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Buying into English

Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World

Catherine Prendergast author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press

Published:20th May '08

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Buying into English cover

Many developing countries have little choice but to “buy into English” as a path to ideological and material betterment. Based on extensive fieldwork in Slovakia, Prendergast assembles a rich ethnographic study that records the thoughts, aspirations, and concerns of Slovak nationals, language instructors, journalists, and textbook authors who contend with the increasing importance of English to their rapidly evolving world. She reveals how the use of English in everyday life has becomes suffused with the terms of the knowledge and information economy, where language is manipulated for power and profit. Buying into English presents an astute analysis of the factors that have made English so prominent and yet so elusive, and a deconstruction of the myth of guaranteed viability for new states and economies through English.

ISBN: 9780822960010

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

192 pages