Language and Happiness – Paperback

This book asks how happiness and its expressions relate to language use at both the personal and the societal level. Starting with macro themes and proceeding through demographic questions of age, race, gender and socio-economic status to individual differences such as notions of self-efficacy, anxiety, identity, the author explores how happiness is projected in language use and communication, how language use and happiness correlate in different settings and contexts, and whether ‘happy’ people use more positive language. Addressing existential questions such as how empathy, altruism, well-being, emotional intelligence (or prosody) and trust relate to happiness, and whether perceptions of issues such as freedom of speech and language rights manifest in language use around happiness, the book draws on fields such as happiness psychology, positioning theory, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and communication studies.