Ben Rampton
Biographic Data
| ID | 140272 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Rampton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Rampton |
| SIGNATURE | BEN RAMPTON |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2437-1944 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1040 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Localising linguistic citizenship in England
What's the relevance of ‘Linguistic Citizenship' (LC), a concept developed in southern Africa, to language education in England? LC is committed to democratic participation and voice, to linguistic diversity and the value of sociolinguistic understanding (Stroud 2001), and it provides a framework for contesting linguistic conditions in England, where vernacular multilingualism faces monolingual language education policies and an officially ‘hosti…
Existential challenges and interactional sociolinguistics/linguistic ethnography
Sociolinguistics, memory studies, and the dynamics of interdisciplinarity
This article uses a dialogue between memory studies (MS) and ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics (EIS) to explore the dynamics of interdisciplinarity. MS focuses on the social remembering of high-profile and often traumatic events, and this is relevant to EIS's growing interest in (in)securitization. MS is increasingly keen to explore everyday practices of remembering in interscalar analyses, and EIS' expertise in the study of mundane…
Hegemony, social class and stylisation
Focusing on issues of class identity, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and Raymond Williams’ view of hegemony as “relations of domination and subordination... [that saturate] the whole process of living...: Our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world” (1977: 109-110). It assesses the kinds of insight afforded in both variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, and then…
International relations, sociolinguistics and the ‘everyday’
Focusing on the role that language and language education can play in peace-building, this paper examines everyday practice through the lens of linguistic ethnography. It investigates Greek Cypriot teenagers learning Turkish, the language of the (former) enemy, and it asks: how were the Turkish language’s associations with violent conflict handled in the practices and institutional organisation of schooling, and how far and in what ways can we sa…
Jan Blommaert and the use of sociolinguistics
On 7 January 2021, Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a ten-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic, and there have been a great many very moving personal accounts of how much Jan meant to the people he interacted with. I knew and worked with him for over twenty-five years, and during his protracted illness, for me and for a lot of others, it was good to be able to tell him directly how much I owed him. Bu…
Crossing
Crossing involves the use of a language or variety that feels anomalously “other” for the participants in an activity, involving movement across quite sharply sensed social or ethnic boundaries, in ways that can raise questions of legitimacy. It has been widely described in multi‐ethnic neighborhoods, as well in the popular culture and mass and new media, and it requires detailed interactional sociolinguistic analysis. Crossing differs from styli…
Everyday Surveillance, Goffman, and Unfocused Interaction
It is often said that surveillance has massively transformed our social lives (Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball 2012: 1), but this claim is weakened by the admission that its “effects are difficult to isolate or observe, as they are embedded within many normal aspects of daily life.” Picking up this analytic challenge, this paper investigates the everyday interactional practice and experience of being surveilled. To do so, it draws on Goffman’s account o…
Sociolinguistics and everyday (in)securitization
ThisJournal of Sociolinguisticsdialogue starts from the perception that existential threats to national security have become an increasingly pervasive concern in daily life, spreading fear and suspicion through civil society. Communicative practices play a central role in these processes of (in)securitization, but sociolinguists appear to have paid them less attention than they deserve. So in what follows, six researchers discuss the significance…
Closing questions
Epilogue
Written from the Global North, this paper offers an account of the interactional sociolinguistic underpinnings of research on language crossing, discusses the five papers in this special issue, and sets them both within the broader context of North/South knowledge production
Crossing of a different kind
This study of language crossing moves away from the scenes of multi-ethnic heteroglossia that have dominated the research, and turns instead to a setting affected by major conflict where the language of the traditional enemy has been introduced to secondary schools as part of a reconciliation initiative. This generates a radically different view of crossing and the environment in which it emerges: schooling counts more than popular culture; inter…
Security and Language Policy
This chapter draws critical security studies into the investigation of language policy for two reasons. First, it provides informative commentary on how the concept of security is being reconfigured, with developments in digital technology, large-scale population movements, and the privatisation of public services. Second, it is increasingly attentive to how geopolitics permeates the everyday. Accordingly, critical security studies can generate c…
Breaking classroom silences
This paper addresses potentially problematic classroom episodes in which someone foregrounds a social division that is normally taken for granted. It illustrates the way in which linguistic ethnography can unpack the layered processes that collide in the breaking of silence, showing how linguistic form and practice, individual positioning, local institutional history and national education policy development all count, and it discusses the value …
Text trajectories in a multilingual call centre
Call centres have been widely criticised as standardised workplaces, and the imposition of calling scripts is often characterised as dehumanising and deskilling. But these accounts lack close analysis of how scripts are actually produced, taken up, and used by call-centre workers, and they are generally locked into dualistic analyses of control and resistance. In contrast, this article combines long-term ethnography with transcontextual analysis …
Language and Superdiversity
This paper explores the scope for research on language and super-diversity.12 Following a protracted process of paradigm shift, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are well placed to engage with the contemporary social changes associated with super-diversity. After a brief introductory discussion of what super-diversity entails, the paper outlines key theoretical and methodological developments in language study: named languages have now…
Theory and Method in Linguistic Ethnography
This chapter provides a sketch of the assumptions, values, frameworks and techniques that currently characterise linguistic ethnography. In keeping with the dynamic that makes it a productive and appealing perspective, we ground our account in a series of historical, institutional and/or methodological encounters, looking at the questions and possibilities that these interactions generate. So we consider the relationships between: linguistics and…
De-securitizing Turkish
This article explores the fit between orthodox ideas about intercultural language education and situations of acute insecurity. It describes the teaching of Turkish to Greek-Cypriots, introduced in 2003 by the Republic of Cyprus as part of a de-securitization policy. Although these classes were optional, many students regarded Turks as enemies, and after documenting hostility itself as one motive for learning Turkish, we describe three teaching s…
Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialisation
This paper begins in Section 1 by noting two processes that have been generally overlooked in sociolinguistics. Firstly, the prevailing approaches to ethnicity have tended to neglect the processes through which individuals can either adopt someone else's ethnicity, or get together with them and create a new one. Secondly, socialization in sociolinguistics is most commonly seen as enculturation into an ingroup, not as a process of learning to like…
Crossing
A neo-Hymesian trajectory in applied linguistics
Rather than attempting a panoramic overview, this paper looks at knowledge construction in applied linguistics through the prism of a piece of data. It follows the analysis of this data into an academic argument, into a research training programme, and into professional development materials for teachers, and it argues that this empirically driven trajectory finds coherence in Hymes' writing on linguistic and ethnography
From 'Multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia' to 'Contemporary urban vernaculars
Style contrasts, migration and social class
Social class and sociolinguistics
Crossing, Ethnicity and Code-Switching
Crossing
Language in Late Modernity
The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out in an inner-city high school. Through his vivid analysis of classroom talk, he offers answers to some important questions: does social class still count for young people, or is it in demise? Are t…
Styling the Other
Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom
This paper describes the development of 'linguistic ethnography' in Britain over the last 5-15 years. British anthropology tends to overlook language, and instead, the U.K. Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF) has emerged from socio- and applied linguistics, bringing together a number of formative traditions (inter alia, Interactional Sociolinguistics, New Literacy Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis). The career paths and the institutional pos…
The Idealised Native Speaker, Reified Ethnicities, and Classroom Realities
TESOL practice in the schooling sector in England has implicitly assumed that ESL students are linguistic and social outsiders and that there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between ethnicity and language. This perspective has tended to conceptualise L2 learners as a linguistically diverse group (from non-English-speaking backgrounds) but with similar language learning needs. However, demographic and social changes in the past 30 years have r…
Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialisation
This paper begins in Section 1 by noting two processes that have been generally overlooked in sociolinguistics. Firstly, the prevailing approaches to ethnicity have tended to neglect the processes through which individuals can either adopt someone else's ethnicity, or get together with them and create a new one. Secondly, socialization in sociolinguistics is most commonly seen as enculturation into an ingroup, not as a process of learning to like…
Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization
As Coupland and others show, Bauman's account of "performance" provides a valuable perspective on speech stylization across a range of public contexts. This article explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylization in everyday practice, and although recognizing other frames as well, it dwells on Goffman's interaction ritual, cross-referring to two studies of adolescents in England. In the first, race and ethnicity we…
Ethics, advocacy and empowerment
Deutsch in Inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language
There has been a remarkable neglect of instructed foreign languages in sociolinguistics, and this can be attributed to a traditionally 'reflectionist' view of the relationship between language and social structure, to a preoccupation with the home-school interface, and to the dominance of what Bernstein (1996) calls the 'social logic of competence'. In combination, these concerns provide little scope for seeing how the value and social indexicali…
From 'Multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia' to 'Contemporary urban vernaculars
Critique in Interaction
This article looks at issues of critique from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistic (IS) discourse analysis. Using a small case study of the ways in which social class is both reproduced and problematized in the speech of inner London adolescents, it elaborates on the tensions between 'behavioural' and 'established ideology' that lie at the heart of IS research, and points to the changing intellectual environment in which the assessmen…
Sociolinguistics and everyday (in)securitization
ThisJournal of Sociolinguisticsdialogue starts from the perception that existential threats to national security have become an increasingly pervasive concern in daily life, spreading fear and suspicion through civil society. Communicative practices play a central role in these processes of (in)securitization, but sociolinguists appear to have paid them less attention than they deserve. So in what follows, six researchers discuss the significance…
Style contrasts, migration and social class
Sociolinguistics and cultural studies
With the emergence of 'new ethnicities' as its central empirical focus, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistic discourse analysis on the one hand, and research on youth in cultural studies, anthropology and sociology on the other. After a brief sketch of some major trends in the study of youth, the paper focuses on recent European work on inter-ethnic processes among young people in urban neighbourhoods, and it notes the way…
Crossing
Retuning in applied linguistics
What do we now mean by the term ‘applied linguistics’? Can we provide a coherent characterisation that says it's more than simply all and anything that isn't ‘autonomous’/‘core’? Should we even try? Nik Coupland's paper, “Language, ageing and ageism: a project for applied linguistics?”, provides a focus for reflection on this issue, and the present paper serves as an introduction, setting up some of the context for the subsequent discussion. As i…
Text trajectories in a multilingual call centre
Call centres have been widely criticised as standardised workplaces, and the imposition of calling scripts is often characterised as dehumanising and deskilling. But these accounts lack close analysis of how scripts are actually produced, taken up, and used by call-centre workers, and they are generally locked into dualistic analyses of control and resistance. In contrast, this article combines long-term ethnography with transcontextual analysis …
Ritual and foreign language practices at school
This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly in a foreign language class, and then using the language to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teacher's pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons provided symbolic and socio-emotional material that students subsequently inverted in a set of micro-rit…
Creole Metaphors in Cultural Analysis
It is sometimes suggested that creole language study provides important concepts and metaphors for the analysis of cultural processes within globalization and transnational flow. This article argues, however, that although it may have served as a useful heuristic in certain cases, most of creole linguistics has been grounded in a set of assumptions and procedures that now look increasingly doubtful, both within linguistics and anthropology more g…
Discourse and Critique
International relations, sociolinguistics and the ‘everyday’
Focusing on the role that language and language education can play in peace-building, this paper examines everyday practice through the lens of linguistic ethnography. It investigates Greek Cypriot teenagers learning Turkish, the language of the (former) enemy, and it asks: how were the Turkish language’s associations with violent conflict handled in the practices and institutional organisation of schooling, and how far and in what ways can we sa…
Breaking classroom silences
This paper addresses potentially problematic classroom episodes in which someone foregrounds a social division that is normally taken for granted. It illustrates the way in which linguistic ethnography can unpack the layered processes that collide in the breaking of silence, showing how linguistic form and practice, individual positioning, local institutional history and national education policy development all count, and it discusses the value …
Everyday Surveillance, Goffman, and Unfocused Interaction
It is often said that surveillance has massively transformed our social lives (Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball 2012: 1), but this claim is weakened by the admission that its “effects are difficult to isolate or observe, as they are embedded within many normal aspects of daily life.” Picking up this analytic challenge, this paper investigates the everyday interactional practice and experience of being surveilled. To do so, it draws on Goffman’s account o…
Disciplinary mixing
Sociolinguistics, memory studies, and the dynamics of interdisciplinarity
This article uses a dialogue between memory studies (MS) and ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics (EIS) to explore the dynamics of interdisciplinarity. MS focuses on the social remembering of high-profile and often traumatic events, and this is relevant to EIS's growing interest in (in)securitization. MS is increasingly keen to explore everyday practices of remembering in interscalar analyses, and EIS' expertise in the study of mundane…
Reply to comments
Ethics, advocacy and empowerment
Politics and Change in Research in Applied Linguistics
This paper begins by noting the way in which social processes, sociology, anthropology, and media studies recently seem to have replaced pedagogy, linguistics, and psychology as the major preoccupations in British applied linguistics (AL) To try to make sense of this shift, it first borrows Street's (1984) notions of ‘autonomous’ and ‘ideological’ models of literacy and extends them to other branches of applied linguistics It then tries to situat…
Retuning in applied linguistics
What do we now mean by the term ‘applied linguistics’? Can we provide a coherent characterisation that says it's more than simply all and anything that isn't ‘autonomous’/‘core’? Should we even try? Nik Coupland's paper, “Language, ageing and ageism: a project for applied linguistics?”, provides a focus for reflection on this issue, and the present paper serves as an introduction, setting up some of the context for the subsequent discussion. As i…
Crossing
The Idealised Native Speaker, Reified Ethnicities, and Classroom Realities
TESOL practice in the schooling sector in England has implicitly assumed that ESL students are linguistic and social outsiders and that there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between ethnicity and language. This perspective has tended to conceptualise L2 learners as a linguistically diverse group (from non-English-speaking backgrounds) but with similar language learning needs. However, demographic and social changes in the past 30 years have r…
Problems with an orchestral view of applied linguistics
Dichotomies, difference, and ritual in second language learning and teaching
This article questions the distinction between 'natural' and 'instructed' language learning. It first of all introduces two extracts in which adolescents use Panjabi as a second language in peer group recreation, and then shows how these contradict orthodox images of natural acquisition and classroom learning. But rather than simply dismissing the dichotomy as empirical fantasy, its important role as an ideology of language is recognized, and the…
Accents, Ebonics, and Crossing
English With an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents
Sociolinguistics and cultural studies
With the emergence of 'new ethnicities' as its central empirical focus, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistic discourse analysis on the one hand, and research on youth in cultural studies, anthropology and sociology on the other. After a brief sketch of some major trends in the study of youth, the paper focuses on recent European work on inter-ethnic processes among young people in urban neighbourhoods, and it notes the way…
Deutsch in Inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language
There has been a remarkable neglect of instructed foreign languages in sociolinguistics, and this can be attributed to a traditionally 'reflectionist' view of the relationship between language and social structure, to a preoccupation with the home-school interface, and to the dominance of what Bernstein (1996) calls the 'social logic of competence'. In combination, these concerns provide little scope for seeing how the value and social indexicali…
Styling the Other
Crossing
Crossing
Volume 5 This is a new and enlarged edition of Ben Rampton's ground-breaking study of sociolinguistic processes in urban youth culture. It focuses on language crossing - the use of Panjabi by adolescents of African-Caribbean and Anglo descent, the use of Creole by adolescents with Panjabi and Anglo backgrounds, and the use of stylized Indian English. Its central question is: how far and in what ways do these intricate processes of language sharin…
Critique in Interaction
This article looks at issues of critique from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistic (IS) discourse analysis. Using a small case study of the ways in which social class is both reproduced and problematized in the speech of inner London adolescents, it elaborates on the tensions between 'behavioural' and 'established ideology' that lie at the heart of IS research, and points to the changing intellectual environment in which the assessmen…
Discourse and Critique
Methodology in the Analysis of Classroom Discourse
This paper considers the ethnography of communication, conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics as frameworks for the analysis of classroom discourse. It discusses their basic assumptions, some of the similarities and differences between them, and their different strengths and weaknesses as resources for applied linguistic problem-solving. The empirical case-studies offered by Duff, Mori, Young and Nguyen provide our point of dep…
Ritual and foreign language practices at school
This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly in a foreign language class, and then using the language to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teacher's pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons provided symbolic and socio-emotional material that students subsequently inverted in a set of micro-rit…
Creole Metaphors in Cultural Analysis
It is sometimes suggested that creole language study provides important concepts and metaphors for the analysis of cultural processes within globalization and transnational flow. This article argues, however, that although it may have served as a useful heuristic in certain cases, most of creole linguistics has been grounded in a set of assumptions and procedures that now look increasingly doubtful, both within linguistics and anthropology more g…
Language in Late Modernity
The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out in an inner-city high school. Through his vivid analysis of classroom talk, he offers answers to some important questions: does social class still count for young people, or is it in demise? Are t…
Language and Ethnicity at School
L'article commence par quelques réflexions sur les manières dont une notion souvent associée à l'ethnicité - celle de « communauté langagière » - a été récemment déplacée vers les notions d'« idéologies langagières » et « communautés de pratiques ». Nous interrogeons la priorité que les sociolinguistes ont traditionnellement accordée à l'héritage linguistique et à la socialisation familiale, suggérant que, au lieu de considérer cette importance c…
Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom
This paper describes the development of 'linguistic ethnography' in Britain over the last 5-15 years. British anthropology tends to overlook language, and instead, the U.K. Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF) has emerged from socio- and applied linguistics, bringing together a number of formative traditions (inter alia, Interactional Sociolinguistics, New Literacy Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis). The career paths and the institutional pos…
Disciplinary mixing
Crossing, Ethnicity and Code-Switching
Speech Community and Beyond
Multilingual Education and Policy (42 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Linguistics (35 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (25 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (18 works) · Sociolinguistics (17 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · Computer Science (15 works)