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This volume includes chapters by junior and senior scholars hailing from Europe, Asia, North America, and Oceania, all of whom sought to understand the social and cultural implications surrounding how people take responsibility for the ways they speak or write in relation to a place—whether it is one they have long resided in, recently moved to, or left a long time ago.
The contributors to the volume investigate ‘responsibility’ in and through language practices as inspired by the roots of the (English) word itself: the ability to respond, or mount a response to a situation at hand. It is thus a ‘responsive’ kind of responsibility, one that focuses not only on demonstrating responsibility for language, but highlighting the various ways we respond to situations discursively and metalinguistically. This sort of responsibility is both part of individual and collectively negotiated concerns that shift as people contend with processes related to globalization.
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In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices. The articles in this volume investigate a series of locale-specific models of communicative conduct, or registers of communication, through which persons organize their participation in varied social practices, including practices of politics, religion, schooling, migration, trade, media, verbal art, and ceremonial ritual. Drawing on research traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, the authors of these articles bring together insights from a variety of scholarly disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, folklore, literary studies, and philology. They describe register models associated with a great many forms of interpersonal behavior, and, through their own multi-year and multi-disciplinary collaborative efforts, bring register phenomena into focus as features of social life in the lived experience of people in societies around the world.
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