This book presents a description and analysis of sociolinguistics written from a demographer's perspective. It synthesizes the data on the materials, methods, and issues of this interdisciplinary field, pulling together the scattered materials published in this area into a coherent whole. Drawing on a wide range of sciences in addition to demography and sociolinguistics, including sociology, anthropology, statistics, psychology, neuroscience, and public policy, the book treats theoretical and applied issues, links methods and substantive findings, covers both national and international materials, and provides prehistorical, historical, and contemporary illustrations. The book treats the theoretical issue of how the language we use develops socially on a base of linguistic genetic capacity and the practical issue of how the intervention of the state and public figures may profoundly alter the natural evolution of the language. As such, this book will appeal to a wide range of users, from students to teachers and practitioners of social demography, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and particularly to those social scientists interested in ethnic studies and human migration.

This book contributes to the understanding of the transformative power of incorporating translanguaging, the dynamic language practices of bi/multilingual communities, in the schooling of US Latinx children and youth. It showcases instructional spaces in US education where Latinx children's and youths' translanguaging is at the center of their teaching and learning. By centering racialized Latinx bilingual students, including their knowledge systems and cultural and linguistic practices, it transforms the monolingual-white supremacy ideology of many educational spaces. In so doing, racialized bilingual Latinx subjectivities are potentially transformed, as students learn to understand processes of colonization and domination that have robbed them of opportunities to use their entire semiotic repertoire in learning. The book makes a strong theoretical contribution to the field, putting decolonial, post-structuralist understandings of language and bilingualism alongside critical race theory and critical pedagogy.

Researching Sociopragmatic Variability showcases a range of research approaches to the study of speech acts and pragmatic markers across different languages and varieties of a language, investigating native and non-native usages and variation across gender, situation and addressee.

This book presents the narratives and voices of young, mostly male practitioners of hip hop culture in Delhi, India. The author suggests that practitioners understand hip hop as both a thing that can be appropriated and authenticated, made real, in the local and global context and as a way that enables them to transform their lives and futures in the rapidly globalising urban environments of Delhi. The dancers, artists, musicians and cultural theorists that feature in this book construct a multitude of voices in their narratives to formulate their 'own' transcultural voices within global hip hop. Through a combination of linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the book addresses issues including gender and sexuality, identity construction and global culture.

Identity is a problematic concept in-as-much-as we recognise it now as non-fixed, non-rigid and always being co-constructed by individuals of themselves, or by people who share certain core values or perceive another group as having such values. This volume re-examines the analytical tools employed in the sociolinguistic research of 'identity' in order to assess their efficiency, establish the roles of language in the identity claims of specific communities of people, and determine the place of identity in a variety of social contexts, including work places and language classrooms. It will be of interest to academics researching sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and second language learning.

The Politics of Language surveys and analyses the historical background of recent controversies over language in the United States, and compares the US to two official multilingual societies: Canada and Switzerland. This accessible book will be suitable for courses in linguistics, political science, and sociology.

In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard language ideology, the retention of features from Italo-Romance dialects, the standardization of patterns borrowed from English, and the developmental tendencies of standard Italian in Switzerland. The contributions investigate phonetic/phonological, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena, addressed by several empirical methodologies and theoretical vantage points. This work is of interest to scholars and students working on language variation and change, especially those focusing on standard languages and standardization dynamics.

This book demonstrates the power and distinctiveness of the contribution that sociolinguistics can make to our understanding of everyday communicative practice under changing social conditions. It builds on the approaches developed by Gumperz and Hymes in the 1970s and 80s, and it not only affirms their continuing relevance in analyses of the micropolitics of everyday talk in urban settings, but also argues for their value in emergent efforts to chart the heavily securitised environments now developing around us. Drawing on 10 years of collaborative work and ranging across disciplinary, interdisciplinary and applied perspectives, the book begins with guiding principles and methodology, shifts to empirically driven arguments in urban sociolinguistics, and concludes with studies of (in)securitised communication addressed to challenges ahead.

This book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in researching or just learning more about the changing role and status of English across Europe. The status of English today is explained in its historical context before the authors present some of the key debates and ideas relating to the challenge English poses for learners, teachers, and language policy makers.

PC or Political Correctness has received bad press, according to Choi and Murphy. Indeed, the body of ideas and concepts embodied in PC have been trivialized by conservatives seeking to defend their own positions and by a press catering to a public put off by philosophical discussions. Choi and Murphy seek to analyze the key facets of the debate over PC.

Starting with an examination of the key concepts of PC, Choi and Murphy review the essentials of neo-conservative social philosophy and the Postmodern Alternative as well as neo-conservative critiques of postmodernism. By providing a comprehensive examination of PC from its historical and philosophical underpinnings, Choi and Murphy show what is at stake in the controversy. This book is an important synthesis for researchers and students of contemporary philosophy and social policy.

This collection of original articles covers a range of research connecting with the work of the eminent linguist Ruqaiya Hasan. It contains contributions from M.A.K. Halliday, G. Williams, D. Butt, D. Miller and M. Berry among others, an interview with Ruqaiya Hasan, and notes from the contributors about their connection with Ruqaiya Hasan's work.

This book investigates the history of national disunity in Germany since the end of the Second World War from a linguistic perspective: what was the role of language in the ideological conflicts of the Cold War and in the difficult process of rebuilding the German nation after 1990? In the first part of the book, Patrick Stevenson explores the ways in which the idea of 'the national language' contributed to the political tensions between the two German states and to the different social experiences of their citizens. He begins by showing how the modern linguistic conflict between east and west in Germany has its roots in a long tradition of debates on the relationship between language and national identity. He then describes the use of linguistic strategies to reinforce the development of a socialist state in the GDR and argues that they ultimately contributed to its demise. The second part considers the social and linguistic consequences of unification. The author discusses the challenges imposed on east Germans by the sudden formation of a single 'speech community' and examines how conflicting representations of easterners and westerners - for example, in personal interactions, the media, and advertising - have hindered progress towards national unity. German division and re-unification were crucial to the development of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. This fascinating account of the relationship between language and social conflict in Germany throws new light on these events and raises important questions for the study of divided speech communities elsewhere. The book will interest sociolinguists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists.

This inter-disciplinary book is the first in an Irish context to address issues connected with the 'super-diversifying' of language and society engendered by recent and historical migrations. It analyses novel data from interviews with allochthonous and autochthonous groups of monolingual and plurilingual youngsters living in Northern Ireland. A key aim is to test models within second language acquisition and language variation and change research. Another goal is to examine the extent to which distinctive migratory trends generated changes in the language ecologies of communities on the island of Ireland as well as globally in regions where the Irish settled intensively from the 1700s. The book also compares contemporary migratory experiences with historical records to further our understanding of the dynamics of identification through language across time. The first-ever book devoted to all aspects of the sociolinguistics of globalization and migration in Northern Ireland will be welcomed by scholars interested in the consequences for ethnolinguistic vitality of large-scale population movements. It could not be more timely given the fact that 2.5 million sought asylum in Europe alone during 2016, greatly enhancing its diversity.

This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter's voice and the original speaker's voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

William Labov (b. 1927) has been a driving force in linguistics for over four decades. Throughout North America, and in much of the rest of the world, his name is synonymous with sociolinguistics. This new Guide for the Perplexed summarizes Labov's work in a number of subfields, including historical linguistics, discourse analysis and not least sociolinguistics. It also sketches a broader context for appreciating Labov's major innovations. His considerable and growing legacy is discussed with comparative glances to other ways of approaching language within linguistics and in neighboring disciplines. Since the publication of The Social Stratification of English in New York City in 1966, Labov has pushed the boundaries of sociolinguistics decade after decade but there has been no one volume guide to his work. This is that guide.

Applying critical kinship perspectives to the study of multilingual families, this book foregrounds family formation processes, gender, and sexuality in examinations of language use. Focusing on historically marginalized families (such as single parent, adoptive, and LGBTQ+), the analyses draw on data from private and public spheres including interviews and recorded interactions in homes, as well as memoirs, documentaries, news media, and even comedy. Lyn Wright addresses questions such as why single parents might be better at raising bilingual children, how multilingualism plays a role in constructing shared histories in adoptive families, and what translingual resources allow LGBTQ+ families to negotiate gender roles and family relationships. In addition, she examines the construction of monolingual, nuclear family norms in public discourse that potentially constrain families' everyday multilingual identities. Integrating related fields of family discourse, family language socialization, and family language policy unifies ways of understanding the intersections of kinship and language. The analyses in this book provide insight into multilingual family experiences, children's language development, and societal level language maintenance and shift.

Are contemporary art theorists and critics speaking a language that has lost its meaning? Is it still based on concepts and values that are long out of date? Does anyone know what the function of the arts is in modern society?Roy Harris breaks new ground with his linguistic approach to the key issues. He situates those issues within the long-running debate about the arts and their place in society which goes back to the Classical period in ancient Greece. Contributors to the debate included some of the most celebrated artists and philosophers of their day--Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo, Kant, Hegel, Wagner, Baudelaire, Zola, Delacroix--but none of these eminent figures or their supporters provided a reasoned overview examining the multilingual development of Western artspeak as a whole. Nor did they develop any explicit account of the relationship between the arts and language.The Necessity of Artspeak shows for the first time that what have usually been considered problems of aesthetics and artistic justification often have their source in the linguistic assumptions underlying the terms and arguments presented. It also shows how artspeak has been--and continues to be--manipulated to serve the interests of particular social groups and agendas. Until the semantics of artspeak is more widely understood, the public will continue to be taken in by the latest fads and fashions that propagandists of the art world promote.

This book analyses the experiences of multicultural education in nine very different international settings uncovering insights from a vast variety of educational contexts. Taking a multi-critical approach in reporting and discussing problems faced by increasingly multicultural and multilingual societies the nine case studies reflect radically different assumptions about what counts as ' difference' and what should be the appropriate ways for education systems to respond to differences. While each country's approach seems unique, analysis of the divergent treatments of internal population diversity elicits a genuinely global instance of the increasingly shared phenomenon of cultural pluralism. Discussing various successes and failures of policy enactment, theory, pedagogy and management of diversity, the book isolates both the differences and similarities in the unique geopolitical and socio-historical contexts of the countries investigated. A key value of the book is that it greatly expands the range of settings, experiences, epistemologies, ontologies and practical experiences that are typically encountered in mainstream discussion of what counts as 'multicultural education'. In effect, all societies are in some way 'dealing with difference' - this volume helps widen the scope of reflection and thus facilitates increased, global 'learning from difference'.

This book is the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the linguistics of humor. Salvatore Attardo takes a broad approach to the topic, exploring not only theoretical linguistic analyses, but also pragmatic and semantic aspects, conversation and discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, and interactionist and variationist sociolinguistics. The volume begins with chapters that introduce the terminology and conceptual and methodological apparatus, as well as outlining the major theories in the field and examining incongruity and resolution and the semiotics of humor. The second part of the book explores humor competence, with chapters that cover semantic and pragmatic topics, the General Theory of Verbal Humor, and puns and their interpretation. The third part provides an in-depth discussion of the applied linguistics of humor, and examines social context, discourse and conversation analysis, and sociolinguistic aspects. In the final part of the book, the discussion is extended beyond the central field of linguistics, with chapters discussing humor in literature, in translation, and in the classroom. The volume brings together the multiple strands of current knowledge about humor and linguistics, both theoretical and applied; it assumes no prior background in humor studies, and will be a valuable resource for students from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those coming to linguistics from related disciplines.

Language policies are increasingly acknowledged as being a necessary component of many decisions taken in the areas of the labor market, education, minority languages, mobility, and social inclusion of migrants. They can affect the democratic control of political organizations, and they can either entrench or reduce inequalities. These are the central topics of this book. Economists, philosophers, political scientists, and sociolinguists discuss - from an interdisciplinary perspective - the distributive socio-economic effects of language policies, their impact on justice and inequality at the national or international level, as well as the connection between language choices and an inclusive access to public services. The range of social and economic issues raised by linguistic diversity in contemporary societies is large, and this requires new approaches to tackle them. This book provides new input to design better, more efficient, and fair language policies in order to manage linguistic diversity in different areas. Topics covered include: theoretical models of linguistic justice and linguistic disadvantage; the assessment of the socio-economic consequences of language policies; the evaluation of the costs, benefits, and degree of inclusion of language planning measures; the politics of migrants' linguistic integration; as well as multilingualism and economic activities. These topics are discussed in different contexts, including the areas inhabited by linguistic minorities, cities receiving migrants, and supranational organizations.

In today's increasingly interconnected, knowledge-based world, language policy in higher education is rapidly becoming a crucial area for all societies aiming to play a part in the global economy. The challenge is double faceted: how can universities retain their crucial role of creating the intellectual elites who are indispensable for the running of national affairs and, at the same time, prepare their best-educated citizens for competition in a global market? To what extent is English really pushing other languages out of the academic environment? Drawing on the experience of several medium-sized language communities, this volume provides the reader with some important insights into how language policies can be successfully implemented. The different sociolinguistic contexts under scrutiny offer an invaluable comparative standpoint to understand what position can - or could - be occupied by each language at the level of higher education.

This study of Japanese business discourse adopts Bakhtin's notion of speech genres as an heuristic in order to analyze groups of spoken texts which display similar constellations of compositional, thematic, and stylistic features. Drawing upon a corpus of over 540 naturally-occurring telephone conversations collected in the Kanto and Kansai areas of Japan, Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura demonstrates how Japanese business professionals present, negotiate and clarify their identities and intentions and enlist and offer assistance with respect to a variety of transactions such as toiawase inquiries, merchandise orders, shipping confirmations, and reports of delivery problems. In the process, she highlights the critical deictic function of linguistic devices such as the no desu (extended predicate) construction in producing formulations, and politeness expressions that index the dynamic uti/soto ('inside'/ 'outside') continuum. She also illustrates some of the ways in which these "negotiating moves" are consonant with a number of Japanese "folk" metalinguistic concepts and expressions in order to underscore the importance of shared assumptions and expectations developed through experience in performing these genres of "talk at work" on a regular, collaborative, basis. Yotsukura's findings represent a unique and significant contribution to the discourse - and conversation-analytic literature on business negotiation because the field has until now focused almost exclusively on English and other Indo-European languages. The study should therefore provide an entirely different but equally important ethnographic perspective on the culturally nuanced, rhetorical strategies used by a non-Western community of speakers for the presentation and resolution of problems in business transactions.

Pragmatic and sociolinguistic analyses of im/politeness have usually been dependent on context and cultural frames of reference. This new study approaches the concept from an original perspective, namely situatedness. Although politeness research often concentrates on examining how speeches or discourses themselves are situated with regards to different places and contexts, the focus on just one situation, and various text types within it, can also be of value. Situated Politeness is concerned with disentangling the factors which govern our behaviour within a given social context as well as across them. A range of expanding disciplines, including corpus linguistics, are brought to bear on the topic, and this work will be of interest to a diverse global audience.

While top-down policies and declarations have yet to establish equal status and opportunities for speakers of all languages in practice, activists and advocates at local levels are playing an increasingly significant role in the creation of new social imaginaries and practices in multilingual contexts. This volume describes how social actors across multiple domains contribute to the elusive goal of linguistic equality or justice through their language activism practices. Through an ethnographic account of Indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language activism in Oaxaca, Mexico, this study illuminates the (sometimes conflicting) imaginaries of what positive social change is and how it should be achieved, and the repertoire of strategies through which these imaginaries are being pursued. Ethnographic and action research conducted from 2013-2018 in the multilingual Isthmus of Tehuantepec brings to light the experiences of educators, students, writers, scholars and diverse cultural activists whose aspirations and strategies of social change are significant in shaping the future language ecology. Their repertoire of strategies may inform and encourage language activists, scholars, and educators working for change in other contexts of linguistic diversity and inequality.

Since the earliest days of our species, technology and language have evolved in parallel. This book examines the processes and products of this age-old relationship: a phenomenon we're calling technolingualism -- the mutually influential relationship between language and technology. One the one hand, as humans advance technology to master, control, and change the world around us, our language adapts. More sophisticated social-cultural practices give rise to new patterns of linguistic communication. Language changes in its vocabulary, structures, social conventions, and ideologies. Conversely-and this side of the story has been widely overlooked-the unique features of human language can influence a technology's physical forms and technical processes. Technolingualism explores the fascinating ways, past and present, by which language and technology have informed each other's development. The book reveals important corollaries about the universal nature of language and, most importantly, what it means to be human. From our first babbling noises to the ends of our lives, we are innately attuned to the technologies around us, and our language reflects this. We are, all of us, technolinguals.