic crisis, beginning in 2007/2008 and followed by years of austerity has exasperated class and regional division. There have been numerous socio-economic and political outcomes fro...

This chapter explores the significance of folk-linguistic descriptions of the contextual use of Cant and what they tell us about the community’s self-understanding in society. Starting with both older and young participants’ descriptions of communicative settings and the domain for Cant use the chapter seeks to understand the continuities and disco...

This chapter examines the various ways in which the participants construct themselves as members of their community in midst or in the aftermath of substantial changes and developments, particularly as members of certain age and gender groups through narratives and identity statements. The chapter begins with a section on memories of cultural and l...

Continuing the folk linguistic exploration of Cant, this chapter discusses naming practices and definitions of Cant. As with Cant contextual descriptions, the participants’ names for their language as well as ideologies of languageness and definition of Cant are shown to be closely linked to their perceptions of social reality. The chapter therefor...

The conclusion reflects on the benefits as well as limitations of folk-linguistic and ethnographic research in relation to the Irish Traveller language. It highlights key aspects of what was learned from speakers’ descriptions about their linguistic repertoire, its history, and its present-day use and how these signify stances, experiences, and att...

This chapter presents the Irish Traveller community and their linguistic repertoire as the focus of the book and points out the objectives of the study. The chapter starts by providing a brief summary of recent political developments around the community’s ethnic recognition and situates them in a wider context of nomadic groups. After discussing w...

This book explores the Irish Traveller community through an ethnographic and folk linguistic lens. It sheds new light on Irish Traveller language, commonly referred to as Gammon or Cant, an integral part of the community’s cultural heritage that has long been viewed as a form of secret code. The author addresses Travellers’ metalinguistic and ideol...

This article argues that Irish Travellers’ ideologies of languageness and their definition of Cant are closely linked to their perceptions of social reality. Cant is a communicative code which Travellers use beside English in Traveller-specific situations. Based on the analysis of focus groups, I take a folk-linguistic and anthropological approach...

The question of how Cant speakers experience the relationship between English, Irish, and Cant is explored in Chapter 5. Following the call for a decolonisation of sociolinguistics and for challenging notions of knowledge and expertise (Albury 2017), a first section presents data on the participants’ beliefs in regard to the structural properties o...

This chapter sets the social and cultural context in which the folk-linguistic analysis of the following chapters is embedded. Here, the author critically examines, at first, aspects of oral history of the Irish Travellers’ origin, history, and past relationships with the non-Traveller community, and how these accounts relate to dominant and instit...

The Irish Traveller community is a minority group that has very much held on to their traditional lifestyle, customs, and values in the mid of mainstream settled Irish society. Nevertheless, the community had to go through substantial cultural, economic, and social changes in the course of the last century. These changes have naturally had an impac...