New Books In Language

Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (Columbia UP, 2025) presents a set of keywords and concepts embedded in the languages of South Asia and its vast cultural landscape. It reiterates specific attitudes, ways of seeing and methods of doing, which are embedded in the historical and contemporary experiences in the region. The words, concepts, ideas and attitudes in the volume explore the contexts of their production and how their meanings might have changed at different historical moments. The volume also attempts to work out if these words and concepts can infuse a certain intellectual rigor to reinvent social sciences and humanities in the region and beyond. Individual essays, which are creative, imaginative, ethnographic and historical, explore the possibility of South Asian intellectual worlds and words to create a broader crossregional and global social science and humanities. The volume argues that it is important to move away from the intellectual shackles inherited from colonial and n

In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah talks to Dr. Laura Rademaker (Australian National University), the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission. The conversation explores the distinctive historical context of Australia’s Northern Territory as a location for Christian missionary activity. Tazin and Laura talk about the multiple tensions and elements involved in language interactions between monolingual English-speaking missionaries and multilingual Indigenous communities, against the background of settler colonialism. Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission was published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. About the book Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt arc

In The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India (Oxford UP, 2025), Elaine Fisher reconstructs Vīraśaiva origins from unstudied multilingual archives, overturning the conventional narrative of a monolingual Kannada bhakti movement protesting Sanskrit Brahmanism. The evidence reveals Vīraśaivism as multilingual from inception—its anti-caste inheritance deriving from Sanskrit Śaiva tradition, not rejecting it. Fisher proposes a "linguascape" model replacing unidirectional vernacularization with multidirectional flows through which local Vīraśaivisms were translated into being across south India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic. In Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape (Chelsea Green, 2026) Manchán Magan explores the enchantment, sublime beauty and sheer oddness of a 3000-year-old lexicon. Imbuing the natural world with meaning and magic, it evokes a time-honoured way of life, from its 32 separate words for a field, to terms like loisideach (a place with a lot of kneading troughs), bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), and iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at c

Around 500 BCE, the Indian scholar Pāṇini wrote a treatise on Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, describing a kind of language machine: an algebraic system of rules for producing grammatically correct word forms. The enormity and elegance of that accomplishment—and the underlying computational methodology—cemented Pāṇini’s place as a founder of linguistics. Even so, centuries of commentators have insisted that there are glitches in the machine’s ability to tackle rule conflict (that is, a situation in which two or more rules are simultaneously applicable) and have responded with complex rules and tools aimed at resolving the issues apparently besetting the ancient system. In this book we discuss Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar (Harvard UP, 2025) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In the writings of ancient Christians, the near-ubiquitous references to the "fear of God" have traditionally been seen as a generic placeholder for piety. Focusing on monastic communities in late antiquity across the eastern Mediterranean, Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism (U California Press, 2025) by Dr. Daniel Eastman An explores why the language of fear was so prevalent in their writings and how they sought to put it into practice in their daily lives. Drawing on a range of evidence, including sermons, liturgical prayers, and archaeological evidence, Dr. An explores how the languages monastics spoke, the socioeconomic settings they inhabited, and the visual spaces in which they prayed came together to shape their emotional horizons. By investigating emotions as practices embedded in the languages, cultures, and sensorial environments of late antiquity, this book offers new insights into the spiritual world of Christian monasteries. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda M

In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert calls on a particularly rich collection of primary sources, including diaries, letters, oral histories, census data, court documents, church records, and psychiatric hospital logs, all relating to Hillsborough, North Carolina, to argue that gossip and rumor were central to the formation of interpersonal relationships and an integral part of small-town life in the antebellum South. They exposed the insecurities and anxieties of the town’s inhabitants. Indeed, they served as important weapons in the power struggle between the white slaveholding elite—who tried to exert, maintain, and consolidate their control over community life—and the Black, white, and mixed-race men and women, free and enslaved, who did their best to challenge the socioeconomic status quo. And they exposed fissures in the social fabric that discretion, good manners, and historical amnesia could

In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talked with Kamran Khan about linguistics, citizenship and belonging. The conversation travelled from the 2001 Northern riots in the UK, to the Prevent policy, all the way to more recent adjustments to the Nationalities and Borders Bill. Khan is currently the director of the MOSAIC research group on multilingualism and an associate professor of language, social justice and education. He also wrote the book “Becoming a Citizen: Linguistic Trials and Negotiations in the UK”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

This textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and literary heritage. Designed for independent learners and classrooms alike, it provides a uniquely in-depth and immersive introduction to the language, exploring a rich selection of Sanskrit texts from the Buddhist tradition. Reading Sanskrit: A Complete Step-By-Step Introduction with Texts from the Buddhist Tradition (Columbia UP, 2025)draws from the Buddhist tradition’s vast Sanskrit corpus to present a thematically coherent collection of texts covering a wide range of literary genres, including narrative, philosophical, and poetic writings. This unique choice of source material provides an engaging approach to language learning, immersing the student in one of the major strands of South Asian spirituality and culture while highlighting Buddhism’s connection to other religious and literary traditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did three words come to carry the weight of America's abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Emily Winderman examines how this phrase shaped American reproductive politics and health care standards across generations. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the unexpected origins of this rhetoric in urban reform movements, showing how early associations of alleys with sanitation, morality, and criminality created lasting impressions that would later influence abortion discourse. Dr. Winderman demonstrates how "back-alley abortion" was always more than just descriptive language—it has shaped perceptions of medical legitimacy and clinical spaces. The book reveals how this phrase emerged from racialized and gendered intersections of urban planning, public health, and social reform movements before becoming a rhetoric that anticipated pre–Roe v. Wade criminalized medical encounters. After Roe, back-alley abortion molded public memory through high

The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) by Henry H. Sapoznik explores a century of Yiddish popular culture in New York City. Sapoznik--the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music fro0m Old World to Our World and a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project--tells his story through chapters on eating, architecture, music and theater. Within each chapter are shorter entries on topics as varied as knishes, cafeterias, prominent buildings, Jews and jazz, Black cantors, women cantors, and Yiddish theater. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles, the book offers fresh insights into the profound influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The guide also contains fifty images, many of which have never before been published. The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is vivid, deeply researched, and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnet

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed. Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of th

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Zoe Avery, a Worimi woman and a Research Officer at the Centre for Australian Languages within the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Zoe and her teammates are preparing the upcoming 4th National Indigenous Languages Survey. This time around, the AIATSIS team have made some really important changes to the survey design through a co-design process which we will discuss. The survey will be conducted in late 2025 to 2026 and reported upon in 2026. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in On Antisemitism: A Word in History (Penguin Press, 2025). More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former’s military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right. Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism’ and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstoo

One of the constants of Jewish history is that Jews have learned from the cultures around them. But this exchange of information was not an easy endeavor. Not only did Jews speak a different language, but their cultural touchpoints were different. If they were to learn from the people around them, their translations had to be deliberate, sometimes taking creative license of create buy in among the Jewish community. Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe (U Penn Press, 2024) by Iris Idelson-Shein explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators’ motives, and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. Through an analysis of translations hosted in t

Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound (University of California Press, 2024) explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of prerecorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century’s development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious. A fr

Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create (Litwin Books, 2025) sits at the heart of the library project, shaping how materials are described and organized and how they can be retrieved. The field has long understood that normative systems like Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress do this inadequately and worse, deploying language and categories that are rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and U.S. imperialism. In Ways of Knowing, Emily Drabinski and Amanda Belantara present unique and timely oral histories of alternative thesauri created in response to the inadequacies and biases embedded within widely adopted standards in libraries. The oral histories tell the stories behind the thesauri through the narratives of the people who created them, revealing aspects of thesauri work that ordinarily are overlooked or uncovered. The set of oral histories included in the volume document the Chicano Thesaurus, A Women’s Thesaurus, and Homosaurus. Drabinski and Belantara recorded hour-long oral his

The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail (Heresy Press, 2025) constitutes a bulwark against the persistent censorial efforts from both the political left and right. At a time when conformist pressures threaten viewpoint diversity, and when political attacks on free expression are mounting, this book is a valuable resource for all who seek to understand and defend the right that is central to both individual liberty and our democratic self-government. This concise volume is organized around 10 claims that proponents of speech restrictions regularly assert, such as: “words are violence,” “free speech is right-wing,” and “hate speech isn’t free speech.” In lively, clear, and persuasive prose, the authors examine the flaws in these pro-censorship assertions. The book also includes an insightful introduction by Jacob Mchangama, shedding additional light on the topic from historical and international perspectives. Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, New York Times best-selling author, and th

Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word – it's not always entirely clear what it means. Bitch is a chameleon. There are good bitches and bad bitches; sexy bitches and psycho bitches; boss bitches and even perfect bitches. Bitch: The Journey of a Word (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Stollznow presents an eye-opening deep-dive account that takes us on a journey spanning a millennium, from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog through to its myriad meanings today, proving that sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. It traces the colorful history and ever-changing meaning of this powerful and controversial word, and its relevance within broader issues of feminism, gender, race, and sexuality. Despite centuries of censorship and attempts to ban it, bitch has stood the test of time. You may wonder: is the word going away anytime soon? Bitch, please. This interview was condu

The American-born folklorist and musician Margaret Fay Shaw’s passion for the Hebrides led her to the island of South Uist in 1929 and then to Canna in 1935 as the wife of the eminent folklorist John Lorne Campbell. Her extraordinary work in documenting and preserving traditional Gaelic songs and customs remains a vital resource for understanding Hebridean music, and the Campbells’ house on Canna is a unique collection of priceless material celebrating the Hebridean world. This vast archive also includes Margaret's collection of still and film photography, which capture the essence of island life at a time when old traditions were vanishing. The Cadence of a Song: The Life of Margaret Fay Shaw (Birlinn, 2025) by Fiona J. Mackenzie celebrates the legacy and life of a remarkable woman, who herself wrote with such wit and flair of her travels and adventures and which took her from turn of-the-century Pennsylvania to 1920s New York, Paris, Nova Scotia and the Hebrides, where she lived until her death in 2004.