Liquid Languages
Constructing Languages in Late Modern Cultures of Diffusion

Focusing on the Caribbean, this book shows how languages come into being in social discourse, institutional practices and material culture.

Britta Schneider (Author)

9781009249874, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 August 2025

294 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.1 cm, 0.57 kg

'Polycentric, non-hegemonic sociolinguistic worlds deserve the rich, close-up view that Britta Schneider's study of Belize provides. This is an eye-opening look at multiplex language ideologies and indexicalities, a timely counterweight to much standard-centric research.' Susan Gal, Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Chicago

Which ideas about language are prevalent in cultures that are not framed in Western nationalist and literate traditions? How do people conceptualise language if speakers of the same community are multilingual, have access to different language resources and only partially share ideas about what is right and wrong in language? This book explores the 'liquid' properties of language, highlighting how languages, as discursive-material assemblages, can differ in their degree of fixity. It provides a linguistic anthropological study of the language ideologies in Belize, where ethnic belonging and language practice do not necessarily match and where stable language norms are not always considered a value. Scrutinising ethnographic data and examinations of local performances of English, it shows that languages emerge in relation to belonging, prestige and material culture. Bringing to the fore liquid language cultures, it provides important additions to our understanding of late modern language assemblages in a globalising world.

1. Liquid languages: studying languages under conditions of complexity
2. Constructing languages, constructing social life: linguistic anthropological, sociolinguistic, and posthumanist perspectives on languages as discourse constructs
3. Language ideologies and the Creole context
4. Insights into language ideologies, methodological steps and analytical approaches
5. A diverse Caribbean island: historical, social, and linguistic perspectives on a Belizean village
6. Language ideologies of belonging
7. Language ideologies of prestige
8. Material language culture between ideologies of fixity and resistance
9. Public English: syntactical, phonetic, and prosodic variation in a formal genre
10. Liquid languages – languages as socio-material processes in a polycentric world.

Subject Areas: Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]