Have you ever noticed an accent or puzzled over a dialect phrase? Language can be a powerful tool with which one can create a persona; it can be a common ground between people or can be used as a divide between social groups. This Companion is for anyone who is interested in how and why people speak and write with such diversity.

The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics includes articles by leading scholars in the field on:

• methods of observation and analysis
• social correlates
• socio-psychological factors
• socio-political factors
• language change.

With a substantial A-Z glossary of key terms and concepts, directions for further study, and detailed cross-referencing with links to the glossary, The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics is both an essential broad-based introduction for those new to the field, and a highly useful reference for the more advanced linguist.

Have you ever noticed an accent or puzzled over a dialect phrase? Language can be a powerful tool with which one can create a persona; it can be a common ground between people or can be used as a divide between social groups. This Companion is for anyone who is interested in how and why people speak and write with such diversity.

The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics includes articles by leading scholars in the field on:

• methods of observation and analysis
• social correlates
• socio-psychological factors
• socio-political factors
• language change.

With a substantial A-Z glossary of key terms and concepts, directions for further study, and detailed cross-referencing with links to the glossary, The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics is both an essential broad-based introduction for those new to the field, and a highly useful reference for the more advanced linguist.

This is a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary discussion of the connections between language, borders and identities. Looking at a broad, geographically diverse spectrum of border contexts, this volume illustrates a range of methodological approaches. It examines political borders that divide monoglossic and heteroglossic territories, as well as regional and local and symbolic borders. The authors assess the linguistic implications of these borders contexts such as language planning and policy (e.g. for multilingual education and protection of minority languages) and border control (via the chapter on language analysis for the determination of origin, 'LADO'). Each border is unique, making generalisations about how language functions in 'borderlands' difficult to formulate but casting the net as wide as we intend will, however, equip us to develop and refine models of how language is used to construct borders, and to indicate on which side of a border speakers situate themselves. It covers political, socio-psychological and symbolic borders. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach by combining sociolinguistic research with human geography, anthropology and social psychology. It uses international case studies and examples throughout.

Este volumen reune trabajos sobre distintos discursos publicos, politicos y periodisticos, que abordan cuestiones en torno al lexico empleado en los medios, en las instituciones y en los movimientos ciudadanos. Se estudia el valor argumentativo del lexico mediante la atencion a temas y fenomenos linguisticos concretos en generos diversos. Aunque los enfoques se enmarcan en la corriente del Analisis del discurso, son variadas las perspectivas que confluyen en este volumen, entre otras, las teorias de la valoracion y de los marcos, la pragmatica discursiva y la linguistica de corpus. Este volumen contiene trabajos en espanol y en ingles.

This volume offers a broad survey of our current state of knowledge on the connections between variability in language use and the construction, negotiation, maintenance and performance of identities. Bringing together the expertise of distinguished international scholars in specially commissioned chapters, the book provides a thematic reader and essential resource for advanced students and researchers in language and identity studies.Leading scholars consider: * Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of language and identity* Individual identities* Group and community identities* National and supra-local regional identitiesDealing sequentially with both social and personal identities at various levels, the chapters use detailed empirical evidence to illustrate how the multi-layered, dynamic nature of identities is realised through linguistic behaviour. Several chapters in the collection focus on contexts in which a heightened sense of identity might be expected: cases in which identities may be disputed, changing, blurred, peripheral, or imposed. Such a focus on complex contexts allows clearer insight into the identity-making and -marking functions of language. The collection approaches these topics from a range of perspectives, with contributions from sociolinguists, sociophoneticians, linguistic anthropologists, clinical linguists and forensic linguists