TY - CHAP
T1 - Linguistic practices, social identities and sports
AU - Madsen, Lian Malai
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - Research combining an interest in linguistic practices, social identities and sport has a relatively short history, but sport has for a while been treated as a topic worth serious attention in social research, notably by sociologists such as Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. Their social theories have been highly influential within the sociology of sports and its development as a scientific field, and the work of both scholars points to close connections between sport and more general societal dynamics. Elias (Elias and Dunning 1986) describes how the development of sport has been related to the emergence of the modern state and part of the civilising process connected to this, and Bourdieu (1978) reflects on how sports function as practices of social class distinction as well as on the construction of sport as a particular social and scientific field. Since the 1990s, constructions and negotiations of social identities have received increasing attention within the sociology of sports (MacClancy 1996; Maguire 1999; Harris and Parker 2009), and various studies focus on how people perform and ascribe individual and collective identities through their sports practice, affiliation and/or consumption. The role language plays in these sport-related identity processes, however, has been less of a concern until more recently (e.g. Lavric et al. 2008; Fuller 2006; Halone and Meân 2010; Madsen 2015; Ringbom 2012), although sport has become a potentially significant sociolinguistic research site with the current prominent focus on language, identities and globalisation which often attends to popular culture as well as transnational interest communities and networks.
AB - Research combining an interest in linguistic practices, social identities and sport has a relatively short history, but sport has for a while been treated as a topic worth serious attention in social research, notably by sociologists such as Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. Their social theories have been highly influential within the sociology of sports and its development as a scientific field, and the work of both scholars points to close connections between sport and more general societal dynamics. Elias (Elias and Dunning 1986) describes how the development of sport has been related to the emergence of the modern state and part of the civilising process connected to this, and Bourdieu (1978) reflects on how sports function as practices of social class distinction as well as on the construction of sport as a particular social and scientific field. Since the 1990s, constructions and negotiations of social identities have received increasing attention within the sociology of sports (MacClancy 1996; Maguire 1999; Harris and Parker 2009), and various studies focus on how people perform and ascribe individual and collective identities through their sports practice, affiliation and/or consumption. The role language plays in these sport-related identity processes, however, has been less of a concern until more recently (e.g. Lavric et al. 2008; Fuller 2006; Halone and Meân 2010; Madsen 2015; Ringbom 2012), although sport has become a potentially significant sociolinguistic research site with the current prominent focus on language, identities and globalisation which often attends to popular culture as well as transnational interest communities and networks.
M3 - Book chapter
SN - 9781138905092
T3 - Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics
SP - 241
EP - 253
BT - Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity
PB - Routledge
CY - Abingdon
ER -