Language as Talisman

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The concept of 'Language as Talisman' is rooted in the belief that language is, in some sense extent, protective and operates as a way of averting risk and creating resilience. Members of communities believe that the way they speak to each other and the language and literacy practices they draw on, will in themselves, guarantee and shore up identity, safety and agency. The ways in which a community uses oral and written language include aspects such as dialect, accent, vocabulary, preferred genres and practices.In this study, we focus on one community, Rawmarsh in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Rawmarsh is a community that has a strong history of coal mining and steel industries. It encapsulates the concept of the 'post industrial' working class community described by Hoggart (1957) Williams (1961) and Charlesworth (2000). Rawmarsh is a rich site for literacy and language practices. This project aims to jointly understand the role of language and literacy in constructing and making sense of communities such as Rawmarsh. Partners include the Children and Young People's Service, Rotherham schools and Inspire Rotherham. We propose to produce a research review spanning a number of related fields, separate but adjacent, all of which deal with everyday language and literacy use. In parallel, and, interacting with the review, we shall develop a cross-disciplinary project on language in use with a local community in Rawmarsh. Our central focus will be the concept of language as 'talisman', an image that speaks to all the disciplines represented in the project. The perspectives represented include New Literacy Studies, Sociolinguistics, the investigation of dialect in literature and also in more popular cultural forms, as well as the intellectual history of language study itself. The New Literacy Studies uses ethnographic approaches to gain insights into everyday language and literacy practices in homes and communities (Barton & Hamilton 1998). Sociolinguistics offers tools for the fine-grained analysis of language use along with ways of conceptualizing the place of language within the social world. Looking at dialect in literature and popular culture involves examining the roles played by meta-language, 'folk-linguistic' beliefs, and perceptual phenomena such as enregisterment and indexicality in the way people orient themselves both to language and to the world through language. And bringing the tools of intellectual history to bear on language study allows for a rigorous and wide-ranging consideration of the relationships among different ways of thinking about and investigating language. Alongside, we propose to create a community study on the voices heard in the park, that reflects on the role of language and literacy as a source of resilience in everyday life, as well as develop a learning resource on language as talisman, for use in local schools. Our outputs include a Literature Review, a two page summary that draws each adjacent discipline together, a set of resources to be used with year 6 students in local schools, as well as a co-curated set of arts events in Victoria Park, Rawmarsh. Our community team includes a youth worker, the director of a community literacy initiative and an arts practitioner. Our academic team includes a researcher in the field of New Literacy Studies and ethnographic studies of community literacy practices (Dr Kate Pahl), a socio-linguist (Dr David Hyatt) an expert in the field of dialect and meta-language from English Literature (Dr Jane Hodson) and an academic interested in ideas about language (Dr Richard Steadman-Jones). In addition, an advisory group will guide the process. We have strong support from the Youth Service in Rotherham, as well as Cape UK and local schools for this project.