Orthography as social action : scripts, spelling, identity and power / edited by Alexandra Jaffe [and others].

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Chapter 1. Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power / Mark Sebba ---- Chapter 2. Orthography, publics and legitimation crisis: The 1996 reform of German / Sally Johnson ---- Chapter 3. Orthography and Orthodoxy in post-Soviet Russia / Brian Bennett ---- Chapter 4. Reclamation, revalorization and re-Tatarization via changing Tatar orthographies / Suzanne Wertheim ---- Chapter 5. Hindi is perfect, Urdu is messy: the discourse of delegitimation of Urdu in India / Rizwan Ahmad ---- Chapter 6. Spelling and identity in the Southern Netherlands (1750-1830) / Rik Vosters, Gijsbert Rutten, Marijke van derWal and Wim Vandenbussche ---- Chapter 7. Orthography as literacy: how Manx was "reduced to writing" / Mark Sebba ---- Chapter 8. Orthography as practice: a Pennsylvania German case study / Jennifer Schlegel ---- Chapter 9. Transcription in practice: nonstandard orthography / Alexandra Jaffe ---- Chapter 10. Orthography and calligraphic ideology in an Iranian American heritage school / Amir Sharifi ---- Chapter 11. Floating ideologies: Metamorphoses of graphic "Germanness" / Jurgen Spitzmuller ---- Chapter 12. Whos punctuating what? Sociolinguistic variation in instant messaging / Lauren Squires ---- Chapter 13. How to spell the vernacular: a multivariate study of Jamaican e-mails and blogs / Lars Hinrichs ---- Chapter 14. "Greeklish": Transliteration practice and discourse in the context of computer-mediated digraphia / Jannis Androutsopoulos.

The chapters in this edited volume explore the sociolinguistic implications of orthographic and scriptural practices in a diverse range of communicative contexts, ranging from schoolrooms to internet discussion boards. The focus is on the way that scriptural practices both index and constitute social hierarchies, identities and relationships and in some cases, become the focus for public language ideological debates. Capitalizing on the now robust body of literature on orthographic choice and debate in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, the volume addresses a number of cross-cutting themes that connect orthographic practices to areas of contemporary interest in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. These themes include: the different social implications of self vs. other representation and the permeability of the personal/social and the public/private; how scriptural practices ("inscription") serve as sites for social discipline; the historical and intertextual frameworks for the meaning potentials of orthographic choice (relating to issues of genre and style); and writing as a broader semiotic field: the visual and esthetic dimensions of texts and metalinguistic "play" in spelling and its ambiguous implications for writer stance. -- Publisher description.