This book looks at language in unexpected places. Through a series of personal and narrative accounts, it explores aspects of travel, mobility and locality to ask how languages, cultures and people turn up in unexpected places. What renders the unexpected so and how might we challenge our lines of expectation?

This book looks at language in unexpected places. Drawing on a diversity of materials and contexts, including farewell addresses to British workers in colonial India, letters written from parents to their children at home, a Cornish anthem sung in South Australia, a country fair in rural Australia, and a cricket match played in the middle of the 19th century in south India, this book explores many current concerns around language, mobility and place, including native speakers, generic forms, and language maintenance. Using a series of narrative accounts – from a journey to southern India to eating cheese in China, from playing soccer in Germany to observing a student teacher in Sydney – this book asks how it is that language, people and cultures turn up unexpectedly and how our lines of expectation are formed.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Retracing Routes: Manjari Seeds and Nutmeg Trees

Chapter 2 Turning up in Unexpected Places

Chapter 3 Through Others’ Eyes and Thinking Otherwise

Chapter 4 Constrained Mobilities: Epistolary Parenting

Chapter 5 Resourceful Speakers

Chapter 6 Elephant Tracks

Chapter 7 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackboard

Chapter 8 Beyond the Boundaries of Expectation