AMERICAN journalist Robert Lane Greene’s much appreciated book, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, explores why language, ours as well as other people’s, moves some of us to anxiety or even rage. His central thesis or argument is —claims people most often make about ‘their’ specific language, or what we hear about language, are mostly essentially about the politics of identity and establishing the hegemony of a dominant linguistic group over others.
The book was added to my ‘to read’ list. . .
