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How does language become a site of contestation? From the attention to speech on social media, discrimination and exclusion based on how people sound, the realism of ChatGPT, to debates regarding what constitutes proper and improper language in school textbooks, we seem to increasingly talk about how we talk. How do we study language in these spaces, and amidst contestation and social change? Moving between a number of different contexts, this course explores how language becomes a focal point of agreement and disagreement. Topics include the history of code-switching, language identities around the world, AI and chatbots, indigenous revitalization projects, and how language is thoroughly embedded in our understandings of gender, race, and the concept of the social “other.” Throughout the course, we will read some classic linguistic anthropology texts as well as a contemporary literature, that together provide a foundation for how to think about the role of language in our lives.