This book explores the history of Pittsburghese, the language of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area as it is imagined and used by Pittsburghers. Pittburghese is linked to local identity so strongly that it is alluded to almost every time people talk about what Pittsburgh is like, or what it means to be a Pittsburgher. But what happened during the second half of the 20th century to reshape a largely unnoticed way of speaking into this highly visible urban "dialect"? In this book, sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone focuses on this question. Treating Pittsburghese as a cultural product of talk, writing, and other forms of social practice, Johnstone shows how non-standard pronunciations, words, and bits of grammar used in the Pittsburgh area were taken up into a repertoire of words and phrases and a vocal style that has become one of the most resonant symbols of local identity in the United States today.

Few conversational topics can be as significant as our troubles in life, whether everyday and commonplace, or more exceptional and disturbing. In groundbreaking research conducted with John Lee at the University of Manchester UK, Gail Jefferson turned the microscope on how people talk about their troubles, not in any professional or therapeutic setting, but in their ordinary conversations with family and friends. Through recordings of interactions in which people talk about problems they're having with their children, concerns about their health, financial problems, marital and relationship difficulties (their own or other people's), examination failures, dramatic events such as burglaries or a house fire and other such troubles, Jefferson explores the interactional dynamics and complexities of introducing such topics, of how speakers sustain and elaborate their descriptions and accounts of their troubles, how participants align and affiliate with one another, and finally manage to move away from such topics. The studies Jefferson published out of that remarkable period of research have been collected together in this volume. They are as insightful and informative about how we talk about our troubles, as they are innovative in the development and application of Conversation Analysis. Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) was one of the co-founders of Conversation Analysis (CA); through her early collaboration with Harvey Sacks and in her subsequent research, she laid the foundations for what has become an immensely important interdisciplinary paradigm. She co-authored, with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, two of the most highly cited articles ever published in Language, on turn-taking and repair. These papers were foundational, as was the transcription system that she developed and that is used by conversation analysts world-wide. Her research papers were a distinctive and original voice in the emerging micro-analysis of interaction in everyday life.

Across scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries like female versus male and gay versus straight have been problematized as a symbol of the stigmatization and erasure of non-normative subjects and practices. The chapters in Queer Excursions offer a series of distinct perspectives on these binaries, as well as on a number of other, less immediately apparent dichotomies that nevertheless permeate the gendered and sexual lives of speakers. Several chapters focus on the limiting or misleading qualities of binaristic analyses, while others suggest that binaries are a crucial component of social meaning within particular communities of study. Rather than simply accepting binary structures as inevitable, or discarding them from our analyses entirely based on their oppressive or reductionary qualities, this volume advocates for a re-theorization of the binary that affords more complex and contextually-grounded engagement with speakers' own orientations to dichotomous systems. It is from this perspective that contributors identify a number of diverging conceptualizations of binaries, including those that are non-mutually exclusive, those that liberate in the same moment that they constrain, those that are imposed implicitly by researchers, and those that re-contextualize familiar divisions with innovative meanings. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on locally salient linguistic practices that help constitute gender and sexuality in marginalized communities. As a collection, Queer Excursions argues that researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that our own preconceptions about binary social structures will be shared by the communities we study.

This accessible textbook offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in societies around the world. It is written for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics. It combines text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems.
In Part One Patrick Stevenson invites readers to investigate and reflect on issues about the status and function of the German language in relation to its speakers and to speakers of other languages with which it comes into contact. In Part Two the focus shifts to the forms and functions of individual features of the language. This involves, for example, identifying features of regional speech forms, analysing similarities and differences between written and spoken German, or looking at the 'social meaning' underlying different forms of address. Part Three explores the relationship between the German language and the nature of 'Germanness'. It concentrates on people's attitudes towards the language, the ways in which it is changing, and their views on what it represents for them.
Features and benefits of using this book:
* Comprehensive: provides the basis for a typical one-semester course
* Informative and practical: combines a review of current themes with graded exercises and relevant reading, plus an index of terms
* Topical and contemporary: deals with current situations with the most up-to-date information
* Has a workbook character: encourages students to think and work for themselves.
Patrick Stevenson is a lecturer in German in the School of Modern Languages, Southampton University.

In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity, musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques strategies that are currently employed to support endangered musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat. Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued diversity of our global musical traditions.

Multilingual encounters have been commonplace in many types of institutions, and have become an essential part of supranational institutions such as the EU since their inception. This volume explores and discusses different ways of researching the discursive dimension of these encounters, and critically examines their relevance to policy, politics and society as a whole. This includes institutions at the local, regional and supranational level. Multilingualism in institutions is currently often seen as an obstacle rather than an opportunity, at least with respect to European public and private spheres. The volume asks: - exactly how is multilingualism conceptualized and talked about in different institutions? - how do different institutions 'deal' with multilingualism, both internally and externally? - what are the policy making rules and challenges for the future for various institutions with respect to multilingualism?

Sociocultural research has long recognized the necessity of sustained interpersonal interaction for language development. However, less is known about the underlying relationships that promote language acquisition and their relevance for language classrooms. Presenting cutting-edge research on social networks and their applications in language teaching, this book explores the relationships that mediate language learning in and out of classrooms. Highlighting the complexity of language in multilingual contexts, chapters engage social network analysis to understand the role of instructional practices, socialization, motivation, language status, online communications technology, and language policies in the development of social resources for language learning. Discussing popular language teaching frameworks such as translanguaging, Social Networks in Language Learning and Language Teaching provides a nuanced account of the influences of social context on language learning, exploring classroom applications and pointing the way to a robust research agenda.

This book presents an exploration of the relationship between language ideologies and media discourse, together with the methods and techniques required for the analysis of this relationship. The study of language ideologies has become a key theme in sociolinguistics over the past decade. It is the study of the relationship between representations of language, on the one hand, and broader aesthetic, economic, moral and political concerns, on the other. Research into the particular role played by media discourse in the construction, reproduction and contestation of such ideologies has been widely scattered - this book brings together this emerging field. It considers how, in an era of global communication technologies, the media - by which we understand the press, radio, television, cinema, the internet and multimodal gaming - help to disseminate preferred uses of, and ideas about, language. The book is tightly focussed on the relationship between language ideologies and media discourse, together with the methods and techniques required for the analysis of that relationship. It also places emphasis on television and new-media texts, incorporating and expanding upon recent theoretical insights into visual communication and multimodal discourse analysis. International in scope, this book will also be of interest to students from a wide range of fields including linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology), modern languages, education, media studies, communication studies and cultural theory. "The Advances in Sociolinguistics" series seeks to provide a snapshot of the current diversity of the field of sociolinguistics and the blurring of the boundaries between sociolinguistics and other domains of study concerned with the role of language in society.

"Through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that combines critical sociolinguistic ethnography, multi-modality, reflexivity, and discourse analysis, this groundbreaking book reveals the multiple (and sometimes simultaneous) ways in which individuals engage and invest in representations of languages and identities.This timely work is the first to consider the significance of multilingualism and its relationship to citizenship as well as the development of linguistic repertoires as an essential component of language education in a globalized world. While examining the discourses and interconnections between multilingualism, globalization, and identity, the author draws upon a unique case study of the experiences, voices, trajectories, and journeys of Canadian youth of Italian origin from diverse social, geographical, and linguistic backgrounds, participating in university French language courses as well as training to become teachers of French in the urban, multicultural and global landscape of Toronto, Canada. In doing so, Byrd Clark skilfully illustrates the multidimensional ways that youth invest in language learning and socially construe their multiple identities within diverse contexts while weaving in and out of particularistic and universalistic identifications. This invaluable resource will not only shed light on how and why people engage in learning languages and for which languages they choose to invest, but will offer readers a deeper understanding of the complex interrelationships between multilingualism, identity, and citizenship. It will appeal to researchers in a variety of fields, including applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition and linguistic anthropology."

This book analyses the communicative structure of interpersonal, or casual, conversation. The author shows how the balance of conversation can be upset by variations in the status of the participants during the conversation and how the participants frequently adopt the strategy of negatively evaluating non-present third persons to redress the balance. The repair of such interactional trouble motivates topic change and major topic movement. The author uses transcripts of actual recorded conversations thus providing extensive support for her observations and analysis. Christine Cheepen is currently a Research Fellow in Articial Intelligence at the Hatfield Polytechnic, U.K. Her abiding interest is in linguistics, - in particular the study of natural conversation, and she has recently been involved in research connected with various computational projects. She has combined these two areas of interest, and is presently working primarily on aspects of dialogue in the human/machine interface.

This book provides readers with the latest research on the dynamics of language and language diversity in professional contexts. Bringing together novel findings from a range of disciplines, it challenges practitioners and management scholars to question the conventional understanding of language as a tool that can be managed by language policies that 'standardize' language. Each of the contributions is designed to recognize the strides that have been made in the past two decades in research on language and languages in organizational settings while addressing remaining blind spots and emerging issues. Particular attention is given to multilingualism, sociolinguistic approaches to language in the workplace, migration challenges, critical perspectives on the power of language use and the management of organizations as dialogical, discursive spaces. Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Multilingualism in Professional Contexts offers new insights into familiar and less familiar issues for international business scholars, sociolinguists, management practitioners and business communication scholars and experts, and brings understanding to the central role that language usage and linguistic diversity play in organisational processes.

Changing practices and perceptions of parenthood and family life have long been the subject of intense public, political and academic attention. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role digital media and technologies can play in these shifts, yet this topic has been under-explored from a discourse analytical perspective. In response, this book's investigation of everyday parenting, family practices and digital media offers a new and innovative exploration of the relationship between parenting, family practices, and digitally mediated connection. This investigation is based on extensive digital and interview data from research with nine UK-based single and/or lesbian, gay or bisexual parents who brought children into their lives in non-traditional ways, for example through donor conception, surrogacy or adoption. Through a novel approach that combines constructivist grounded theory with mediated discourse analysis, this book examines connected family lives and practices in a way that transcends the limiting social, biological and legal structures that still dominate concepts of family in contemporary society.

The main purpose of the book is to explore whether native speakerism has an influence on Polish language schools, using the explanatory mixed-methods design. The findings show that the ideology is present in Poland, but it is manifested in complex and subtle ways. Most prominent findings indicate a wage gap between teachers considered native speakers and their Polish counterparts, and the discrepancy between the levels of education required of the two groups, with native speakers often being employed without necessary qualifications. Finally, the findings suggest that Polish teacher education programmes should expose budding teachers to relevant literature regarding native speakerism and other issues related to native and non-native speaker status so that they can critically examine them.

It has long been an assumption in the field of English as a foreign language that those who speak the language as natives pronounce the way it should be taught. Most influential figures in the field have been outsiders, and the subject has accordingly not been really defined as the teaching of English as a foreign language, but as the teaching of English to foreigners: quite a different thing. This book discusses the designing of programs for learning which will take the different kinds of foreign-ness into account.

The volume offers an up-to-date overview of the influence of English on Italian, bringing together the linguistic and the cultural dimensions. The history of language contact between Italy and Anglo-American societies is the basis for understanding lexical borrowing and for identifying the domains of vocabulary more intensely affected in time. Drawing on previous research and on existing lexicographic evidence, this book presents a typology of borrowings based on a new, usage-based word list of Italian Anglicisms which is part of a larger multilingual project (GLAD - Global Anglicism Database). The topics covered are the number of Anglicisms in Italian, their frequency in specialist fields and registers, the blurred area between borrowing and the circulation of international vocabulary, luxury loans and casuals. The book rounds up with the cultural debate on English-only education, which has recently stirred purist concerns, marking an attitudinal shift of Italian from an 'open' to a 'protectionist' language towards exogenous influences. This book is addressed primarily to scholars and university students, but also to a lay audience of non-experts, interested in the linguistic and cultural contacts between English and Italian.

Although multilingualism is the norm in the day-to-day lives of most sub-Saharan Africans, multilingualism in settings outside of cities has so far been under-explored. This gap is striking when considering that in many parts of Africa, individual multilingualism was widespread long before the colonial period and centuries before the continent experienced large-scale urbanization. The edited collection African Multilingualisms fills this gap by presenting results from recent and ongoing research based on fieldwork in rural African environments as well as environments characterized by contact between urban and rural communities of speakers. The contributors-mostly Africans themselves, including a number of emerging scholars-present findings that both complement and critique current scholarship on African multilingualism. In addition, new methods and tools are introduced for the study of multilingualism in rural settings, alongside illustrations of the kinds of results that they yield. African Multilingualisms reveals an impressive diversity in the features of local language ideologies, multilingual behaviors, and the relationship between language and identity.

This work offers a new perspective on the work of Confucius, the great reference of classical Chinese thought. In general, relatively little work has been done on Confucius' linguistic concerns, which nevertheless did have an impact in his time and afterwards. The author starts from a sociolinguistic approach, based mainly on the ethnography of communication, to analyze the role played by language in Confucius' texts and its links with the ethical program proposed therein. It is, therefore, a considerably novel perspective which, moreover, allows us to cover a very relevant number of interests. The pages of this work concern sociolinguists, but also historians of linguistics, philosophers, and cultural scientists in general. In short, it provides a different vision of one of the great cultural references of humanity.

This work offers a novel and interdisciplinary approach to Translation Studies by connecting this discipline with the oral history on communism. Following the collapse of the communist regime in the Eastern bloc (1989-1991), oral history interviews became the research method par excellence, providing an alternative version to the distorted public discourse. This book addresses the challenges posed by the translation of transcribed historical interviews on communism. The author's translation from Romanian into English of an original corpus helps formulate a methodological framework nonexistent, up to this point, within Translation Studies. Additionally, drawing on research in conversation analysis and psychology, the so-called fictive orality of the data is defined according to an innovative tripartite paradigm: vividness, immediacy, and fragmentation. Inscribed in the current call for translators' activism and visibility, the work draws on oral history terminology to reflect on the translational experience as a 'dialogic exchange' whereby listening assumes central importance. The descriptive and prescriptive paradigms work in concert, facilitating the understanding of translation strategies and of the mechanisms animating historical interviews. However, beyond these theoretical insights, what gains prominence is the argument of the affectivity steeped in the interviews, which alerts translators to the emotive cadence of oral history. Translation is understood here not only as a linguistic and cognitive exercise but rather as a subjective and necessary undertaking in which translators become co-creators of history, illuminating the way knowledge about the past has been and continues to be formed and mediated.