This is the first work of its kind to bring together a wide range of studies of major sociolinguistic issues as they concern the languages of South Africa.

Written by specialists in their fields, the contributions deal with such topics as language contact, language loss, the formation of pidgins, Creoles and social dialects, and language policy and planning.

The book is aimed chiefly at all students of linguistics and language, and will be of use and interest as well to historians, sociologists, speech therapists and anthropologists.

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.

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.

The Old Prussian language has always puzzled linguists. While other Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, have remained in use to the present day, Old Prussian was extinguished at the beginning of eighteenth century, and the extant Old Prussian linguistic corpus is quite limited in scope. Drawing on two bilingual vocabularies and three Lutheran Catechisms (as well as onomastic evidence and several other minor texts), this work critically explores the linguistic and historiographical contours of Old Prussian.

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 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.

Education and Language in the Philippines provides a comprehensive overview of the critical role of education and language development in the Philippines. Lorraine Pe Symaco and Francisco P. Dumanig highlight the economic, social, and political factors that led to the complexity of the country's education system and language policies. In addition, they provide a nuanced discussion of the pressing issues regarding the contextual realities of Philippine education language policies and reforms, the role of multilingual education in learners' identity formation, and the impact of multi-ethnic teaching approaches. The book emphasizes that in a plurilingual country, social actors contribute in many ways to the changes of language education policy, and it explores and discusses how such a policy is implemented and results in the development of multilingual education. This book is the first to comprehensively examine the interconnected roles of education and language in the Philippines.

This book examines the role of complaining in conversation and online interaction in Korean society. Kyung-Eun Yoon examines patterns of formulating complainability, linguistic resources for complaints, organizational features of complaining discourse, and the ways in which the participants construct social identities and cultural norms through complaining. Yoon analyzes real language use in various contexts, including everyday face-to-face and phone conversations with family members and friends, social media posts, online customer reviews, news articles, and formal complaints posted on the websites of local governments in Korea. The analysis in this book ties together the relationship among language, interaction, and social organization as well as the relationships between participants and sociocultural norms, using Korea as a case study. Scholars of interactional linguistics, Korean language pedagogy, and intercultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Africa's diversity is best illustrated linguistically. Thousands of endogenous and exogenous languages are linked to and central to the identity and reality of Africans. Language is a vital lens for analyzing these multifaceted challenges in Africa, where deeper understanding of entire linguistic landscape is germane to understanding socio-political and cultural systems. Concentrating on instrumental and emblematic functions of language in Africa, Language, Society, and Empowerment in Africa and its Diaspora argues for the critical value of African languages beyond functionality into philosophical consideration of their importance for African unity and advancement. Akinloye Ojo calls for the development and empowerment of African languages to serve in various domains, including the support of basic literacy and daily survival of their users. Ojo propagates ways to empower African languages for African socio-cultural and economic development in the 21st century. The author productively engages works by linguists and language pedagogues to provide an ardent case for the empowerment of African languages in the renewed era of globalization, the internet, and an emergent Global Africa. Ojo posits and accentuates some of the notable modalities for empowering African languages in specialized domains for national and continental development.

In Telling Animals, Jasmine Spencer offers a comparative yet personal approach to Dene/Athabaskan stories, both Northern and Southern. It examines the animating effects of animal stories, the transformative power of animacies in Dene stories, and the effects of narrative revitalization through animal grammar. It takes as its first premise the teachings of many Elders, who have shared that the stories are alive. Jasmine Spencer's comparative approach combines literary, linguistic, anthropological, and philosophical theories and methods using a deictic framework for closely reading the stories in both their Dene languages and in English translation. The narrative epistemologies enacted by Dene stories counterbalance many of the ethical problems inherent within Euro-Western approaches to ontology and experience. These stories revive those who listen and read, offering hope.

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.

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.

In French Immersion Ideologies in Canada, Sylvie Roy gives voice to people who have experiences with French immersion programs in Alberta, Canada. Using a sociolinguistics for change approach, she interprets questions related to language ideologies, as well as reasons people learn French as an additional language and why some students are asked to learn English first. She also reflects on what it means to become or to be bilingual or multilingual in a globalized world. Roy discusses teachers' and learners' linguistic and cultural practices and examines transculturality for the future. By questioning concepts that recur in participants' narratives, this book explores how power is reproduced, who is marginalized in the process, and what can be done to deconstruct ideologies about learning and teaching French in Canada and in the world. Roy demonstrates complex issues related to the French language and their consequences for learners, parents, teachers, and administrators.

Academic Discourse Socialization: Case Study on Multilingual Learners examines academic literacy development. Yutaka Fujieda draws on literacy autobiographies, reflective journals, final narratives, blog posts on Moodle, and individual and focus group interviews with multilingual students in a mandatory research seminar course to unpack their processes, experiences, and practices of academic literacy and academic identity construction. Fujieda argues that multilingual students' academic identities are co-constructed via various roles and a sense of belonging to the discourse community.

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.