Language and the Market

Market forces are widely acknowledged to be at the heart of globalising forces, and any consideration of how globalisation affects language and vice versa requires an in-depth examination of the relationship between languages and markets. Despite this, the disciplines of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have an uneasy relationship with markets. The hegemony of market processes and their negative outcomes has, it could be argued, become a commonsense assumption in the academic treatment of the subject. The aim of the current volume is to challenge this assumption. The book takes the market as its common starting point, and examines, in a large number of individual contributions, the sociolinguistic inputs and fall-out from market processes, using a variety of different methodological approaches and various contexts and case studies. These cases range from a call centre in India to an industrial development agency in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht, with genres ranging from Sami rap music to corporate mission statements. The book is intentionally interdisciplinary, including perspectives from management and economics, media and communications studies, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and cultural studies.

Helen Kelly-Holmes is a Lecturer in sociolinguistics with new media at the University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland. Her research interests revolve around the interrelationship between media, markets and languages, and she has published widely on all aspects of these issues. She is the author of Advertising as Multilingual Communication (Palgrave, 2005)
Gerlinde Mautner holds a chair in English Business Communication at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria. In recent publications she has explored the application of corpus linguistics in critical discourse analysis. Her current research focuses on the transfer of market-oriented discourse to other social domains.