Overview

Since the earliest days of our species, technology and language have evolved in parallel. This book examines the processes and products of this age-old relationship: a phenomenon we’re calling technolingualism -- the mutually influential relationship between language and technology. One the one hand, as humans advance technology to master, control, and change the world around us, our language adapts. More sophisticated social-cultural practices give rise to new patterns of linguistic communication. Language changes in its vocabulary, structures, social conventions, and ideologies. Conversely—and this side of the story has been widely overlooked—the unique features of human language can influence a technology’s physical forms and technical processes. Technolingualism explores the fascinating ways, past and present, by which language and technology have informed each other’s development. The book reveals important corollaries about the universal nature of language and, most importantly, what it means to be human. From our first babbling noises to the ends of our lives, we are innately attuned to the technologies around us, and our language reflects this. We are, all of us, technolinguals.

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9781472578358

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Reviews

The book does a good job at identifying trends in relationships between language and technology historically ... [It] is written in a very conversational and accessible style and fits within the scope of much of the literature on the history of literacy. A good audience for this book would be undergraduates or non-linguists who are unfamiliar with technology and its relationship to language. * LINGUIST List *

Author Information

James Pfrehm is Associate Professor at Ithaca College, USA

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