Sociolinguistics

"I'm sitting here in Newfoundland, in Canada, writing a book about sociolinguistics, and you're out there somewhere, starting to read it. If you were here and could hear me talk -- especially if you were Canadian, especially if you had some training -- you could tell a lot about me. When I speak English, most people can tell I'm North American (I pronounce schedule with a [sk] sound), Canadian (I rhyme shone with gone, not bone), and probably from Quebec (I keep my socks in a bureau). And if I was wherever you are, I could probably tell a lot about your speech community and where you fit into it. The fact that we can do this is one of the things that interest sociolinguists..." It's rare to encounter a textbook that one will want to read cover to cover. But Gerard van Herk has written exactly that, introducing students to the field of sociolinguistics as the best teachers do: with excitement, humor, and deep knowledge. What is Sociolinguistics? is a tour through the major issues that define the field, such as region, status, gender, time, language attitudes, interaction, and style, while also exploring the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, culture and ethnicity, language contact, and education. The chapters contains useful and clear features including: Numerous innovative exercises and Spotlighted research, where the author introduces some key concepts discussed in foundational research and offers suggestions for reading the primary literature Further readings, glossary terms, chapter summaries, and text boxes that explore introduced concepts in greater depth for interested students The companion website offers PowerPoint slides for instructors and sample answers to questions, while providing students with further resources, including sound files and carefully curated links for further study.

Making Waves tells the human story of an academic field based on one-to-one interviews with 43 of the most famous scholars in Variationist Sociolinguistics. Explanations of concepts, ideas, good practice and sage advice come directly from the progenitors of the discipline. An authentic, inside story about the origins of Sociolinguistics as Language Variation and Change, recording the context and spirit of sociolinguistics Gives students access to the views on language variation of major sociolinguists such as Bill Labov and Peter Trudgill Offers a human story of an academic field, and is written in the style of a novel, offering complete accessibility with minimal in-group terminology Provides a timely audio archive of the reminiscences of the major Sociolinguists, including Labov, Fasold, Milroy, Trudgill, and Wolfram, with a companion website featuring 400 audio clips from the interviews. Visit the site at www.wiley.com/go/tagliamonte/makingwaves

This volume offers a synthetic approach to language variation and language ideologies in multilingual communities. Although the vast majority of the world s speech communities are multilingual, much of sociolinguistics ignores this internal diversity. This volume fills this gap, investigating social and linguistic dimensions of variation and change in multilingual communities. Drawing on research in a wide range of countries (Canada, USA, South Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu), it explores: connections between the fields of creolistics, language/dialect contact, and language acquisition; how the study of variation and change, particularly in cases of additive bilingualism, is central to understanding social and linguistic issues in multilingual communities; how changing language ideologies and changing demographics influence language choice and/or language policy, and the pivotal place of multilingualism in enacting social power and authority, and a rich array of new empirical findings on the dynamics of multilingual speech communities.

A brief but comprehensive introduction to sociolinguistics, the study of ways in which groups of people use language. It makes links with related disciplines such as history, politics and gender studies.

This collection of twelve essays, some of which have been written specifically for this volume by well-known European and North-American sociolinguists, reflects an increasing recognition within the field that sociological and theoretical innocence can no longer be underwritten by it, and offers a multi-pronged and multi-methodological way to move towards a critical, reflexive, and theoretically responsible socio-linguistics. It explores, with courage and sensitivity, some very important areas in the enormous space between Bloomfieldian 'idiolect' and Chomskyan 'UG' in order to situate the human linguistic enterprise, and offers valuable insights into human linguisticality and sociality. These explorations expose the limits of correlationism, determinism, and positivistic reificationism, and offer new ways of doing sociolinguistics.Intended for both practicing and future sociolinguists, it is an ideal text-book for the times, particularly for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

New edition of widely-acclaimed textbook, including new sections on up-to-date topics for the 1990s.

Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date, research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages such as childhood and adolescence, ignoring, for the most part, healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of scrutiny. This book examines the discourse of adulthood and accounts for sociolinguistic variation, with regards to age and gender, through the exploration of a 90,000 word age-and gender-differentiated spoken corpus of Irish English. The book explores both the distribution and use of a number of high frequency pragmatic features of spoken discourse that appear as key items in the corpus. Part 1 of the book provides an introduction, a theoretical overview of age as a sociolinguistic variable and a description on how to compile a small spoken corpus for sociolinguistic research. Part 2 consists of five chapters which investigate and explore key features such as hedges, vague category markers, intensifiers, boosters and high-frequent items of taboo language in relation to the variables, age and gender. The book is of interest to undergraduates or postgraduates taking formal courses in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics or discourse analysis. It is also of interest to students and researchers interested in using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research.