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.

Space provides the stage for our social lives - social thought evolved and developed in a constant interaction with space. The volume demonstrates how this has led to an astonishing intertwining of spatial and social thought. For the first time, research on language comprehension, metaphors, priming, spatial perception, face perception, art history and other fields is brought together to provide an integrative view. This overview confirms that often, metaphors reveal a deeper truth about how our mind uses spatial information to represent social concepts. Yet, the evidence also goes beyond this insight, showing for instance how flexible our mind operates with spatial metaphors, how the peculiarities of our bodies determine the way we assign meaning to space, and how the asymmetry of our brain influences spatial and face perception. Finally, it is revealed that also how we write language - from left to right or from right to left - shapes how we perceive, interpret, and produce horizontal movement and order. The evidence ranges from linguistics to social and spatial perception to neuropsychology, seamlessly integrating such diverse findings as speed in word comprehension, children's depictions of abstract concepts, estimates of the steepness of hills, and archival research on how often Homer Simpson is depicted left or right of Marge. The chapters in this book offer a topology of social cognition and explore the pivotal role language plays in creating links between spatial and social thought.

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.

The publication of Hugo Baetens Beardsmore's book Bilingualism: Basic Principles by Multilingual Matters in 1982 coincided with an unprecedented upsurge of interest in bilingualism. A major reason for this was the acknowledgement that bilingualism is far more common than was previously thought, and perhaps even the norm. The number of bilinguals at the turn of the third millennium is probably greater than ever before and will continue to grow as a result of the combined forces of globalisation, automatisation, increased mobility and migration, and modernisation of foreign language teaching. The contributions in this book prove that, given the right conditions, bilingualism can confer distinct benefits like intellectual, psychological, social, cultural and economic improvement on the individual. The papers in this volume have been written by leading scholars in the field of bilingualism and deal with individual bilingualism, societal and educational phenomena, addressing issues such as bilingual usage, acquisition, teaching, and language planning and policy. The volume's major asset lies in its diversity, not only in depth of investigation and in topical variety but also in the range of languages and geographical regions covered. Another important feature of the volume is its multidisciplinary perspective. Among the contributors are linguists, sociologists, psychologists and sociolinguists.

Polish vs. American Courtroom Discourse brings together the fields of discourse analysis and socio-legal studies to identify, illustrate and explain the cross-cultural similarities and disparities between the inquisitorial and adversarial procedures of witness examination in criminal trials.

This book explores translation strategies for films and TV programs. On the basis of case studies on subtitle translations, it argues that translators are expected to take into consideration not only linguistic and cultural differences but also the limits of time and space. Based on the editor's experience working as a translator for TV, journalist, and narrator, this book proposes employing editorial translation for TV translation. Further, in light of statistics on international audiences' views on Chinese films, it suggests striking a balance between conveying cultural messages and providing good entertainment.

Linguists, applied linguists and language teachers all appeal to the native speaker as an important reference point. But what exactly (who exactly?) is the native speaker? This book examines the native speaker from different points of view, arguing that the native speaker is both myth and reality.

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

One key measure of a country's status in the world is the literacy of its people; at the same time, global migration has led to increased interest in bilingualism and foreign language learning as topics of research. Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures reviews international studies of the role of literacy in child development, particularly how children learn their first written language and acquire a second written and spoken one. Comparisons and contrasts are analyzed across eight countries and 11 languages, including English, Spanish, Mandarin, Hebrew, Dutch, and Catalan.

Using qualitative and quantitative, established and experimental methods, contributors trace toddlers' development of print awareness, clear up common myths regarding parental involvement and non-involvement in their children's literacy, and suggest how the spelling of words can aid in the gaining of vocabulary. For added relevance to educators, the book includes chapters on early intervention for reading problems and the impact of pedagogical science on teaching literacy.

Highlights of the coverage:

• Letter name knowledge in early spelling development
• Early informal literacy experiences
• Environmental factors promoting literacy at home
• Reading books to young children: what it does-and doesn't do
• The role of orthography in literacy acquisition among monolingual and bilingual children
• Gaining literacy in a foreign language
• Instructional influences on literacy growth

Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures adds significant depth and interest to the knowledge base and should inspire contributions from additional languages and orthographies. It belongs in the libraries of researchers and educators involved in cognitive psychology, language education, early childhood education and linguistics.

Although the Japanese language is one of the most quoted examples in politeness research, extant publications focus on particular areas of politeness, and very few of them enquire into the varied aspects of Japanese politeness. In this book, Yasuko Obana provides an integrated account of what signifies Japanese politeness. By examining how far previous assumptions can apply to Japanese, Obana exposes a variety of characteristics of Japanese politeness. By taking a diachronic approach, she probes into what constitutes politeness, extracts key elements of the term 'polite' in Japanese, and demonstrates how modern honorifics' apparent diverse, divergent uses and effects can be integrated into a systematic matrix. Furthermore, by quoting traditional Japanese language scholars' (kokugo gakusha) studies, Obana brings different views into the open. She also carves out politeness strategies in Japanese that have not been adequately explored to date, and which often conform to the way in which honorifi cs behave because they refl ect social indexicality. This book is a good reference for scholars in pragmatics, particularly for those who are working on politeness. It is useful for Japanese language teachers who want to know how to teach Japanese politeness to non-native learners. Postgraduate students of Japanese or pragmatics may also find this book useful for self-study.

This book showcases new and innovative developments and approaches in pragmatics, spotlighting perspectives from an international range of emerging scholars undertaking cutting-edge research pushing the field in new directions. The volume begins by taking stock of the most up-to-date developments in pragmatics research, as embodied by the work of a newer generation of pragmaticists. Chapters are organized around key areas of development within pragmatics, including intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, and new perspectives on referencing, implicating, and inferring, shedding further light on the ways in which pragmatics increasingly interfaces with other linguistic disciplines and on innovative methodologies. The book also places the focus on pragmatics approaches in languages other than than English, further expanding the borders of research. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in pragmatics interested in staying on top of the latest developments and future directions for the field.

There have been noticeable demographic changes recently in the use of English around the world. English as a medium of communication is now the contact language of native speakers from many diverse speech communities who interact with each other in multilingual contexts. The use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and its implications has become a hot topic in applied linguistics and English studies. Communicating Strategically in English as a Lingua Franca reflects the growing interest in achieving communicative effectiveness in ELF situations and provides a comprehensive account of recent empirical findings in the field of ELF. It analyzes and interprets the author's own large corpus of naturally occurring spoken interactions and focuses on identifying innovative employments in the communicative strategies and pragmatics of speakers involved in ELF interactions. In doing so, this book makes a considerable contribution to the growing field of empirical studies in ELF. It explores the usage of pragmatic strategies and highlights their significant role in communicative effectiveness in ELF interactions. In showing the processes of classifying communication strategies involved in the identification of newly observed communication strategies, this book will be of great interest to English linguists, applied linguists, graduate and undergraduate students of English, English Language Teaching material developers and teachers of English.

This book presents a collection of thematically focused articles addressing culture-specific features of academic communication, with a particular focus on communication conducted in English as an Additional Language and directed at multicultural audiences. It comprises papers arranged in four sections: Expert writers, Novice writers and readers, Conference participants, and Non-research academic genres. The book explicitly addresses and is centred upon the concept of a research niche understood as a space to be captured and populated, as a temporary location to move or grow out of in the course of individual professional development from novice to expert, and as a space to consciously reach beyond, delimited by one's linguistic, cultural, educational, and geopolitical background. Here the niche is approached as a frame of reference for discussion of what is culture-bound, culture-sensitive, and culture-free in the academic community and its practices.

This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of academic researchers in order to examine how and to what extent the challenge of language revitalisation should be reassessed and reconceptualised to take account of our fast-changing social context. The period of four decades between 1980 and 2020 that straddled the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is widely regarded as one that witnessed a series of fundamental social, economic and political transformations. Many societies have become increasingly individualistic, mobile and diverse in terms of ethnicity and identity; their economies have become increasingly interconnected; and their governance structures have become increasingly complex, incorporating a growing number of different levels and actors. In addition, rapid advancements with regard to automated, digital and communication technology have had a far-reaching impact on how people interact with each other and participate in society. The chapters in this book aim to advance an agenda of key questions that should concern those working in the field of language revitalisation over the coming years, and the volume will be of interest to students, scholars and policy-makers in related areas including sociolinguistics, education, sociology, geography, political science, law, economics, Celtic studies, and communication technology.

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 is a comprehensive volume which engages with language policies and positions to highlight the issues surrounding language commodification and globalization.Throughout human history, languages have been in competition with each other. As the world becomes more globalized, this trend increases. It affects the decision-making of those in positions of power and determines macro language policies and planning. Often decisions about language (or dialects or language variety) are related to usefulness - defined in terms of their pragmatic and commercial currency or their value as symbols of socio-cultural identity. Languages can be modes of entry into coveted social hierarchies or strongholds of religious, historical, technological and political power bases. Languages are seen now as commodities that carry different values in an era of globalization.This volume engages with language policies and positions in relation to the roles and functions these languages adopt. It examines the 'value' of languages, defined in terms of the power they have in the global marketplace as much as within the complex matrices of the local socio-politics. These valuations strongly underpin the various motivations that influence policy-making decisions, and in turn, these motivations create the tensions that characterize many language-related issues; tensions that arise when languages become commodified.

Capital, Commodity, and English Language Teaching illustrates how the drive for profit in commercial ELT affects the manner in which language is taught. The book looks at education as a form of production, and asks how lessons are produced, and how the production of profit in addition to the production of the lesson affects the operation of educational institutions and their stakeholders. Simpson delivers a theoretically rigorous conception of capital and builds from this an investigation into how the circulation of capital for profit interrelates with the teaching of language. Simpson discusses ELT at both a global level, in discussion of the ELT industry in the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada, Japan, Spain, and transnationally online, as well as at a more local level, where finer detailed descriptions of the work-lives of those within the Japanese eikaiwa ELT industry are given. Drawing on a synthesis of Marxist and Bourdieusian theory, the book outlines a dialectical approach to understanding capital, and to understanding how the drive for profit and language education interrelate with one another. Simpson concludes by showing how such an approach might open up areas for further research in a number of contexts across the globe, as well as in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Providing a model for addressing global issues of ELT, this book is of interest to advanced students, scholars and professionals within applied linguistics, TESOL, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, language economics and related areas.

The author presents a new approach to the study of language policy, by focusing on language policy formation and implementation as a dynamic, conflict-laden "process" involving the interaction of various actors with different motivations and uneven bargaining powers, rather than as a "product," examinable "post hoc" from existing language legislation.

This book proposes, examines and unpacks the notion of unequal Englishes as a way to understand English today. Unlike many studies on the pluralization of English, the volume assumes that inequalities and Englishes are inextricably linked and must be understood and theorized together.

This book throws light on ideologies, practices and sociocultural developments currently shaping language use in Japan by departing from the more common investigation of language in private contexts and examining aspects of the language found in a range of significant public spaces, from the material (an international airport, the streets of Tokyo, the JSL classroom in Japan and courtrooms) to the electronic (television dramas, local government web pages and cyberspace).

Through its study of the language encountered in such settings, the volume provides a deeper understanding of multifaceted aspects of linguistic diversity, both in terms of the use of languages other than Japanese and of issues relating to the Japanese language itself. The variety of theoretical approaches brought to bear by contributing authors ensures a substantial intellectual contribution to the literature on language in contemporary Japan.

This book was published as a special issue of Japanese Studies.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

The book is the first of its kind to establish Cognitive Linguistics as a research paradigm within the field of world Englishes. The authors survey the main tenets of both areas of linguistic enquiry and suggest that the theoretical and methodological apparatus developed both within Cognitive Linguistics generally and within its novel sub-discipline Cognitive Sociolinguistics can overcome certain limitations inherent in traditional approaches to cultural variation in language. They present a case study of the linguistic realization of the cultural model of community in African English as an exemplar for the investigation of cultural models in other varieties of English. Corpus-linguistic methods are combined with conceptual metaphor analysis and blending theory to elucidate a vast network of conceptualizations salient to speakers of African English. The findings, based on computer corpora and a range of additional sources, are discussed against the background of work in anthropology, religious studies, and political science. The book also reflects on the role of English in intercultural communication and concludes with a comparison of Cognitive Linguistics and pragmatic functionalism, placing the former in the wider framework of a hermeneutic philosophy that stresses dialogic understanding.

This volume covers the language situation in Hong Kong, Timor-Leste and Sri Lanka 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. Two of the authors are indigenous to the situations described while the other has undertaken extensive field work and consulting there. The three monographs contained in this volume draw together the literature on each of the polities to present an overview of the research available about each of them, while providing new research-based information. The purpose of the volume is to provide an up-to-date overview of the language situation in each polity based on a series of key questions in the hope that this might facilitate the development of a richer theory to guide language policy and planning in other polities where similar issues may arise. This book was published as special issues of Current Issues in Language Planning.

This book explores the nature and scope of modality in Japanese. It contains a review of the history of Japanese modality studies, as well as theoretical and empirical research and is the first collection of studies on Japanese modality written in English and offers a stimulating contrast to existing studies on Western languages.

The Language, Society and Power Reader is the definitive Reader for students studying introductory modules in language and society.

Highly user-friendly, this wide-ranging collection of key readings introduces students to the thoughts and writings of major writers working within the area of sociolinguistics. The Language, Society and Power Reader

• is divided into ten thematic sections that explore the nature of language in the following areas: power, politics, media, gender, ethnicity, age, social class, identity and standardisation
• includes classic foundational readings from renowned scholars, but also innovative and contemporary work from new writers in the area
• provides a wealth of editorial support for each section with detailed section introductions and background information, issues to consider, annotated further reading and suggestions for further viewing
• features a glossary with helpful definitions and information on how the readings link to different areas.

While it can be used as a stand-alone text, The Language, Society and Power Reader has also been fully cross-referenced with the new companion title: Language, Society and Power, third edition (Routledge, 2011). Together these books provide the complete resource for students studying modules in language and society in English language and linguistics, media, communication, cultural studies, sociology and psychology.