The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people talk about language, how we can participate in those conversations, and what we can learn from them about both language and our society. Along the way, we learn that knowledge about language and its connection to social life is not primarily produced and spread by linguists or sociolinguists, or even language teachers, but through everyday conversations, on-line arguments, creative insults, music, art, memes, twitter-storms - any place language grabs people's attention and foments more talk. An essential new aid to the study of the relationship between language, culture and society, this book provides a vision for language inquiry by turning our gaze to everyday forms of language expertise.

‘In this volume, Betsy Rymes captures the advances that must be attained to democratize language use and communication: reconfigure speakers’ expertise, reinforce speakers’ agency, and create epistemic communities, in which language researchers and citizens participate to foreground local forms of expertise and to build common ground production of linguistic concepts, and ideologies.’

Luisa Martin Rojo - Professor in Linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

‘This book is for all people who care about language and are interested in it. It is definitely not intended for trained linguists only. Reading this book has been a pleasurable and worthwhile experience, and I heartily recommend it to everyone even remotely interested in the way we talk and to those who want to learn more about how to talk about language.’

Marijana Javornik Čubrić Source: LINGUIST List

‘This is an extremely useful call to think new and to try to go to the roots of how to democratise our understandings of how we talk about language from a participatory, dialoguing and non-authoritative sociolinguistics perspective. Indeed, an invitation worth considering, for anyone to become not only a citizen but a citizen sociolinguist actor.’

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau Source: Language in Society