Bücher der Reihe Language Play and Creativity

In this book, disparate approaches are brought together, demonstrating that a number of phenomena whose similarities might not have been immediately recognized have an academic home under the umbrella of language play and linguistic creativity, and making a unique contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon.

This book focuses on the unexplored context of contemporary Swedish comic strips as sites of innovative linguistic practices, where humor is derived from language play and creativity, often drawing from English and other European languages as well as social and regional dialects of Swedish. The overall purpose of the book is to highlight linguistic playfulness in Swedish comic strips, as an example of practices as yet unobserved and unaccounted for in theories of linguistic humor as applied to comics scholarship.The book familiarizes the reader with the Swedish language and linguistic culture as well as contemporary Swedish comic strips, with chapters focusing on specific strategies of language play and linguistic humor, such as mocking Swedish dialects and Swedish-accented foreign language usage, invoking English language popular culture, swearing in multiple languages, and turn-final code-switching to English to signal the punchline.The book will appeal to readers interested in humor, comics, or how linguistic innovation, language play, and language contact each can further the modern development of language, exemplified by the case of Swedish.

The Language Play and Creativity series publishes monographs and edited collections on the topic of language play and linguistic creativity. It provides a forum for broad, interdisciplinary perspectives on questions including, but not limited to the role of, or relationship between, language play and first or second language development, formulaic vs. creative language use, memory and cognition, linguistic diversity and multilingualism, language change, identities, language education, and intercultural communication. The series welcomes work conducted from a variety of research perspectives in order to address cognitive, social, and applied issues involved in language play and linguistic creativity.