Writing in Changing Social Contexts: Creating the genre of language journalism

Language journalism is a genre of writing which has emerged out of creative nonfiction over the past few decades. While the usefulness of genre classification has been debated in literary studies, a linguistic perspective sees genre, and the social contexts genres exist within, as essential in text creation. This paper discusses how language journalism has emerged as a result of how writers have responded to the changing social context of the past half century. Noam Chomsky and his influence in the field of linguistics and the status of English as a global language are used to illustrate the social contexts from which language journalism has emerged due to the ways writers have responded to these changing circumstances.