Extremely isolated communities offer "laboratory conditions" for examining the processes of language change and dialect formation. This book presents findings of the first ever ethnographic field work on the most remote island in the world with a permanent population, Tristan da Cunha. It documents the historical formation of a unique local dialect and investigates the sociolinguistic mechanisms that underlie dialect contact and new-dialect formation. It also uncovers the linguistic consequences of post-insularity - language change processes as a result of increasing contacts with other communities and speakers. Researchers and students of language variation will find this book a unique resource.

Spanish is spoken as a first language by almost 400 million people in approximately 60 countries, and has been the subject of numerous political processes and debates since it began to spread globally from Iberia in the thirteenth century. A Political History of Spanish brings together a team of experts to analyze the metalinguistic origins of Spanish and evaluate it as a discursively constructed artefact; that is to say, as a language which contains traces of the society in which it is produced, and of the discursive traditions that are often involved and invoked in its creation. This is a comprehensive and provocative new work which takes a fresh look at Spanish from specific political and historical perspectives, combining the traditional chronological organization of linguistic history and spatial categories such as Iberia, Latin America and the US, whilst simultaneously identifying the limits of these organizational principles.

This book offers a unique understanding of how researchers' linguistic resources, and the languages they use in the research process, are often politically and structurally shaped and constrained, with implications for the reliability of the research. The chapters are written by both experienced and novice researchers, who examine how they negotiated the use of their own, and others', linguistic and communicative resources when undertaking their research in politically-charged, and linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. The contributing authors are either from the Global South, or engaged in work which is contextualised within the Global South; or they face linguistic structural hegemonies in the Global North which challenge their research processes. They utilise diverse theoretical, methodological and disciplinary approaches to produce a collection of engaging and accessible accounts of researching multilingually in their contexts. These accounts will help readers to make theoretically and methodologically informed choices about the political dimensions of languages in their own research when researching multilingually.

This book offers a unique understanding of how researchers' linguistic resources, and the languages they use in the research process, are often politically and structurally shaped and constrained, with implications for the reliability of the research. The chapters are written by both experienced and novice researchers, who examine how they negotiated the use of their own, and others', linguistic and communicative resources when undertaking their research in politically-charged, and linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. The contributing authors are either from the Global South, or engaged in work which is contextualised within the Global South; or they face linguistic structural hegemonies in the Global North which challenge their research processes. They utilise diverse theoretical, methodological and disciplinary approaches to produce a collection of engaging and accessible accounts of researching multilingually in their contexts. These accounts will help readers to make theoretically and methodologically informed choices about the political dimensions of languages in their own research when researching multilingually.

This book responds to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that places an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and illuminates how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. It engages with new ways of understanding language that expand its meaning by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The book unites an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and HE classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts.

This book responds to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that places an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and illuminates how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. It engages with new ways of understanding language that expand its meaning by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The book unites an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and HE classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts.

This book presents case studies of five schools engaged in radical change in order to engage with children's home languages and cultures in a more multilingual and inclusive way. Located around the globe, from Hawaii to Kenya, the case studies are informed by both researchers and professionals on the ground. While the schools in question are each anchored in a unique context and situation, they also have a common mission to see language diversity as a resource, and a responsibility to embrace all the languages of their pupils. The authors offer a rich resource for education professionals and policymakers, including not only theoretical insights but useful practical tips. This innovative volume will be a helpful resource for educational professionals interested in following a path of multilingualism as well as students and scholars of second language acquisition, heritage languages and cultures and multilingual educational policy.

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.

Language, Health and Culture brings together contributions by linguistic scholars working in the area of health communication in Asia—in particular, in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. Olga Zayts-Spence and Susan M. Bridges, along with the contributors, draw on a diverse range of authentic data from different (primary, secondary, digital) healthcare contexts across Asia. The contributions probe empirical analyses and meta-reflections on the empirical, epistemological and theoretical foundations of doing research on language and health communication in Asia. While many of the medical and technological advances originate from the ‘non-English-dominant’/‘peripheral’ contexts, when it comes to health communication, there is a strong tendency to downplay and marginalize the scope and the impact of the ripe research tradition in these contexts. The contributions to the edited volume problematize the hegemony of dominant (Anglocentric) traditions in health communication research by highlighting culture- and context-specific ways of interpreting different health realities through linguistic lenses.

This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to 20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.

Contact Linguistics is a critical investigation of what happens to the grammars of languages when bilingual speakers use both their languages in the same clause. It consolidates earlier insights and presents the new theoretical and empirical work of a scholar whose ideas have had a fundamental impact on the field. It also shows that bilingual data offer a revealing window on the structure of the language faculty. Carol Myers-Scotton examines the nature of major contact phenomena, especially lexical borrowing, grammatical convergence, codeswitching, first language attrition, mixed languages, and the development of creoles. She argues forcefully that types of contact phenomena often seen as separate in fact result from the same processes and can be explained by the same principles. Her discussion centers around two new models derived from the Matrix Language Frame model, previously applied only to codeswitching. One model recognizes four types of morphemes based on their different patterns of distribution across contact phenomena; its key hyothesis is that distribution depends on differential access to the morphemes in the production process. The other analyzes three levels of abstract lexical structure whose splitting and recombination across languages in bilingual speech explains many contact outcomes. This is an important volume, of unusual relevance for theories of competence and performance and vital for all those concerned with language contact. Carol Myers-Scotton is a Carolina Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of South Carolina. She is a specialist in language contact phenomena and sociolinguistics and has a special interest in East and Southern African linguistics. In 1993, she published two volumes on codeswitching, Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa, and Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching (both OUP). She has also edited a volume of essays on language and literature (OUP 1998) and published many articles in her areas of interest.

This book investigates the contact between Arawak and Tucanoan languages spoken in the Vaupés river basin in northwest Amazonia, which spans Colombia and Brazil. In this region language is seen as a badge of identity: language mixing is resisted for ideological reasons. The book considers which parts of the language categories are likely to be borrowed. This study also examines changes brought about by recent contact with European languages and culture, and the linguistic effects of language obsolescence.

Looking for an easy-to-use, practical guide to conducting fieldwork in sociolinguistics? This invaluable textbook will give you the skills and knowledge required for carrying out research projects in 'the field', including: * How to select and enter a community * How to design a research sample * What recording equipment to choose and how to operate it * How to collect, store and manage data * How to interact effectively with participants and communities * What ethical issues you should be aware of. Carefully designed to be of maximum practical use to students and researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and related fields, the book is packed with useful features, including: * Helpful checklists for recording techniques and equipment specifications * Practical examples taken from classic sociolinguistic studies * Vivid passages in which students recount their own experiences of doing fieldwork in many different parts of the world

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 collection showcases the diversity and disciplinary breadth of small stories research, highlighting the growing critical mass of scholarship on small stories and its reach beyond discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. The volume both takes stock of and seeks to advance the development of small stories research by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg, as a counterpoint to conventional models in narrative studies, one which has accounted for "atypical" yet salient activities in everyday life, such as fragmentation and open-endedness, anchoring onto the present, and co-constructive dimensions in stories and identities. With data from different languages and contexts, emphasis is placed on the analytical aspects of the paradigm toward producing models for the analysis of structures, textual and interactional choices, and genres of small stories. Chapters on the role and commodification of small stories in digital environments reflect on the paradigm’s recent extension to the analysis of social media communication. This book will appeal to scholars interested in narrative inquiry and narrative analysis, in such fields as sociolinguistics, literary studies, communication studies, and biographical studies.

How do written and other signs shape our educational spaces and practices; and how, in turn, are these written and other signs shaped by the educational spaces and practices they inhabit? Building on enquiries into the linguistic landscapes of public spaces, this volume addresses these questions and thereby further advances the educational turn in linguistic and semiotic landscapes studies. Prompted by social changes associated with migration and superdiversity, as well as imperatives to promote pluri- and multilingualism, the studies collected here speak to the interest of researchers and practitioners in educational linguistics and educational sciences. They confirm the value of combining empirical analyses of linguistic and semiotic educationscapes with action research on mobilising linguistic landscapes as pedagogical resources to promote multilingual equality.

How do written and other signs shape our educational spaces and practices; and how, in turn, are these written and other signs shaped by the educational spaces and practices they inhabit? Building on enquiries into the linguistic landscapes of public spaces, this volume addresses these questions and thereby further advances the educational turn in linguistic and semiotic landscapes studies. Prompted by social changes associated with migration and superdiversity, as well as imperatives to promote pluri- and multilingualism, the studies collected here speak to the interest of researchers and practitioners in educational linguistics and educational sciences. They confirm the value of combining empirical analyses of linguistic and semiotic educationscapes with action research on mobilising linguistic landscapes as pedagogical resources to promote multilingual equality.

This book examines a wide range of innovations in language learning and teaching in Japan. Each of the chapters describes the impetus for a change or new development in a particular context, from early childhood to adult learning, details its implementation and provides an evaluation of its success. In doing so, they provide a comprehensive overview of best practice in innovating language education from teaching practice in formal classroom settings, to self-directed learning beyond the classroom, and offer recommendations to enhance language education in Japan and beyond. The book will be of interest to scholars of applied linguistics and language development, and in particular to those involved in managing change in language education that attempts to mediate between global trends and local needs.

At eydes.de, the vast archive of The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, with its 5000 hours of recorded testimony in Yiddish about Ashkenazic society in Europe, can now be accessed and researched via the Internet. In 18 contributions scholars comment on the collectiona (TM)s research potentials, discuss data and methodology and throw new light on the interactions between Yiddish and coterritorial cultures.

This book is the first to offer a conceptual framework of English-medium education that can be used across different international higher education (HE) contexts. It provides readers with an understanding of the complexities, possibilities and challenges that this phenomenon raises in the 21st century. Making the case for the pressing need for an overarching conceptualisation, the authors discuss, from a theoretical point of view, the recently introduced ROAD-MAPPING framework for 'English Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings' (EMEMUS). Drawing on current research and examples from a variety of settings, the book makes a strong case for the applicability of the framework in two important directions: as a methodological tool for researching educational practices and as an analytical guide to examine policies and teacher education programmes.

Comprising 11 countries and hundreds of languages from one of the most culturally diverse regions in the world, the chapters in this collection explore a wide range of translation issues. The subject of this volume is set in the contrasted landscapes of mainland peninsulas and maritime archipelagos in Southeast Asia, which, whilst remaining a largely minor area in Asian studies, harbors a wealth of textual heritage that opens to inquiries and new readings. From the post-Angkor Cambodia, the post-colonial Viantiane, to the ultra-modern Singapore metropolis, translation figures problematically in the modernization of indigenous literatures, criss-crossing chronologically and spatially through different literary landscapes. The peninsular geo-body gives rise to the politics of singularity as seen in the case of the predominant monolingual culture in Thailand, whereas the archipelagic geography such as the thousand islands of Indonesia allows for peculiar types of communication. Translation can also be metaphorized poetically to configure the transference in different scenarios such as the cases of self-translation in Philippine protest poetry and untranslatability in Vietnamese diasporic writings. The collection also includes intra-regional comparative views on historical and religious terms. This book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of translation studies, sociolinguistics, and Southeast Asian studies.

This book aims to present the results of research in the sphere of business language and culture, as well as the experience of pedagogical staff and practitioners concerned with broadly understood business. The highly complex nature of contemporary business environment, approached from both the theoretical and practical standpoint, does not cease to prove that research into business studies cannot be dissociated from the cultural and linguistic context. The chapters included in this book were contributed by academics and practitioners alike, which offers a balanced approach to the topic and ensures high levels of diversity together with an undeniable homogeneity. They were gathered with a view to show various aspects of business language, perceived both as a medium of communication and as a subject of research and teaching. They are concerned with business culture as well, including business ethics and representations of business in popular culture. Owing to its multidisciplinary approach, the book presents a roadmap towards successful functioning in business settings, highlighting such issues as education for business purposes, the study of language used in business contexts, the aspects of cross-cultural communication, as well as ethical behaviour based upon different values in multicultural business environments. Given its multifarious character, the book surely appeals not only to academics, but also to the interested laymen and students who wish to expand their knowledge of business studies and related phenomena.

This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.

The collection demonstrates the ways in which established traditions and scholars have come together under the umbrella of linguistic ethnography to explore important questions about how language and communication are used in a range of settings and contexts, and with what effect.

The impact of mobility and superdiversity in recent sociolinguistic research is well-established, yet very few studies deal with issues related to immobility. The chapters in this book focus on the sociolinguistic investigation of the dynamics between mobility and immobility as experienced by migrants, asylum seekers and members of minority or exploited groups. Central to the book is an exploration of how mobilities are affected by and in turn affect power relations and of the kinds of resources used by people to deal with (im)mobility processes. The book brings to light a new critical sociolinguistic imagination that is responsive to 21st century processes of (im)mobilities as socially, discursively and emotionally constructed and negotiated.