ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to language and talking in poverty. Previous chapters often needed to present all information as if what is said about poverty directly reflects a simple reality, but language is more fluid and functional than that. This chapter first discusses the common discourses in the literature around poverty, then contrasts this to the discursive repertoires and features found in the primary research. The analysis aims to provide the reader with a better, and more contextual insight into the functional reasons people getting by need to employ these ways of talking and thinking. Two discourses, with sets of repertoires (ways of speaking/metaphors/phrases), were balanced against each other: neoliberal discourse, of the hard-working poor person who does not need help and the solidarity discourse, in which people must come together in their troubles to get by. This chapter expands and fills out the discourse elements of the theoretical considerations in Chapter 5 and provides the reader with ways to reconsider and work through the tensions between these ways of talking when they present themselves in everyday life.
