A young woman (Christine) travels back to her home town, after being away for ten years, to bury her mother. The funeral is also a few days before Christine's birthday. She also had strange supernatural and paranormal occurrences leading up to her travel back home and on the way there.After her mother was buried the supernatural occurrences intensified as the day of her 30th birthday neared. A rare 100-year new moon phenomenon which happens on her birthday will shed some of light o...

This single-volume guide equips students of sociolinguistics with a full set of methodological tools including data collection and analysis techniques, explained in clear and accessible terms by leading experts. It features project suggestions, troubleshooting tips, and data assessment across diverse languages.Explores an array of anthropological and scientific methods that cover the full spectrum of contemporary sociolinguistics, from the study of style and discourse analysi...

A Ms. Magazine “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2023” After a less-than-positive experience giving birth as a Black woman in the 1970s, Linda Janet Holmes launched a lifetime of work as an activist dedicated to learning about and honoring alternative birth traditions and the Black women behind them. Safe in a Midwife’s Hands brings together what Holmes has gleaned from the countless midwives who have shared with her the...

Sociolinguistics is the study of the interaction between language and society. In this classic introductory work, Janet Holmes and Nick Wilson examine the role of language in a variety of social contexts, considering both how language works and how it can be used to signal and interpret various aspects of social identity. Divided into three parts, this book explains basic sociolinguistic concepts in the light of classic approaches, as well as introducing more recent research.This s...

Margaret Charles Smith, a ninety-one-year-old Alabama midwife, has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women in rural Greene County, she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience and the traditions, pharmacopeia, and spiritual attitudes that influenced her practice. She debunks images of the complacent southern “granny” midwife and honors the determination, talent, and complexity of mid...

Significantly expanded and updated, the second edition of The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality brings together a team of the leading specialists in the field to create a comprehensive overview of key historical themes and issues, along with methodologies and cutting-edge research topics.Examines the dynamic ways that women and men develop and manage gendered identities through their talk, presenting data and case studies from interactions in a range of soci...

Fascinating answers to quirky questions about language Why is it not wrong to be doubly negative? Where do you place the stress in such words as 'dissect'? Where do 'wowser', 'craw thumper' and the 'f-word' come from? Do New Zealanders mangle the English language? Should we say different 'from' or 'to' or 'than'? We use it every day, but what is this thing called language, and are there rights and wrongs about its use? Four leading linguists, with specific interest in New...

This is the first book in the field of workplace discourse to examine the relationships among leadership, ethnicity, and language use. Taking a social constructionist approach to the ways in which leadership is enacted through discourse, Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity problematizes the concept of ethnicity and demonstrates the importance of context-particularly the community of practice-in determining what counts as relevant in the analysis of ethnicity. The authors analyse ...

Power and Politeness in the Workplace has become established as a seminal text for courses in language and professional communication.Co-authored by bestselling author Janet Holmes, this text provides insights into the way we all talk at work, including a wealth of material illustrating the way people communicate with each other in their ordinary everyday encounters in their workplaces. The analysis focuses, in particular, on how and why people "do" power and politeness in the work...

Women, Men and Politeness focuses on the specific issue of the ways in which women and men express politeness verbally.Using a range of evidence and a corpus of data collected largely from New Zealand, Janet Holmes examines the distribution and functions of a range of specific verbal politeness strategies in women's and men's speech and discusses the possible reasons for gender differences in this area. Data provided on interactional strategies, 'hedges and boosters', comp...

At long last—a book-length biography celebrates Toni Cade Bambara, a seminal literary, cultural, and political figure who was among the most widely read and frequently reviewed of the well-regarded black women writers to emerge in the 1970s.A Joyous Revolt: Toni Cade Bambara, Writer and Activist is the first-ever, full-length biography of a trailblazing artist who championed black women in her fiction as well as in her life. This incisive study provides a ...

Why do we speak the way we do? What are the social factors that influence our choices of expression? This best-selling introduction to the study of language and society encourages students to think about these fundamental questions, asking how and why we select from the vast range of different words, accents, varieties and languages available to us. In this new and updated edition, students are taken step-by-step through the analysis of linguistic expressions, speech varieties and language...