The Language of Pop Culture (LPC) edited by Valentin Werner is a collection of quality articles that aims to raise awareness in LPC as a domain of linguistics research. Through showcasing relevant methods of analysis, this book provides useful examples for both language researchers and educators. This volume comprises five parts and an epilogue.

Part I: Context consists of two important chapters that form the backbone of this volume. Werner, its editor, sets the scene in chapter 1 by asserting that ‘the language of pop culture (LPC) represents an understudied subject area – both in general and in linguistics as an empirical scholarly discipline’ (p. 3). The author contextualises the linguistic study of LPC, providing an in-depth discussion on the distinction between pop culture (PC) and popular culture and arriving at a working definition for this volume. Werner also outlines the previous research and methodologies used in LPC, and presents arguments supporting the application of PC in foreign language teaching.

Trotta's chapter 2 argues that an adequate study of LPC should both look into linguistic aspects as well as its nature and impact on humanities, and ‘explore . . . LPC not only as linguistic data but also as the study of language that is embedded in the larger processes of representation and dissemination via the many forms of PC we experience every day.’ (p. 29) The author notes that LPC, when presented in studies, is generally not the core element of inquiry, but included among examples of other lexicogrammatical and discourse focuses. To facilitate the discussion of LPC, he introduces various definitions of PC, and presents three concepts for the study of LPC: mutual feedback, Social Cognitive Theory, and representation. He discusses the difference between mediated and mediatized language (ML) and compares LPC and ML.

Chapters 3 and 4 make up Part II: Comics. In chapter 3, Walshe explores the multilingualism/linguicism, which is the ‘perpetuating monolingual, [A]nglocentric prejudices and negative stereotyping of other languages and their speakers’ (Bleichenbacher, Reference Bleichenbacher2007, as cited in Walshein in that chapter). He first compares research findings from Bleichenbacher's film corpus with those in the author's comic corpus, then utilises an adapted version of Bleichenbacher's (Reference Bleichenbacher2007: 12) matrix of four different communicative situations to analyse Marvel Comics, focusing on how comic authors and illustrators handle multilingual situations (i.e., the presence of non-English speeches) in comics. These strategies include elimination, signalisation, evocation, and presence.

Chapter 4 looks into the linguistic aspect of the discourse in web comics. Bramlett explores the interconnections between the main comic strip, the alt-text (i.e., the content of an image if it fails to load on a website), and the hidden comic (i.e., a comic that appears via a mouseover event or an extra mouse click). The author's demonstration provides an additional methodological approach for researchers of web comics.

Chapters 5 and 6 form Part III: Music and Lyrics. In chapter 5, Westphal adopts an ethnographic approach to the investigation of German reggae subculture and the spread of Jamaican Creole in PC. The author analyses a wide range of multimodal resources at an outdoor reggae event in Germany, including the performances, lyrics, artists’ accents, the event's space, the language use of the German performers, and the audience. He concludes that both the linguistic and non-linguistic signs (e.g., Jamaican Creole, popular Jamaican music, clothing, hairstyles, body language) are ‘collective[ly] transported through global reggae subculture and function as meaningful resources to perform a subcultural style and identity’ (p. 109).

Chapter 6 looks into British perceptions towards the American accent in general, and in music and performance through an explorative sociolinguistic approach. Jansen conducted an e-survey in 2013 in which a total of 14 female and seven male British students or staff members of the University of Hull participated. Using content analysis methods on the small data, she finds negative evaluations appearing more often than positive ones toward the American accent in general, as well as gender differences in terms of accent loyalty. It has also been suggested that Americanised singing style may be perceived as the default mode.

The two chapters in Part IV: TV and Movies utilise very different mixed-methods approaches. Chapter 7 compares linguistic features in corpora of scripts, transcripts and subtitles from the movie Ghostbusters (1984) as well as using Biber's (Reference Biber1988) Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) to show differences in five dimension scores of self-made transcriptions, downloaded subtitles and DVD subtitles of the same 32 movies. Pinto finds that (post-)production scripts are less reliable than transcripts and subtitles, while also noting that the statistical differences between the transcription and subtitle corpora are minimal for MDA studies.

In chapter 8, Schubert investigates verbal humor functioning as satire or comic relief in crime drama series, namely Dexter, Breaking Bad, and House of Cards. Adopting a cognitive-linguistic approach with a mix of Blending Theory, the Semantic Script Theory of Humor, and the General Theory of Verbal Humor, the author analyses all humorous scenes in a total of 39 TV episodes from the three series (mostly the first seasons) and highlights prototypical examples for the readers. These includes humor in domains of sexuality, crime, disease, and death. He concludes that Blending Theory is preferred when humor is construed through individual lexical items, while General Theory of Verbal Humor is best when humor occurs in longer conversations with multiple turns.

Part V: Pop Meets EFL consists of chapters 9, 10, and 11. Chapter 9 argues for the application of pop songs for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Through a corpus analysis approach, Summer investigates linguistic features (i.e., parts of speech counts) and content of a 3,331-word corpus she compiles using lyrics of popular English songs from charts in Germany. While the part in which the author considers gotta and wanna as innovative grammatical patterns is debatable, she provides numerous strong arguments for the use of pop songs in TEFL and the proposed song task generator model offers a useful checklist for the development of song-based teaching tasks.

Continuing on the topic of song lyrics and pedagogy, Bértoli begins chapter 10 by performing corpus linguistics analysis on a one-million-word corpus compiled from 6,290 songs between 1940–2009. The analysis follows steps from Biber's (Reference Biber1988) MDA, which includes a factor analysis of the grammar components found in the corpus into three factors/dimensions: persuasion, interaction, and narrative concerns. The author also considers three semantic dimensions for song lyrics: personal action, emotion and society, and musical reference. In the next part of the chapter, she discusses the development of two song-based EFL classroom activities based on the dimensional distributions of the selected songs.

Bruti's chapter 11 presents a case study on the (im)politeness in the TV series The Young Pope and how this can inform the teaching of pragmatics. The author applies a mix of corpus-driven and character-based analysis on a compiled transcript corpus, using the British National Corpus Spoken. Although the sizes of the transcript collection/corpus and the reference corpus of TV series, as well as the source of the reference corpus, are not mentioned, quantitative analysis has been carried out and a trend in the pope's speech (i.e., presence of deontic modality and a lack of impoliteness) is observed. Bruti then performs qualitative analysis on a selection of impolite interactions between the pope and another character in the first episode of the series, and suggests how these instances can be used in teaching advanced EFL learners.

The book ends with an Epilogue chapter titled Analyzing Pop Culture by Bednarek, who provides a summary of the similarities and differences in every chapter of this volume using her framework of three perspectives (Bednarek, Reference Bednarek2015): processes of creation, product/outcome, and consumption (e.g., audience practices). Using a topology by Bednarek and Caple (Reference Bednarek and Caple2014, Reference Bednarek and Caple2017) for increased transparency and reflexivity in research, she categorises all studies with respect to two intersecting clines: the intertextual-intratextual cline, and the intersemiotic-intrasemiotic cline. She reveals limitations of the studies in the book, noting that most chapters focus on the outcome/product but rarely on processes of creation or consumption, and that most empirical chapters are intertextual and/or intrasemiotic. Thus, she calls for ‘multimethodological and multitheoretical perspectives’ (e.g., Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis, triangulation) as an alternative approach to generating more comprehensive research. The chapter ends with several fundamental questions regarding the definition of LPC as food for thought for readers.

Limitation-wise, Bednarek's macro-analysis precisely reveals possible issues. However, I should add that, for chapters which provide pedagogical implications, the barrier to entry may be too high for most teachers, i.e., from corpus compilation, cleaning, tagging, categorising, corpus analysis to activities/material development. Collaborations between researchers and teachers on PC projects may bring mutual benefits. Home video/online games are also exciting PC sources worthy of linguistic and pedagogical research (Law, Reference Law2021).

Overall, this volume covers a wide range of PC sources and methodological approaches, so much so that there is something for every PC researcher. It is an excellent reference for postgraduates and early-career scholars who are in search of creative ideas for research, and a loud call on the linguistics community to pay serious attention to the study of PC.