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The book problematizes the concept of identity itself and the relationship between people´s sense of belonging in a community, the discourse practices that define that sense of membership, and its expression and manifestation in verbal and non-verbal behavior.

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The book brings to the fore the issue of collective identity and analyzes it from the linguistic perspective. Addressing the problem, the authors demonstrate ways in which the language we use in everyday life enables us to construct and perform in a flexible and context-bound manner the sense of our belonging in a community. They offer some rich data and present strong arguments in favor of qualitative methodologies for research in the field. Drawing on numerous interactional settings, and amongst different communities, the contributors shed new light on how our language practices and non-verbal behaviors mold our collective identities.

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Collective identity - Japan - immigrant - deaf - testimony - move analysis - narrative - place-attachment - Shi´i women - Malaysian English - Robert Stevenson - Scots - nursing - client change - Intersubjectivity - diary - metaphor - psychotherapy - third space - CEFR - sign language - personality - grammaticalization - Spain - musician - Daily Mail - social media

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Kamila Ciepiela is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Lódz, Poland. Her research interests span issues of the self and identity and how the two are embedded and realized in different discourse practices. She is the initiator of the biennial conference series ¯Personal Identity through a Language Lens.®

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