This volume covers the language situation in The Baltic States, Ireland and Italy explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation, including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages. The authors are indigenous and/or have been participants in the language planning context, and these monographs on the Baltic States, Ireland, and Italy draw together the published literature in each of these polities. The purpose of the volumes in this series is to present up-to-date information on polities that are not well-known to researchers in the field. A longer range purpose is to collect comparable information on as many polities as possible in order to facilitate the development of a richer theory to guide language policy and planning in other polities that undertake the development of a national policy on languages. This volume is part of an areal series which is committed to providing descriptions of language planning and policy in countries around the world.

This book discusses the existing sociolinguistic order in Africa, how it is sustained, how it might be changed to the advantage of those who are dominated by it and, most importantly, how it affects the development potential of the Continent. It raises issues about African languages that the average person is not always aware of. For example, why must the African child learn how to read and write in a foreign language? Why must all African doctors be trained in languages that their patient population do not understand? Why must African leaders address their people in languages they know the people do not understand? What are the flow-on effects of these language practices on Africa's development goals? The book also proposes sustainable and development-oriented alternatives to these practices.

The emergence of studies of translation based on electronic corpora has been one of the most interesting and fruitful developments in Translation Studies in recent years. But the origins of such studies can be traced back through many decades, as this volume sets out to establish. Covering a number of European languages including Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian, as well as French, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, the book presents many new studies of translation patterns using parallel corpora focusing on particular linguistic features. The studies reveal systemic differences which are in turn, of relevance to the linguistic description of the languages concerned, as well as to translator training. Also included are broader-ranging contributions on the concept of translation universals, including a critical perspective on this popular topic. [127 words]

The contributors to "Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices" investigate the workings of language ideologies in relation to other social processes in a globalizing world. They explore in detail the specific ways in which language ideologies underpin language policy and the relationship between public policies and individual practices. Particular attention is given to Europe, where the impetus to social transformation within and across national boundaries is in renewed tension with conflicting national and supra-national interests, with these tensions reflected in the complex issues of language choice and language policy.

Language and communication are central features of social behaviour. So, it is somewhat surprising that the social psychological study of language, communication and discourse has a relatively short history. In this book a leading group of language, discourse and social psychology scholars will overview the history, theories and methods of the field. However, the main focus is on current developments in the social psychology of language and discourse, showcasing cutting edge empirical work.

In choosing to render dialect and vernacular speech into Scots, Bill Findlay, to whose memory this volume is dedicated, made a pioneering contribution in safeguarding the authenticity of voices in translation. The scene of the book is set by an overview of approaches to rendering foreign voices in English translation including those of the people to whom Findlay introduced us in his Scots dialect versions of European plays. Martin Bowman, his frequent co-translator follows with a discussion of their co-translation of playwright Jeanne-Mance Delisle. Different ways of bridging the cultural divide in the translation between English and a number of plays written in a number of European languages are then illustrated including the custom of creating English versions, an approach rejected by contributions that argue in favour of minimal intervention on the part of the translator. But transferring the social and cultural milieu that the speakers of other languages inhabit may also cause problems in translation, as discussed by some translators of fiction. In addition attention is drawn to the translators' own attitude and the influence of the time in which they live. In conclusion, stronger forces in the form of political events are highlighted that may also, adversely or positively, have a bearing on the translation process.

The children and grandchildren of South Asian migrants to the UK are living out British identities which go largely unrecognized as dominant voices both inside and outside their communities, seeking to foreground and hold in place alternative positionings of them as primarily Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims or Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis or Panjabi, Gujarati, Hindi, and Urdu speakers. This ignores their everyday low-key Britishness, albeit a Britishness with new inflections. It is this sensibility which marks them as "Brasians."

The New Cockney provides a sociolinguistic account of speech variation among adolescents in the 'traditional' East End of London. Embedded in its social context, it focuses on the interaction and social practices within a single community and highlights some of the possible mechanisms for language change.

Following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Croatian was declared to be a separate language, distinct from Serbian, and linguistic issues became highly politicized. This book examines the changing status and norms of the Croatian language and its relationship to Croatian national identity, focusing on the period after Croatian independence.

The question of why the issue of language features increasingly at the centre of debates about education for social and economic development at the beginning of the 21st Century is compelling. Within a rapidly changing world, language, literacy and communication are seen as constituting key elements in the process of lifelong learning. Contemporary technological development and cultural shifts intersect in complex ways with the legacy of colonialism and underdevelopment within developing countries with a colonial history. This book addresses some of these issues related to language and development. Part I explores the relationship between colonial and postcolonial social policies on the unresolved language problems that prevail in many developing countries. Part II comprises case studies of Mali, Pakistan and South Africa. Part III draws on key motifs identified in the previous two sections, and discusses linguistic diversity as an important variable of cultural capital within the interactive global cultural economy. The book's focus on language, education and development makes it essential reading in Development Studies, International and Comparative Education, Sociology and Educational Policy Studies. Its focus on language issues within the global cultural economy would make it an important text in Applied Linguistic Studies.

"Migration, Accommodation, and Language Change: Language and the Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity" marries qualitative ethnographic methods to quantitative acoustic methods. The analysis describes the differences between internal and external factors in phonological change and demonstrates how these two forces interact in structuring the phonological systems of Appalachian and African American Southern Migrant speakers in the Detroit, Michigan area.

This volume covers the language situation in Fiji, The Philippines and Vanuatu explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation, including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages. The authors are indigenous and/or have been participants in the language planning context. Fiji and Vanuatu are not well represented in the international language policy/planning literature, while the section on the Philippines draws together the published literature in this area. The purpose of the volumes in this series is to present up-to-date information on polities that are not well-known to researchers in the field. A longer range purpose is to collect comparable information on as many polities as possible in order to facilitate the development of a richer theory to guide language policy and planning in other polities that undertake the development of a national policy on languages. This volume is part of an areal series which is committed to providing descriptions of language planning and policy in countries around the world.

The first volume of the series Language and Ideology, this work explores mature literacy. Patrick L. Courts argues that while by society's standards many people can read well, they are unable to create meaning from the world of oral and written language. His theory derives from psycho- and sociolinguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and whole language theory. Courts criticizes programmed activities, texts, and workbooks--challenging the control that commercial textbook publishers and test-makers exert on education. He shuns overemphasis on methods and offers an alternative approach firmly grounded in theory and aimed at empowering teachers and students. Courts begins with a discussion of liberatory pedagogy, drawing from whole language theory, the social semiotics of Halliday, reader-response theory, and the ideas of Heidegger and Derrida. The subsequent methodological chapters build a case for what Courts calls a conservative revolution in literacy education: teachers combining a sound base of theory with methodologies to tap students' generative, creative powers. Courts's methodology aims to empower people as meaning makers. This book is valuable to teachers and administrators, textbook publishers, and students of education.

Language Choice in a Nation under Transition charts the spread of English into Cambodia and the French efforts to contest this spread in favor of their own language through an analysis of the country's recent history. This book proposes a synthesis of the national-functional and international-critical perspectives. This synthesis emerges from the Cambodian experience and thus adheres to Joshua Fishman's admonition that theory reflect the sharp bite of local detail and unique historical experience.

Bridal magazines have become increasingly popular in Western society, proliferating the idea of a 'princess bride' on her 'big day'. Yet little has been written on how the ever-expanding wedding media and the popular wedding culture constructs gender and affects the ways women live and experience their weddings. Offering a critique of contemporary wedding discourse, this book marries together analyses of media texts and their reception to propose a new approach to media discourse. The analysis richly illustrates how women are invited to embrace not only the stereotypical idea of bridal femininity but also a consumptive way of experiencing it. Through examination of brides' accounts of their 'big days', the book observes the imprints of the popular gender imagery on their self-portraits and self-narratives, and describes the women's diverse approaches to them. Based on insights from gender and critical discourse studies, sociology and audience research, this exploration illuminates the ongoing debate on 'media and gender' and its methodological approaches.

How did an Athenian citizen address his wife? - his children, his slaves, and his dog? How did they address him? This book is the first major application of linguistic theories of address to an ancient language. It is based on a corpus of 11,891 vocatives from twenty-five prose authors from Herodotus to Lucian, and on comparative data from Aristophanes, Menander, and other sources; the data are analysed using techniques and evidence from the field of sociolinguistics to shed light on some long-standing problems in Greek. A separate section discusses the theoretical problems which arise from the attempt to reconstruct conversational Greek on the basis of written texts and concludes that this enterprise is indeed possible, provided that the right sources are selected. Analysis of the Greek address system leads to a reconsideration of the meanings of individual addresses and thus of the interpretation of specific passages; it also challenges the validity of some alleged sociolinguistic 'universals'. In particular, Eleanor Dickey examines some of the idiosyncratic aspects of Socrates' language, offering an exceptionally interesting and novel contribution to the problem of the 'historical Socrates'. Highly original, lucid, and jargon-free, this book offers many significant insights on both the literature and language of ancient Greece.

An unprecedented glimpse into the multidimensional learning processes that take place when novice professionals develop the necessary communication skills for effective task accomplishment. This analysis of authentic patient consultations by pharmacy interns is a significant contribution to research on health communication training.

This analysis of language policy on Corsica provides the first study of the three levels of language policy existing on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. It focuses on the key participants - the State, the language activists and the islanders - in the language debate that has taken place across the island since its purchase by France. This book is informed by recent work on language planning, both theoretical and relating to specific case studies. At the same time, it engages with trends in sociolinguistics over the past decades, which have included language planning in their investigations of languages in contact, language obsolescence and language death. A central premise of this book is that the three discrete categories of participants in the language debate are closely interrelated and that the status and position of Corsican in relation to French cannot be understood without a thorough exploration of these three strands. This volume will appeal to researchers and students in French Studies, sociolinguistics, and especially language policy.

This volume presents the results of the largest ever language attitude/motivation survey in second language studies. The research team gathered data from over 13,000 Hungarian language learners on three successive occasions: in 1993, 1999 and 2004. The examined period covers a particularly prominent time in Hungary's history, the transition from a closed, Communist society to a western-style democracy that became a member of the European Union in 2004. Thus, the book provides an 'attitudinal/motivational flow-chart' describing how significant sociopolitical changes affect the language disposition of a nation. The investigation focused on the appraisal of five target languages - English, German, French, Italian and Russian - and this multi-language design made it also possible to observe the changing status of the different languages in relation to each other over the examined 12-year period. Thus, the authors were in an ideal position to investigate the ongoing impact of language globalisation in a context where for various political/historical reasons certain transformation processes took place with unusual intensity and speed. The result is a unique blueprint of how and why language globalisation takes place in an actual language learning environment.

Language, Sex and Social Structure offers a cutting edge, empirically driven approach to critical discourse analysis, challenging the text and language-based bias that most applications of CDA adopt. Drawing upon rich conversational data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of a community of practice (a university-based sports team), it introduces a method for uncovering nuanced correlations between homophobic attitudes and the concepts and social structures that sustain these attitudes. Situated within seminal work in discourse theory, practice theory, relevance theory and sociolinguistics, it presents a fresh perspective on recent debates in the field of language and sexuality. The book provides a thorough critique of CDA together with a new methodology for critically analysing discourse, one which enables more sophisticated and contextualised analyses of ethnographic data than current models allow. Through a rigorous and insightful application of this methodology, it exposes subtle variations on discourses of sexuality in a community and offers new perspectives on the emancipatory potential of CDA.

After 40 years of Cold War, NATO found itself intervening in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan, where the ability to communicate with local people was essential to the success of the missions. This book explains how the Alliance responded to this challenge so as to ensure that the missions did not fail through lack of understanding.

Hardbound. Debates about the nature of literacy and literacy practices have been conducted extensively in the last fifteen years or so. The fact that both previous and current British governments have effectively suppressed any real debate makes the publication of this book both timely and important. Here, Urszula Clark stresses the underlying ideological character of such debates and shows that they have deep historical roots. She also makes the point that issues regarding the relationship between language and identity, especially national identity, become sharply focused at times of crisis in that identity. By undertaking a comparison with other major English-speaking countries, most notably Australia, New Zealand and the USA, Clark shows how these times of crisis reverberate around the globe.

This book provides a timely and comprehensive snapshot of the current digital communication practices of today's organisations and workplaces, covering a wide spectrum of communication technologies, such as email, instant messaging, message boards, Twitter, corporate blogs, consumer reviews and mobile communication technologies.

This book offers a range of perspectives and insights from around the world on the teaching and learning of listening, speaking, reading and writing. It brings together contributors from across six continents, who analyse a wide range of teaching and learning contexts, including primary, secondary, tertiary, private, and adult ESL/EFL classes. In doing so, they provide locally relevant accounts that nonetheless resonate with other contexts and wider concerns. This informative and practical edited collection will appeal to students and scholars who are interested in the four building blocks of language learning, as well as language education and teacher education.

Minority languages in Europe, as part of a common cultural heritage, need protection. The contributions to this book reflect urgent, stimulating and productive debates among researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, politics and sociology, and among language activists and policy makers. At the heart of the debate are the effectiveness of the existing political and legal frameworks aimed at protecting linguistic and cultural diversity, and prospects for the survival of minority languages in the process of European integration.