Pluricentric Languages

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.

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.

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 "one-nation-one-language" assumption is as unrealistic as the well-known Chomskyan ideal of a homogeneous speech community. Linguistic pluricentricity is a common and widespread phenomenon; it can be understood as either differing national standards or differing local norms. The nine studies collected in this volume explore the sociocultural, conceptual and structural dimensions of variation and change within pluricentric languages, with specific emphasis on the relationship between national varieties. They include research undertaken in both the Cognitive Linguistic and socolinguistic tradition, with particular emphasis upon the emerging framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Six languages, all more or less pluricentric, are analyzed: four Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch and Swedish) and two Romance languages (Portuguese and French). The volume describes patterns of phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic variation, and perception and attitudes in relation to these pluricentric languages. It makes use of advanced empirical methods able to account for the complex interplay between conceptual and social aspects of pluricentric variation and other forms of language-internal variation.

This book maps out the pedagogical implications of the global spread and diversification of pluricentric languages for language education and showcases new approaches that can take account of linguistic diversity. Moving the discussion of contemporary norms, aims, and approaches to pluricentric languages in language education beyond English, this book provides a multilingual, comparative perspective through case study examples of Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, and Vietnamese. The chapters document, compare, and evaluate existing practices in the teaching of pluricentric languages, and highlights different pedagogical approaches that embrace their variability and diversity. Presenting approaches to overcome barriers to innovation in language education, the book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, doctoral students in the field of language education, as well as socio- and applied linguists. Practitioners interested in linguistic diversity more broadly will also find this book engaging. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 license.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the «3rd International Conference on Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages» that was held in 2014 at the University of Surrey, Guildford (UK). The papers in section one deal with the theoretical aspects of pluricentricity and methods of description of the variations in pluricentric languages. Section two contains a number of papers about «new» pluricentric languages and «new» non-dominant varieties that have not been described before. Section three showcases pluricentric languages that are used alongside indigenous languages and section four deals with the pluricentricity of special languages.

Since the publication of the first edition of the handbook Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik , the then young discipline has changed and developed considerably. The field has left behind its status as an interdiscipline between sociology and linguistics and is now a worldwide established field. Sociolinguistics continues to contribute to solving practical problems in areas such as language planning and standardization, language policy, as well as in language didactics and speech therapy. Moreover, new topics and areas of application have arisen from the autonomy of the discipline - these have been systematically and extensively included in the second edition of the handbook. The new overall concept depicts the regional and disciplinary representativity of sociolinguistic research while offering an encyclopedia-like useablitiy for all its readers. This includes theoretical depth and stringency for readers interested in theory, as well as methodical abundance and detail for empirical researchers. The descriptions of methods are so informative and precise that they can directly be used in the preparation of project planning. Similarly, the descriptions in the practice-oriented articles are so precise that users can accurately assess to what extent they can expect a certain sociolinguistic approach to help solve their problems. With an extensive description as its goal, the second edition of the handbook Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik takes into account the current standing of the discipline and the modified structure of the field.

This is the first of two thematically arranged volumes with papers that were presented at the "World Conference of Pluricentric Languages and their non-dominant Varieties" (WCPCL). It comprises papers about 20 PCLs and 14 NDVs: African, Arabic, Asian and European pluricentric languages, Berber, Basque, Kazakhstan Russian and many more.