The empirical and descriptive strengths of sociolinguistics, developed over more than 40 years of research, have not been matched by an active engagement with theory. Yet, over this time, social theorising has taken important new turns, linked in many ways to linguistic and discursive concerns. Sociolinguistics and Social Theory is the first book to explore the interface between sociolinguistic analysis and modern social theory.
Nikolas Coupland is Professor and Director of the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University. Srikant Sarangi is Reader in Language and Communication at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, and Christopher N. Candlin is Chair Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for English Language Education and Communication Research, City University of Hong Kong.

The book sets out to reunite sociolinguistics with the concepts and perspectives of several of the most influential modern theorists of society and social action, including Bakhtin, Foucault, Habermas, Sacks, Goffman, Bourdieu and Giddens. In eleven newly commissioned chapters, leading sociolinguists reappraise the theoretical framing of their research, reaching out beyond conventional limits. The authors propose significant new orientations to key sociolinguistic themes, including:
- social motivations for language variation and change
- language, power and authority
- language and ageing
- language, race and class
- language planning
In substantial introductory and concluding chapters, the editors and invited discussants reassess the boundaries of sociolinguistic theory and the priorities ofsociolinguistic methods. Sociolinguistics and Social Theory encourages students and researchers of sociolinguistics to be more reflexively aware and critical of the social bases of their analyses and invites a reasessment of the place sociolinguistics occupies in the social sciences generally.

First published in 1988, this book focuses on diversity and discourse, and collects contemporaneous research across a wide range of topics including: description, polemic, narrative analysis, DJ talk, philosophical history, conversation, children's books and nuclear deterrence. The essays demonstrate analyses of discourse in the service of stylistic inquiry, exploring relationships of text and context. This reflects the overall argument that discourse analyses aiming to represent diversity of social context will necessarily approach the task selectively, since all dimensions are of potential relevance to any and every communicative manifestation. Some of contextual dimensions that are addressed include: interpersonal, socio-structural, modal, ideological, and pragmatic.

The empirical and descriptive strengths of sociolinguistics, developed over more than 40 years of research, have not been matched by an active engagement with theory. Yet, over this time, social theorising has taken important new turns, linked in many ways to linguistic and discursive concerns. Sociolinguistics and Social Theory is the first book to explore the interface between sociolinguistic analysis and modern social theory. The book sets out to reunite sociolinguistics with the concepts and perspectives of several of the most influential modern theorists of society and social action, including Bakhtin, Foucault, Habermas, Sacks, Goffman, Bourdieu and Giddens. In eleven newly commissioned chapters, leading sociolinguists reappraise the theoretical framing of their research, reaching out beyond conventional limits. The authors propose significant new orientations to key sociolinguistic themes, including- - social motivations for language variation and change - language, power and authority - language and ageing - language, race and class - language planning In substantial introductory and concluding chapters, the editors and invited discussants reassess the boundaries of sociolinguistic theory and the priorities of sociolinguistic methods. Sociolinguistics and Social Theory encourages students and researchers of sociolinguistics to be more reflexively aware and critical of the social bases of their analyses and invites a reasessment of the place sociolinguistics occupies in the social sciences generally.

This title is a new collection in the Routledge Critical Concepts in Linguistics series. In six volumes, it provides a critical synthesis of the key ideas, findings, methods, and approaches that make up the interdisciplinary field of sociolinguistics. It includes both classic texts and contemporary, state-of-the-art research, with a bias towards the latter. The editors aver that the collection a ~will stand as an articulation of "the New Sociolinguistics" as it is emerging through a sustained reflexive reassessment of the field which is now ongoing, set against a core of classic textsa (TM). Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, Sociolinguistics is an essential work of reference and is destined to be welcomed by scholars and students alike as a vital one-stop research resource.

Metalanguage brings together new, original contributions on people's knowledge about language and representations of language, e.g., representations of dialects, styles, utterances, stances and goals in relation to sociolinguistic theory, sociolinguistic accounts of language variation, and accounts of linguistic usage. Drawing on a variety of data sources such as lay and linguists' metalanguage, the media, parliamentary debates, education, and retail shopping, the book comprises four sections and an integrative commentary. The main thematic parts deal with metalanguage in relation to the following issues: the theory of metalanguage, ideology, social evaluation, and stylisation. Other key themes discussed include constructionism, identity formation, in- and out-grouping, deception, discrimination, manipulation, and the increasing semiotisation of the socio-cultural landscape. Apart from the strictly linguistic concerns, some contributions focus on discourse in a broader sense examining meta-commentary construed in modalities other than language. The book follows from and complements a great tradition of the study of metalanguage, reflexivity, and metapragmatics, and offers a new, integrating perspective from various fields of sociolinguistics: perceptual dialectology, variationism, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics. The broad range of theoretical issues and accessible style of writing will appeal to advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics and in other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities including linguists, communication researchers, anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, critical and social theorists. The book includes chapters by Deborah Cameron, Nikolas Coupland, Dariusz Galasinski, Peter Garrett, Adam Jaworski, Tore Kristiansen, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, Dennis Preston, Theo van Leeuwen, Kay Richardson, Itesh Sachdev, Angie Williams, and John Wilson.

First published in 1988, this book focuses on diversity and discourse, and collects contemporaneous research across a wide range of topics including: description, polemic, narrative analysis, DJ talk, philosophical history, conversation, children's books and nuclear deterrence. The essays demonstrate analyses of discourse in the service of stylistic inquiry, exploring relationships of text and context. This reflects the overall argument that discourse analyses aiming to represent diversity of social context will necessarily approach the task selectively, since all dimensions are of potential relevance to any and every communicative manifestation. Some of contextual dimensions that are addressed include: interpersonal, socio-structural, modal, ideological, and pragmatic.

In this bestselling Reader, Jaworski and Coupland have collected in one volume the most important and influential articles on discourse analysis. Designed as a structured sourcebook and divided into clear sections, The Discourse Reader covers the foundations of modern discourse analysis and represents all of its contemporary methods and traditions. The third edition: Has been revised and updated throughout to ensure a selection of up to date and accessible readings Includes new readings by Jan Blommaert, Norman Fairclough, James Paul Gee, Barbara Johnstone, Ron Scollon and Don Zimmerman, among others. Features papers by leading researchers commissioned especially for the new edition. The general introduction serves as an essential introduction to the field of discourse analysis, while the section introductions provide a useful overview and further insight into the readings. The third edition of The Discourse Reader is a key resource for all students of discourse analysis in a wide range of disciplines from linguistics to communication studies, anthropology and psychology.

In this bestselling Reader, Jaworski and Coupland have collected in one volume the most important and influential articles on discourse analysis. Designed as a structured sourcebook and divided into clear sections, The Discourse Reader covers the foundations of modern discourse analysis and represents all of its contemporary methods and traditions. The third edition: Has been revised and updated throughout to ensure a selection of up to date and accessible readings Includes new readings by Jan Blommaert, Norman Fairclough, James Paul Gee, Barbara Johnstone, Ron Scollon and Don Zimmerman, among others. Features papers by leading researchers commissioned especially for the new edition. The general introduction serves as an essential introduction to the field of discourse analysis, while the section introductions provide a useful overview and further insight into the readings. The third edition of The Discourse Reader is a key resource for all students of discourse analysis in a wide range of disciplines from linguistics to communication studies, anthropology and psychology.

When talk circulates through technological media - through television or radio and through the activities they support, like the dissemination of news, product advertising or entertainment - it takes on distinctive characteristics, functions and styles. The talking media have developed their own ways of styling individuals (often as celebrities of different types, but also as 'ordinary people'), and ways of styling relationships (such as constructing informality or trust or authority). Media also style their own ways of communicating (how to read the news, how to conduct interviews, how to entertain or educate others, and so on). Media invest heavily in style and styling, drawing on semiotic modes well beyond speech itself. 'Style' therefore needs to be theorised carefully in sociolinguistics and neighbouring disciplines. Episodes and fragments of mediated styles commonly take on new lives when they are re-circulated via interactive 'new' media platforms. Style therefore points to both stability, where ways of speaking and ways of being have become culturally familiar, and to instability, in the talking media's persistent dynamic reworking of stylistic norms. This book explores a wide range of normative structures and creative media processes of this sort, in many different national contexts and in different languages. The globalised world is already massively mediatised - what we know about language, people and society is necessarily shaped through our engagement with media. But talking media are caught up in wider currents of rapid change too. Creative innovations in media styling can heighten our reflexive awareness, but they can also unsettle our existing understandings of language-society relations. In reporting new investigations by expert researchers, situated in relation to relevant theory, the book gives an original and timely account of how style, media and change need to be integrated further to advance the discipline of sociolinguistics.

Sociolinguistics is a dynamic field of research that explains the role and function of language in social life. This book offers the most substantial account available of the core contemporary ideas and arguments in sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on innovation and change. Bringing together original writing by more than twenty of the field's most influential international thinkers and researchers, this is an indispensable guide to the newest and most searching ideas about language in society. For researchers and advanced students it gives access to the field's most pressing issues and debates, as well as providing a platform for new initiatives in sociolinguistic research.

This leading team of scholars presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users. The authors refer to this network of interlinked changes as the new conditions surrounding small languages (Sami, Corsican, Irish and Welsh) in peripheral sites. Starting from the conviction that peripheral sites can and should inform the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the book explores how new modes of reflexivity, more transactional frames for authenticity, commodification of peripheral resources, and boundary-transgression with humour, all carry forward change. These types of change articulate a blurring of binary oppositions between centre and periphery, old and new, and standard and non-standard. Such research is particularly urgent in multilingual small language contexts, where different conceptualisations of language(s), boundaries, and speakers impact on individuals' social, cultural, and economic capital, and opportunities.

The Handbook of Language and Globalization brings together important new studies of language and discourse in the global era, consolidating a vibrant new field of sociolinguistic research. * The first volume to assemble leading scholarship in this rapidly developing field * Features new contributions from 36 internationally-known scholars, bringing together key research in the field and establishing a benchmark for future research * Comprehensive coverage is divided into four sections: global multilingualism, world languages and language systems; global discourse in key domains and genres; language, values and markets under globalization; and language, distance and identities * Covers an impressive breadth of topics including tourism, language teaching, social networking, terrorism, and religion, among many others * Winner of the British Association for Applied Linguistics book prize 2011

The theory of accommodation is concerned with motivations underlying and consequences arising from ways in which we adapt our language and communication patterns toward others. Since accommodation theory's emergence in the early l970s, it has attracted empirical attention across many disciplines and has been elaborated and expanded many times. In Contexts of Accommodation, accommodation theory is presented as a basis for sociolinguistic explanation, and it is the applied perspective that predominates this edited collection. The book seeks to demonstrate how the core concepts and relationships invoked by accommodation theory are available for addressing altogether pragmatic concerns. Accommodative processes can, for example, facilitate or impede language learners' proficiency in a second language as well as immigrants' acceptance into certain host communities; affect audience ratings and thereby the life of a television program; affect reaction to defendants in court and hence the nature of the judicial outcome; and be an enabling or detrimental force in allowing handicapped people to fulfil their communicative potential. Contexts of Accommodation will appeal to researchers and advanced students in language and communication sciences, as well as to sociolinguists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists.

Style refers to ways of speaking - how speakers use the resource of language variation to make meaning in social encounters. This 2007 book develops a coherent theoretical approach to style in sociolinguistics, illustrated with copious examples. It explains how speakers project different social identities and create different social relationships through their style choices, and how speech-style and social context inter-relate. Style therefore refers to the wide range of strategic actions and performances that speakers engage in, to construct themselves and their social lives. Coupland draws on and integrates a wide variety of contemporary sociolinguistic research as well as his own extensive research in this field. The emphasis is on how social meanings are made locally, in specific relationships, genres, groups and cultures, and on studying language variation as part of the analysis of spoken discourse.

The theory of accommodation is concerned with motivations underlying and consequences arising from ways in which we adapt our language and communication patterns toward others. Since accommodation theory's emergence in the early l970s, it has attracted empirical attention across many disciplines and has been elaborated and expanded many times. In Contexts of Accommodation, accommodation theory is presented as a basis for sociolinguistic explanation, and it is the applied perspective that predominates this edited collection. The book seeks to demonstrate how the core concepts and relationships invoked by accommodation theory are available for addressing altogether pragmatic concerns. Accommodative processes can, for example, facilitate or impede language learners' proficiency in a second language as well as immigrants' acceptance into certain host communities; affect audience ratings and thereby the life of a television program; affect reaction to defendants in court and hence the nature of the judicial outcome; and be an enabling or detrimental force in allowing handicapped people to fulfill their communicative potential.

Sociolinguistics is a dynamic field of research that explains the role and function of language in social life. This book offers the most substantial account available of the core contemporary ideas and arguments in sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on innovation and change. Bringing together original writing by more than twenty of the field's most influential international thinkers and researchers, this is an indispensable guide to the newest and most searching ideas about language in society. For researchers and advanced students it gives access to the field's most pressing issues and debates, as well as providing a platform for new initiatives in sociolinguistic research.

Style refers to ways of speaking - how speakers use the resource of language variation to make meaning in social encounters. This 2007 book develops a coherent theoretical approach to style in sociolinguistics, illustrated with copious examples. It explains how speakers project different social identities and create different social relationships through their style choices, and how speech-style and social context inter-relate. Style therefore refers to the wide range of strategic actions and performances that speakers engage in, to construct themselves and their social lives. Coupland draws on and integrates a wide variety of contemporary sociolinguistic research as well as his own extensive research in this field. The emphasis is on how social meanings are made locally, in specific relationships, genres, groups and cultures, and on studying language variation as part of the analysis of spoken discourse.