In this book, Rymes provides a stimulating proposal—an open conversation with ourselves and with ‘our students’, ‘our children, colleagues, and friends’ (187)—to develop heightened forms of language awareness of how we talk about language in locally, context-dependant, situated interactions. The aim of this is to ‘map out our uniquely human journey of talking meaning into being’ (ix) and to engage meaningfully with the ‘multiple points of view held by different people’ (56), developing a common understanding to confront social barriers and social difference.
Assuming that everyday encounters may be ‘weaponized’ (172), Rymes puts forward a series of ‘actions’ for a citizen sociolinguistics based on a radical commitment to social engagement which problematises the power of academic knowledge: it is a call to go beyond ‘programmatic approaches to critical language awareness’ (182) and to reconsider the social meanings that we attribute to language talk, as well as the mechanisms whereby we attribute them.
To these aims, Rymes takes as an exploratory unit of analysis all sorts of ephemeral talk, including public, private, institutional, and grassroots debates about language, arguing that these counterbalance ‘exclusive, unilateral, and standardized depictions of what counts as legitimate language knowledge’ (14). This everyday language talk is a window into valuing overlooked forms of language expertise. It considers ever-changing (micro) family-circulated encounters or (macro) widespread conversations that pass unnoticed, are banned, despised, embraced, and so on. Illuminating examples of these types of talk are the discussions about the pronunciation of ‘Greenwich Street’, the far-reaching consequences of statements by an American university faculty trying to control Chinese students’ lunchtime multilingual conversations, or the hate speech surrounding gender-neutral pronouns.
Rymes argues that we need to be pushed outside our ‘comfort zones’ (185), challenging academic epistemologies of what counts as ‘citizenship voice’ as well as of what counts as language, for whom, when, why, and with what consequences, trying to understand how language works for all speakers. This is a way to ‘illuminate the nuanced social value that people put on certain ways of speaking’, as they ‘see details… in language use that professionals may not have access to, or just never notice or seriously consider’ (5).
The toolkit that Rymes puts forward in order to explore acts of citizen sociolinguistics (see pp. 126–27 for a guide to getting started) is to make use of the affordances of the new information and communication technologies, ‘a treasure box of opinion’ (190). These help to historicise acts of ‘citizen wonderment’ (surprise/awe at talk about language) and/or ‘citizen's arrest’ (criticism, censoring, or erasure of given viewpoints), and to trace their genealogy and spreadability, focusing on verisimilitude, unknowability, and answerability, ‘making them more exploratory, creative, and non-judgmental’ (24).
This is an extremely useful call to think new and to try to go to the roots of how to democratise our understandings of how we talk about language from a participatory, dialoguing and non-authoritative sociolinguistics perspective. Indeed, an invitation worth considering, for anyone to become not only a citizen but a citizen sociolinguist actor.
