The concept of authenticity has received some attention in recent academic discourse, yet it has often been left under-defined from a sociolinguistic perspective. This volume presents the contributions of a wide range of scholars who exchanged their views on the topic at a conference in Freiburg, Germany, in November 2011. The authors address three leading questions: What are the local meanings of authenticity embedded in large cultural and social structures? What is the meaning of linguistic authenticity in delocalised and/or deterritorialised settings? How is authenticity indexed in other contexts of language expression (e.g. in writing or in political discourse)? These questions are tackled by recognised experts in the fields of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and contact linguistics. While by no means exhaustive, the volume offers a large array of case studies that contribute significantly to our understanding of the meaning of authenticity in language production and perception.

This book explores the discourse of authenticity on the popular social media platform YouTube. It investigates how popular users negotiate their identity and discursively portray themselves as authentic in their videos. In so doing, it adds to the development of new perspectives on social media communication and offers an outlook on issues concerning the complexities of contemporary identity practices. Starting from the premise that authenticity is a discursive construction, the study adopts a linguistics-based approach and relies on a hybrid methodological toolkit that draws on the analytical tools provided by Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS), a newly-introduced framework comprised of different but interconnected levels of description. The volume presents three case studies which investigate the discursive and rhetorical strategies used by well-known users in order to come across as authentic. Videos produced by popular content creators belonging to different communities of practice (scientists, stay-at-home mothers, and makeup artists) are explored. The analysis reveals that they share a common set of identity characteristics, a common core of authentic traits famous YouTubers conventionally display to discursively depict themselves as genuine and credible.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advances in Information Security and Its Applications, ISA 2009, held in Seoul, Korea, in June 2009. The 41 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 137 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on cryptographic algorithms, authentication and identity management, authorization and access control, biometrics and computer forensics, cryptographic protocols, data integrity and privacy, key management and recovery, mobile and RFID network security, firewall, IDs, anti-virus, and other security products, internet and web services security, cyber-attack and cyber-terrorism, other security research, together with the articles from the workshops MoWiN 2009, NASSUE 2009, IAWSN 2009, WNGS 2009 & CGMS 2009, SHCI-ISA 2009.

This is the first book-length study on how authors of color present themselves in public literary discourse. The study utilizes data obtained from and around exemplary empirical case study participants – Junot Diaz, Madeleine Thien, and Mohsin Hamid. Relevant data includes the case study authors’ Twitter usage and the impact of the digital sphere in author self-presentation. Dr Iyer employs a combined theoretical framework of discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, with an awareness of literary and creative writing studies. The theoretical approach uses four metapragmatic stereotypes regarding what constitutes an ‘authentic’ author. The theoretical approach and metapragmatic stereotype form an evaluative framework that can be applied on diverse data to replicate findings. The study originated from the author’s own exposure to prevailing literary discourse through public engagements as a writer. She became aware of the problematic nature of an author’s public self-presentation, with a requirement to ‘be yourself’. Each celebrity author of color faces a paradoxical positioning within literary discourse as a result of that requirement. Through her study, Dr Iyer sought to discover how authors of color negotiate themselves in public spheres, including digital social media platforms, in order to accomplish ‘authenticity’ discursively. This book is ideal for learners and practitioners in creative writing who are seeking strategies for self-presentation as published authors. It is also valuable for researchers in discourse analysis, including literary discourse and social media discourse, providing an empirical means of evaluating ‘authenticity’ as understood in contemporary times.

This volume showcases innovative research on dialectal, vernacular, and other forms of “oral,” speech-like writing in digital spaces. The shift from a predominantly print culture to a digital culture is shaping people's identities and relationships to one another in important ways. Using examples from distinct international contexts and language varieties (kiAmu, Lebanese, Ettounsi, Shanghai Wu, Welsh English, and varieties of American English) the authors examine how people use unexpected codes, scripts, and spellings to say something about who they are or aspire to be. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the impact of social media on language use, style, and orthography, as well as those with a broader interest in literacy, communication, language contact, and language change.

This volume provides a broad coverage of the intersection of sociolinguistic variation and language acquisition. Favoured by the current scientific context where interdisciplinarity is particularly encouraged, the chapters bring to light the complementarity between the social and cognitive approaches to language acquisition. The book integrates sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic issues by bringing together scholars who have been developing conceptions of language acquisition across the lifespan that take into account language-internal and cross-linguistic variation in contexts of both first and second language acquisition as well as of first and second dialect acquisition. The volume brings together theoretical and empirical research and provides an excellent basis for scholars and students wanting to delve into the social and cognitive dimensions of both the production and perception of sociolinguistic variation. The book enables the reader to understand, on the one hand, how variation is acquired in childhood or at a later stage and, on the other, how perception and production feed into one another, thus building up our understanding of the social meanings underpinning language variation.

This book analyses the language practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh in online and offline environments. Focusing on the diverse linguistic and cultural resources these young people draw on in their interactions, the authors draw attention to the creative and innovative nature of their transglossic practices. Situated on the Asian periphery, these young adults roam widely in their use of popular culture, media voices and linguistic resources. This innovative and topical book will appeal to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, cultural studies and linguistic anthropology.