An accessible and engaging textbook which has been tailored to the author's own Language, Society and Power module so each edition is refined by student feedback. Virtually all English Langauge and Linguistics degrees around the world have a Language and Society/Sociolinguistics module and most are core courses. This is the ideal textbook for both undergraduate students of linguistics as well as those not studying linguistics full-time but who are interested in the study of language and society. Packed with pedagogical features such as activity boxes, chapter summaries, and further reading. Also accompanied by a companion website with updated features such as a 'who's who' of Twitter, links to blogs, and further discussion questions. This makes it the complete package for students of language and society Includes an 'applied' chapter on projects which has been designed to help students understand what sociolinguists do and how they conduct research, intended to help students conduct their own research in turn.

Adding a new introduction and two previously unpublished papers, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis brings together van Leeuwen's methodological work on discourse analysis of the last 15 years. Discourse, van Leeuwen argues, is a resource for representation, a knowledge about some aspect of reality which can be drawn upon when that aspect of reality has to be represented, a framework for making sense of things. And they are plural. There can be different discourses, different ways of making sense of the same aspect of reality that serve different interests and will therefore be used in different social contexts.
However abstract some discourses are, discourses ultimately always represent doings, van Leeuwen argues. Doing is the foundation of knowing, and social practices are the foundation of discourses. Studying children's books, newspaper reports, brochures and other texts, as well as photographs and children's toys, van Leeuwen investigates what can happen when practices are transformed into discourses and provides analytical tools for reconstructing discourses from texts.
Throughout the book, van Leeuwen makes connections between sociological and linguistic or semiotic concepts and methods to ensure the social and critical relevance of his analytical categories. van Leeuwen's work has already been widely used by critical discourse analysts across the world. This volume will be a welcome guide for anyone looking for a form of discourse analysis that is both explicit and methodical, and critically incisive.

The status of English in Europe is changing, and this book offers a series of studies of attitudes to English today. Until recently English was often seen as an opportunity for Europeans to take part in the global market, but increasingly English is viewed as a threat to the national languages of Europe, and the idea that Europeans are equally at home in English is being challenged. This book will appeal to anyone interested in global English.

The contributors to "Internationalising the University: the Chinese Context "offer an in-depth understanding of the rapidly changing developments in the fields of institutional, social, management, curriculum and student concerns and changes.

An original and timely study of men's experiences of depression in which the author tackles the discursively constructed relationship between the self and depression showing its linguistic and social complexity and analyses the relationship between depression and masculinity.

Focuses on the endangering effects of language-ideological processes. This book looks at the challenges imposed by globalization and super-diversity on the nation state and its language situations and ideologies, and demonstrates how many of its problems rise from the tension between late-modern diversity and the (pre-)modernist responses to it.

This book brings together current research by leading international scholars on the often contentious nature of language policies and their practical outcomes in North America, Australia and Europe. It presents a range of perspectives from which to engage with a variety of pressing issues raised by multilingualism, multiculturalism, immigration, exclusion, and identity. A recurrent theme is that of tension and conflict: between uniformity and diversity, between official policies and real day-to-day life experiences, but also between policies in schools and the corporate world and their implementation. Several chapters present research about language policy issues that has previously not been fully or easily available to an English-language audience. Many of the chapters also provide up-to-date analyses of language policy issues in particular regions or countries, focusing on recent developments.

This book details innovative developments in the pragmatics and lexicogrammar of speakers using English as a lingua franca. There have been considerable recent demographic shifts in the use of English worldwide. English is now undoubtedly(and particularly) an international lingua franca, a lingua mundi. The sociolinguistic reality of English language use worldwide, and its implications, continue to be hotly contested. Plenty of research has questioned, for example, the ownership of English, but less attention has been paid to the linguistic consequences of the escalating role English plays. This is one of the first books to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of recent empirical findings in the field of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Dewey and Cogo analyze and interpret their own large corpus of naturally occurring spoken interactions and focus on identifying innovative developments in the pragmatics and lexicogrammar of speakers engaged in ELF talk. Dewey and Cogo's work makes a substantial contribution to the emerging field of empirical ELF studies. As well as this practical focus, this book looks at both pragmatic and lexicogrammatical issues and highlights their interrelationship. In showcasing the underlying processes involved in the emergence of innovative patterns of language use, this book will be of great interest to advanced students and academics working in applied linguistics, ELF, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

Stories told within institutions play a powerful role, helping to define not only the institution itself, but also its individual members. How do institutions use stories? How do those stories both preserve the past and shape the future? To what extent does narrative construct both collective and individual identity?
Charlotte Linde's unique and far-reaching study addresses these questions by looking at the interplay of narratives, memory, and identity in a large insurance company. Her detailed ethnography looks at the role of stories within the institution and how they are employed by its members in both private and group settings. Analyzing the re-telling of certain key stories, she shows how the formation of "core" stories and their multiple re-tellings and modifications provide a means of formulating and promoting a cohesive group identity -- which in turn shapes the stories and identities of the individuals within the collective. Linde also looks at silences, and how stories not told also convey their version of the past.
Working the Past shows how stories that might otherwise be seen as part of mundane daily life are in fact utterly essential to the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity. Her original research will appeal to those interested in narrative studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and institutional memory.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

This study embarks on the intriguing quest for the origins of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu. In the literature on the issue, widely diverging hypotheses have been advanced, but scholars have not come close to a consensus. The present study casts new and long-lasting light on the issue, putting forward compelling interdisciplinary evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curacao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting the basic vocabulary while leaving intact the original phonology, morphology, and syntax. Papiamentu is thus shown to constitute a case of 'language contact reduplicated' in that a creole underwent a second significant restructuring process (relexification). These explicit claims and their rigorous underpinning will set standards for both the study of Papiamentu and creole studies at large and will be received with great interest in the wider field of contact linguistics.

Only a few hundred of the world's 6,000-7,000 languages have any kind of official status, and it is only speakers of official languages (speakers of dominant majority languages) who enjoy all linguistic human rights. As many of the collected papers in this book document, most linguistic minorities are deprived of these rights. This book describes what linguistic human rights are, who has and who does not have them and why, and suggests which linguistic rights should be regarded as basic human rights. Linguistic Human Rights introduces a new area, combining sociolinguistics, educational, and minority concerns with human rights. Discrimination against language minorities is widespread, despite national and international law prohibiting this. The book analyzes language rights in many countries worldwide, including North and Latin America, several European states, the former USSR, India, Kurdistan, Australia and New Zealand.

This work examines and reviews the ecological context of language planning in 14 countries in the Pacific basin: Japan, the two Koreas, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. It provides the only up-to-date overview and review of language policy in the region and challenges those interested in language policy and planning to think about how such goals might be achieved in the context of language ecology.

This book, the first of its kind, is dedicated to different Spanish varieties spoken in the Amazonian regions of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The contributions present diverse perspectives on theoretical, methodological, and descriptive characterizations of the study of Amazonian Spanish. It includes linguistic (phonological, syntactic, discourse-pragmatic), typological, ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and language contact approaches. The analyses of oral corpora include comparisons between monolingual and contact varieties of the speech of bilingual speakers who are native speakers of an indigenous Amazonian variety. This collection contributes to the fields of Hispanic and Amerindian Linguistics, and language contact.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches - theoretical and empirical - supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines - anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

The volume brings together the papers read at the international conference on Romance Objects organized by the Linguistics Department of the Roma Tre University. It is characterized by a striking uniformity of approach, which is functional, and of methodology. The various case studies regarding the object focus on the syntax/semantics and syntax/pragmatics interfaces. The common denominator of the ten enquiries is the identification of the object category, the DO in particular, in Romance languages; at the same time some of the contributors relate the specific topic to more general questions of linguistic typology. Some of the essays are based on the analysis of data from a corpus and present a diachronic picture of the evolution of the specific topic investigated. Thus this volume is addressed not only to scholars interested in the Romance languages but also all those who study the object category in a cross-linguistic perspective. Michela Cennamo: (In)transitivity and object marking: some current issues.

The book outlines the evolution and role of minority languages locally and nationally; it investigates current educational language policies in minority areas; and it assesses the social and economic outcomes of language change for communities in contemporary China.

What is French and how has it changed over time? Can we distinguish language history from historical linguistics, and language change from linguistic change? These questions are explored using copious material from the history of the French language, concentrating on changes in the relatively modern period in particular. Posner explains how change comes about and how changes at different levels of language interact, and the role of sociological and ideological factors is set against the internal mechanisms that trigger change. This work makes a substantial contribution to the theory of linguistic change, as well as to discussion of the relationship between language and history in French-speaking areas, including Canada and French Creole-speaking countries.

This book presents, for the first time, an overarching, trans-Scandinavian, comprehensive and comparable account of linguistic developments and practices in late modern urban contact zones. The book aims to capture the multilingual realities of all young people in urban contexts, whether they are of migrant descent or not. Taking a multi-layered approach to linguistic practices, chapters in the book include structural and phonological analyses of new linguistic practices, examine how these practices and their practitioners are perceived, and discuss the sociolinguistic potentials of speakers when constructing, challenging and negotiating identities. The book also contains three short overview articles describing studies of multilingual practices in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The editors have aimed to make Scandinavian research on urban multilingualism accessible to scholars and students who don't speak Scandinavian languages, and also to make a valuable contribution to the global study of multilingualism.

The study of language and law has seen explosive growth in the past twenty-five years. Research on police interrogations, trial examination, jury deliberation, plea bargains, same sex marriage, to name a few, has shown the central role of written and oral forms of language in the construction of legal meaning. However, there is another side of language that has rarely been analyzed in legal settings: the role of gesture and how it integrates with language in the law. This is the first book-length investigation of language and multimodal conduct in the law. Using audio-video tapes from a famous rape trial, Matoesian and Gilbert examine legal identity and impression management in the sociocultural performance of precedent, expert testimony, closing argument, exhibits, reported speech and trial examination. Drawing on insights from Jakobson and Silverstein, the authors show how the poetic function inheres not only in language but multimodal conduct generally. Their analysis opens up new empirical territory for both forensic linguistics and gesture studies.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics is a novel and burgeoning field of research which seeks to foster investigation into the socio-cognitive dimensions of language at a usage-based level. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics brings together ten studies into the social and conceptual aspects of language-internal variation. All ten contributions rely on a firm empirical basis in the form of advanced corpus-based techniques, experimental methods and survey-based research, or a combination of these. The search for methods that may adequately unravel the complex and multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between conceptual meaning and variationist factors is thus another characteristic of the volume. In terms of its descriptive scope, the volume covers three main areas: lexical and lexical-semantic variation, constructional variation, and research on lectal attitudes and acquisition. It thus illustrates how Cognitive Sociolinguistics studies both the variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation.

Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

Spanish in Chicago is the first book-length study of Spanish in Chicago, where populations originating in both Mexico and Puerto Rico have lived in contact for generations and Latinos now comprise nearly a third of the population. Identifying Chicago as a rich site for examining language and dialect contact at both community and family levels, Kim Potowski and Lourdes Torres describe the spoken Spanish of Chicago, analyzing patterns of language change and identity constructions and establishing their likely causes. Drawing on interviews with 124 individuals across three generations of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and MexiRican Chicagoans, Potowski and Torres trace the effects of language and dialect contact through close sociolinguistic analysis of lexicon, discourse markers, codeswitching, the subjunctive, and phonology. Their analysis uniquely examines these features across three generations of speakers and two different regional origins within the same corpus. By including MexiRicans as a category, the book not only assesses the dynamics of linguistic convergence, dialect leveling, accommodation, and language loss, but also the concept of intrafamiliar dialect contact pioneered by Potowski. Contextualizing these language changes within the history of Latino communities in Chicago, Spanish in Chicago provides a nuanced picture of a minority language in a major US city and a vital contribution to sociolinguistics and Latino studies.