Sociolinguistics Of Style And Social Class In Contemporary Athens

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.

Research Companion to Language and Country Branding brings together entirely new interdisciplinary research conducted by scholars working on various sociolinguistic, semiotic, anthropological and discursive analytical aspects of country branding all over the world. Branding is a process of identity construction, whereby countries gain visibility and put themselves on the world map as distinctive entities by drawing on their history, culture, economy, society, geography, and their people. Through branding, countries aim not only at establishing their uniqueness but also, and perhaps most importantly, at attracting tourism, investments, high quality human capital, as well as at forging financial, military, political and social alliances. Against this backdrop, this volume explores how countries and regions imagine and portray others and themselves in terms of gender, ethnicity, and diversity today as well as the past. In this respect, the book examines how branding differs from other, related policies and practices, such as nation building, banal nationalism, and populism. This volume is an essential reference for students, researchers, and practitioners with an interest in country, nation, and place branding processes.

This volume sets out to investigate the linguistic ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, with chapters that combine empirical and theoretical approaches to the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. One important feature of this publication is that the five parts of the collection deal with such key issues as the historical dimension, language policies and language planning, contemporary societal multilingualism, multilingual language acquisition, and the localized Englishes of global cities. The first four sections of the volume provide a multi-levelled and finely-detailed description of multilingual diversity of three global cities, while the final section discusses postcolonial Englishes in the context of multilingual language acquisition and language contact.

This book examines the various patterns of nominal and pronominal address used in Jamaica and Trinidad, the two most populous islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given that the Anglo-Caribbean context has so far been largely neglected in address research, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic means Jamaicans and Trinidadians have at their disposal and make use of to address each other. A particular focus will be on variation in the speakers’ address behaviour with regard to their sex, age, social class, ethnicity, and regional background. The study draws both on data from a self-compiled corpus of postcolonial Jamaican and Trinidadian literary works, and on questionnaire and interview data collected during fieldwork. This book contributes to the ever-growing body of research in the field of nominal and pronominal address, and will be relevant to researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and World Englishes.

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics introduces readers to the major facets of research on Arabic and of the linguistic situation in the Arabic-speaking world. The edited collection includes chapters from prominent experts on various fields of Arabic linguistics. The contributors provide overviews of the state of the art in their field and specifically focus on ideas and issues. Not simply an overview of the field, this handbook explores subjects in great depth and from multiple perspectives. In addition to the traditional areas of Arabic linguistics, the handbook covers computational approaches to Arabic, Arabic in the diaspora, neurolinguistic approaches to Arabic, and Arabic as a global language. The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics is a much-needed resource for researchers on Arabic and comparative linguistics, syntax, morphology, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics, and also for undergraduate and graduate students studying Arabic or linguistics.

This book concentrates on the parallel evolution of debt crisis and digital communications in Greece. By examining four different online and social media platforms, it uncovers the impact of digital media on the contentious politics of crisis, as well as the impact of the political economic sphere on the formation of the Greek digital mediascape.

An indispensable guide to the newest and most searching ideas about language in society.

Developments in the analysis of linguistic variation show the need for a theoretical model whereby variants are viewed as cognitively-based communicative choices. In this book, the analysis of the first and second grammatical persons in Spanish media discourse illustrates an approach to linguistic structure and usage as motivated by the need to create meaning at all semiotic levels. Rather than mere sets of deictic forms, persons constitute arrays of functional strategies used by speakers to develop certain representations of themselves and others. The degree of salience attributed to some participant through grammatical configuration – including features like person, way of formulation and syntactic function – strongly conditions the discursive role of that participant, as well as the communicative situation at large. Methodologically, the demonstration conjugates the analysis of quantitative usage patterns with that of specific instances of choice, in order to elucidate the stylistic potential of syntactic forms in media contexts. Understanding variation as the construction of meaning is essential to the scientific advancement of linguistics as an inherently social and cognitive discipline.