This series creates a space for innovative scholarship examining the ways language functions as a powerful meaning-making resource for constructing identities, managing relationships and building communities. Grounded in new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, and engaging a diverse range of communicative and textual practices, the series embraces work from variationist sociolinguistics through to discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics. Monographs and edited volumes are welcomed, as is any work that explicitly situates language in its political, economic and cultural contexts, and/or intersects with other modes of communication such as visual images, material culture, space/place, and nonverbal communication.

The current series was conceived in 2015, but it actually emerged from two earlier book series also published by De Gruyter Mouton. Founded in 1999 by Richard Watts and Monica Heller as Language, Power and Social Process, the series ran until 2011 although Monica had stepped down in 2008. From 2011, the series continued under the new name Language and Social Processes, with David Britain joining Richard Watts as editor. When Richard stepped down at the end of 2014, Crispin Thurlow joined David as editor; this is when David and Crispin worked together on updating the series with an expanded, more contemporary scope and a more fitting title: Language and Social Life.

To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

Using Taiwan as a case study, this book constructs an innovative theory of a political sociology of language. Through documentary and ethnographic data and a comparative-historical method the book illustrates how language mediates interactions between society and the state and becomes politicized as a result; how language, politics and power are intertwined processes; and how these processes are not isolated in institutions but socially embedded.