Contributions to the Sociology of Language [CSL]

This ethnographic work examines both the colonial language governmentality imposed by the Turkish state and the Kurdish language activism as a response to this system. Through a genealogical study, it calls for a reconsideration of the linguistic condition in Turkey as being more than nationalist, highlighting its foundation in intertwined ideologies of racism, imperialism, and colonialism. It then provides an analysis of new possibilities and directions led by the actors of the Kurdish language movement, which seeks to enhance not only the linguistic but also the socio-political condition of the Kurdish people by taking a "beyond language" approach. The work advances our thinking about language oppression and minority language activism.

Past studies of family language socialization often focus on children’s verbal communication skills and are conducted from the parents’ perspective. This book describes a child’s mostly self-directed and near-simultaneous multilingual and multiliterate development from birth to age 8. The present findings thus emphasize the critical role of child agency, and they may redefine and expand on the traditional theoretical framework of family language policy.

This multi-authored monograph, located in the intersection of translanguaging research and Romani studies, offers a state-of-the-art analysis of the ways in which translanguaging supports bilingual Roma students’ learning in monolingual school systems. Complete with a video repository of translanguaging classroom moments, this comprehensive study is based on long-term participatory ethnographic research and a pedagogical implementation project undertaken in Hungary and Slovakia by a group of primary teachers, bilingual Roma participants, and researchers. Co-written by academic and non-academic participants, the book is an essential reading for researchers, pre- and in-service teachers of Romani-speaking students, and experts working with collaborators (learners, informants, activists) whose home languages are excluded from mainstream education and school curricula.

The videofiles in the book are available via the following website: http://www.kre.hu/romanitranslanguaging/index.php/video-repository/

Most journal articles, edited volumes and monographs on youth language practices deal with one specific variety, one geographical setting, or with one specific continent. This volume bridges these different studies, and it approaches youth language from a much broader angle. A global framework and a diversity of methodologies enable a wider perspective that gives room to comparisons of youth’s manipulations and linguistic agency, transnational communicative practices and language contact scenarios. The research presented addresses structural features of everyday talk and text, youth identity issues related to specific purposes and contexts, and sociocultural emphases on ideologies and belonging.

Combining insights into sociolinguistic and structural features of youth language, the volume includes case studies from Asia (Indonesia), Australia and Oceania (Arnhem Land, New Ireland), South America (the Amazon, Chile, Argentina), Europe (Germany, Spain) and Africa (Uganda, Nigeria, DR Congo, Central African Republic, South Africa). It expands on existing publications and offers a more comparative and "global" approach, without a division of youth’s strategies in terms of geographical space or language family. This collection, including a conceptual introduction, is of interest to scholars from several linguistic subfields working in different regional contexts as well as sociologists and anthropologists working in the field of adolescence and youth studies.

Discourse and ideology are quintessential, albeit contested concepts in many functionally oriented branches of linguistics, such as linguistic anthropology, critical discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and sociology of language. With many ways of understanding and utilizing the concepts, the line between discourse and ideology can become blurry. This volume explores divergent ways in which the concept of ideology may be applied in different branches of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, critical discourse studies, and applied linguistics. The goal is to provide an overview of the ways in which these two concepts can be used separately or together, emphasizing one or the other depending on the ways in which the concepts and their relationship are defined. The volume is targeted at scholars working in various fields of linguistics in which discourse and ideology are used as theoretical and analytical tools. While the target audience includes both senior and junior scholars, a particular goal is to reach junior scholars, who often struggle with the distinction between discourse and ideology and their theoretical and methodological potential. The volume is suitable for classroom use at the graduate level.

This book focuses on the structure and sociolinguistics of Nigerian Pidgin English. Its major aim is to serve as a compendium which touches different major aspects of NPE as it has been observed that earlier works in this area have focused only on one aspect or the other. It will offer a broad survey of the form and functions of Nigerian Pidgin (NP) in different domains. The book promises to investigate the use of NP in such domains as popular culture, advertisement, social media and online discussion fora. One major strong point of this volume is the fact that it will direct attention to different fertile areas of NP by focusing, inter alia, on its social functions, its morphology and syntax, its regional varieties, its (possible) use as a viable medium of instruction in school, the changing attitudes of people towards its use, the place of NP in relation to language planning and policy in Nigeria as well as sociolinguistic variation within NP. The book will make a significant contribution to the existing literature on NP as, unlike earlier studies in this area, it will explore the grammatical, sociolinguistic and perceptual aspects of the language. By bringing together the expertise of renowned Nigerian and international scholars who have conducted research in this area, the volume will be an essential resource for researchers, graduate and undergraduate students interested not only in Nigerian Pidgin but also on contact linguistics.

Seniority-based hierarchy (jouge kankei) is omnipresent in Japanese group dynamics. How one comports, depends on one’s status and position vis-à-vis others. To-date, no study shows what constitutes this hierarchy, where and when individuals growing up in Japan first come into contact with it, as well as how they learn to function in it.

This book fills in the lacunae. Considering jouge kankei as a social institution and adopting a discourse analytic approach, this volume examines the ways in which institutional jouge kankei as an enduring feature of Japanese social life are created and reproduced. The monograph analyses how seniority-based relations are enacted, legitimised, transmitted, and reified by social actors through language use and paralinguistic discursive practices, such as the use of space, objects, signs, and symbols. It also looks at how established rules could be challenged. The empirical data on which findings are based are gathered through 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2015 to 2018 in Japanese schools, with certain types of data (school club etiquette books and uniforms) being presented and analysed for the first time. This volume also shows continuity and change of jouge kankei from school to work.

While "economic forces" are often cited as being a key cause of language loss, there is very little research that explores this link in detail. This work, based on policy analysis and ethnographic data, addresses this deficit. It examines how neoliberalism, the dominant economic orthodoxy of recent decades, has impacted the vitality of Irish in the Republic of Ireland since 2008. Drawing on concepts well established in public policy studies, but not prominent in the subfield of language policy, the neoliberalisation of Irish-language support measures is charted, including the disproportionately severe budget cuts they received. It is argued that neoliberalism’s antipathy towards social planning and redistributive economic policies meant that supports for Irish were inevitably hit especially hard in an era of austerity.

Ethnographic data from Irish-speaking communities reinforce this point and illustrate how macro-level economic disruptions can affect language use at the micro-level. Labour market transformations, emigration and the dismantling of community institutions are documented, along with many related developments, thereby highlighting an issue of relevance to communities around the world, the fundamental tension between neoliberalism and language revitalisation efforts.

While top-down policies and declarations have yet to establish equal status and opportunities for speakers of all languages in practice, activists and advocates at local levels are playing an increasingly significant role in the creation of new social imaginaries and practices in multilingual contexts. This volume describes how social actors across multiple domains contribute to the elusive goal of linguistic equality or justice through their language activism practices. Through an ethnographic account of Indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language activism in Oaxaca, Mexico, this study illuminates the (sometimes conflicting) imaginaries of what positive social change is and how it should be achieved, and the repertoire of strategies through which these imaginaries are being pursued. Ethnographic and action research conducted from 2013-2018 in the multilingual Isthmus of Tehuantepec brings to light the experiences of educators, students, writers, scholars and diverse cultural activists whose aspirations and strategies of social change are significant in shaping the future language ecology. Their repertoire of strategies may inform and encourage language activists, scholars, and educators working for change in other contexts of linguistic diversity and inequality.　

China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights through a sociolinguistic study of Zhuang, the language of China’s largest minority group. The analysis traces language policy from the Constitution to local government practices, investigating how Zhuang language rights are experienced as opening or restricting socioeconomic opportunity. The study finds that language rights do not challenge ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. However, people still value a Zhuang identity validated by government policy and practice.

Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy.

The book refines Grey’s award-winning doctoral dissertation, which received the Joshua A. Fishman Award in 2018. The judges said the study “decenter[s] all types of sociolinguistic assumptions." It is a thought-provoking work on minority rights and language politics, relevant beyond China.

This book offers sociological and structural descriptions of language varieties used in over 2 dozen Jewish communities around the world, along with synthesizing and theoretical chapters. Language descriptions focus on historical development, contemporary use, regional and social variation, structural features, and Hebrew/Aramaic loanwords. The book covers commonly researched language varieties, like Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as less commonly researched ones, like Judeo-Tat, Jewish Swedish, and Hebraized Amharic in Israel today.

This book offers a diversification model of transplanted languages that facilitates the exploration of external factors and internal changes. The general context is the New World and the variety that unfolded in the Central Highlands and the Gulf of Mexico, herein identified as Mexican Colonial Spanish (MCS). Linguistic corpora provide the evidence of (re)transmission, diffusion, metalinguistic awareness, and select focused variants. The tridimensional approach highlights language data from authentic colonial documents which are connected to socio-historical reliefs at particular periods or junctions, which explain language variation and the dynamic outcome leading to change.

From the Second Letter of Hernán Cortés (Seville 1522) to the decades preceding Mexican Independence (1800-1821) this book examines the variants transplanted from the peninsular tree into Mesoamerican lands: leveling of sibilants of late medieval Spanish, direct object (masc. sing.] pronouns LO and LE, pronouns of address (vos, tu, vuestra merced plus plurals), imperfect subjunctive endings in -SE and -RA), and Amerindian loans. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of variants derived from the peninsular tree show a gradual process of attrition and recovery due to their saliency in the new soil, where they were identified with ways of speaking and behaving like Spanish speakers from the metropolis. The variants analyzed in MCS may appear in other regions of the Spanish-speaking New World, where change may have proceeded at varying or similar rates. Additional variants are classified as optimal residual (e.g. dizque) and popular residual (e.g. vide). Both types are derived from the medieval peninsular tree, but the former are vital across regions and social strata while the latter may be restricted to isolated and / or marginal speech communities.

After one hundred years of study in linguistics, this book contributes to the advancement of newer conceptualization of diachrony, which is concerned with the development and evolution through history. The additional sociolinguistic dimension offers views of social significant and its thrilling links to social movements that provoked a radical change of identity. The amplitude of the diversification model is convenient to test it in varied contexts where transplantation occurred.

Today’s growing mobility in European urban regions results in a more widespread language diversity, which is increasingly challenging current language policies. Against this background, this volume deals with the interface between language policy, language planning and actual practices. The impact that prevailing language policies have on language practices is observed in a series of urban settings, leading to a reflection on the changes that need to be brought about to promote social inclusion and valorise linguistic diversity in a context of globalisation-affected and migration-related multilingualism. The topics of discussion draw on different theoretical perspectives and span the research fields of linguistics, education, (family) language policy and planning, language acquisition and sociology.

Within the scope of today’s globalisation, linguistic diversity is a given fact of the world we live in. In several educational contexts in Europe, language awareness (LA) activities have been introduced with the objective to prepare pupils cognitively, socially and/or critically for life as multilingual, open minded and/or empowered citizens in a diverse world. Despite previous research in various contexts, the concept of LA remains problematic: a generally accepted, evidence-based conceptualisation is missing. This confronts both research and education with a challenge: in order to develop LA activities, implement them successfully in educational contexts and achieve the expected outcomes, we should know what the concept stands for, how it works and why we would choose to implement it in classrooms (or not). This volume focuses on three apparent simple questions: what, how and why? The first question – what? – refers to the concept(ual mess) of LA. The second question – how? – refers to the implementation of LA activities in several educational contexts. The third question – why? – is a recurrent theme running through all the chapters and deals with a reflection on the way we deal (un)consciously with LA activities in education.

This book examines how style and intersubjective meanings emerge through language use. It is innovative in theoretical scope and empirical focus. It brings together insights from discourse-functional linguistics, stylistics, and conversation analysis to understand how language resources are used to enact stances in intersubjective space. While there are numerous studies devoted to youth language, the focus has been mainly on face-to-face interaction. Other types of youth interaction, particularly in mediated forms, have received little attention. This book draws on data from four different text types - conversation, e-forums, comics, and teen fiction - to highlight the multidirectional nature of style construction.

Indonesia provides a rich context for the study of style and intersubjectivity among youth. In constructing style, Indonesian urban youth have been moving away from conventions which emphasized hierarchy and uniformity toward new ways of connecting in intersubjective space. This book analyzes how these new ways are realized in different text types.

This book makes a valuable addition to sociolinguistic literature on youth and language and an essential reading for those interested in Austronesian sociolinguistics.

Dynamic language practices of African multilingual speakers have not been cogently described in a book-length manuscript. This book challenges assumptions that led to South Africa's 11 official languages and makes a case for mutual inter-comprehensibility. Students, teachers, and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, translanguaging, and teacher education will find this book thought-provoking.

Twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are still undergoing numerous transitions. This book examines various language issues in relation to current discussions about national identity, education, and changing notions of socio-cultural capital in Central Asia.

Youth languages have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars and students of various disciplines. African youth languages are a vibrant phenomenon with manifold characteristics involving a range of different languages. This book is a first comprehensive study of African youth languages and presents fresh insights into various youth languages, providing linguistic as well as sociolinguistic data and analyses.

The book examines the development and maintenance of a minority language, engaging on both micro and macro levels to address open questions in the field. Guardado provides a history of the study of language maintenance, including discussion of language socialization, cosmopolitan identities, and home practices. In particular, the author uses 'discourse' as a primary tool to understand minority language development and maintenance.

Heritage language education is a relatively new field developed as "heritage" has become an important trope of belonging, legitimacy and commodification. Many recent studies treat the "heritage language learner" as an objective category. However, it is a social construct, whose meaning is contested by researchers, school administrators and the students themselves. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2007-2011 at a weekend Japanese language school in the United States, this monograph investigates the construction of the heritage language learner at the intersections of the knowledge-power complex, ideologies of language and national belonging, and politics of schooling. It examines the ways individuals become, resist and negotiate their new subjectivity as heritage language learners through becoming objects of study, being caught in nationalist aspirations and school politics regarding what to teach to whom, and negotiating with peers with various linguistic proficiency and family backgrounds. The volume proposes a new approach to view the notion of heritage language learner as a site of negotiation regarding the legitimate knowledge of language and ways of belonging, while offering practical suggestions for schools.

This volume approaches contemporary multilingualism as a new linguistic dispensation, in urgent need of research-led, reflective scrutiny. The book addresses the emergent global and local patterns of multingual use and acquisition across the world and explores the major trends that characterize today's multilingualism. It is divided into three parts on the basis of the broad themes: education (including multilingual learning in its general, theoretical aspects), sociolinguistic dimensions and language policy. The book's fifteen chapters, written by renowned international experts, discuss a range of issues relating to the quintessential and unique properties of multilingual situations – issues relevant to the challenges faced in different ways by researcher and practitioners alike. All the contributions share a focus on currently operative patterns of interaction between contexts, events and processes.

The book proposes a paradigm shift in language planning and language policy in Africa. For the past fifty years, the dominant model has been the hegemonic model whereby a language of wider communication (LWC) is imposed on minority languages. It is now time for a paradigm shift in favor of a more egalitarian model in which all the languages spoken in the same country, irrespective of their size, are planned. The paradigm shift concerns four critical areas: status planning, cost-benefit planning, acquisition planning, and corpus planning.
Such a shift is justified for the following reasons: First, the hegemonic model has a dismal track record of success in Africa and elsewhere. Second, the hegemonic model exacerbates linguistic conflicts in many countries. Consequently, policy makers shun it for fear of jeopardizing the fragile social fabric in their respective countries. Last, a shift away from the hegemonic model is recommended because it is too costly to implement. The "democratic model" is undergirded by the Strategic Game Theory proposed by David Laitin. It forecasts a 3±1 language outcome for most African countries. This outcome supports the "three language formula" now called for by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

This volume investigates sociolinguistic discourses, identity choices and their representations in postcolonial national and social life, and traces them to the impact of colonial contact. The chapters stitch together current voices and identities emerging within both ex-colonized and ex-colonizer communities as each copes with the social, lingual, cultural, and religious mixes triggered by colonialism. These mixes, reflected in the five thematic parts of the book - 'postcolonial identities', 'nationhood discourses', 'translating the postcolonial', 'living the postcolonial', and 'colonizing the colonizer' - call for deeper investigations of postcolonial communities using emic approaches.

This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on one of the largest immigrant groups in the West. Most of the extant books on the subject of Russian immigration are written from a sociological or socio-linguistic perspective. They are focused on strictly Jewish immigration or cast the immigrant community as "Russian," ignoring the reality of two distinct ethnic groups. In addition, none of the extant literature or books is based on an empirical, controlled-study of a numerically large group of immigrants. Finally, few if any published monographs make use of qualitative as well as quantitative methods of analysis or the same theoretical framework to explore changes in culture, identity, and language.

The proposed book has several features distinguishing it from the currently available scholarship. "Russian Diaspora" examines two distinct ethnic groups, relies on empirical data based on sizable groups in three countries, and looks into three elements of acculturation (culture, identity, and language). Of the 214 people who participated in the present study, 174 are Russian immigrants who had resided in the United States, Germany, and Israel between ten and thirty years. In addition to offering a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the book adopts sociological, socio-linguistic and psycho-linguistic methods of analysis.
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Grounded primarily in the ethnography of communication and aligned with the multidisciplinarity of discourse analysis, the book examines the use of proverbs in the daily life of a social network of Mexican-origin transnational families in Chicago and Michoacán, Mexico. Various and detailed analyses of actual proverb use reveal that proverbs in this particular population function as a highly contextualized communicative strategy that serves four discrete social functions: to argue, to advise, to establish rapport, and to entertain. Proposing that the social and cognitive aspects of language use must be combined for a complete understanding of how such genres of language are actually used by regular people in daily life, the author shows how ordinary people use sophisticated cognitive processes to interpret the socially-relevant meanings of proverbs in everyday conversation.
The book provides an unusual mix of contextualized discourse analysis that is ethnographic, linguistic, and cognitive, yielding much needed insight into a segment of the Mexican-origin population of the Midwestern U.S., a population whose increasing importance and size is often mentioned, but about which precious few linguistic studies have been conducted. The volume not only helps to fill this void but it is also one of the few studies that focuses on the impact of transnationalism on linguistic practices, regardless of cultural group. Departing from the conventional approach of ignoring the role of everyday-language use in order to focus exclusively on culture, economics, or migrant patterns, the book makes linguistic practice the central issue, and thus affirms that it is language that weaves together the two distant sites of transnational communities, providing a fertile area for understanding the perspectives of the transmigrants themselves.

This book, which emerges in the context of the European research network LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence), is concerned with European multilingualism both as a political concept and as a social reality. It features cutting-edge studies by linguists and anthropologists who perceive multilingualism as a discursive phenomenon which can be revealed and analyzed through empirical fieldwork. The book presents a fresh perspective of European multilingualism as it takes the reader through key themes of social consciousness – identity, policy, education, economy – and relevant societal levels of organization (European, national, regional).
With its distinct focus on post-national society caught in unifying as well as diversifying socio-political currents, the volume problematizes emerging contradictions inherent in the idea of a Europe beyond the nation state –between speech minorities and majorities, economic realities, or socio-political ideologies.

This book offers an inclusive perspective on the constellation of languages in Europe by taking into account official state languages, regional minority languages and immigrant minority languages. Although "celebrating linguistic diversity" is one of the key propositions in the European discourse on multilingualism and language policies, this device holds for these three types of languages in a decreasing order. All three types of languages, however, are constituent parts of a multilingual European identity and should be taken into account in any type of language policy. Both facts and policies on multilingualism and plurilingual education are addressed in case studies at the national and European level. The selection of case studies is based on a careful weighing of geographical spread of countries and languages across Europe on the one hand, and availability of established expert knowledge on the other.
After an Introduction to the theme of the book (Guus Extra and Durk Gorter), Part I deals with official state languages with a focus on the spread of English as lingua franca across Europe (Juliane House), on French and France (Dennis Ager), on Polish in Poland and abroad (Justyna Lesniewśka), and on language constellations in the Baltic States (Gabrielle Hogan-Brun). Part II deals with regional minority languages with a focus on Catalan in Spain (Francesc Xavier Vila i Moreno), Frisian in the Netherlands (Durk Gorter et al.), Hungarian as a minority language in Central Europe (Susan Gal), and Saami in the Nordic countries (Mikael Svonni). Part III deals with immigrant minority languages in the United Kingdom (Viv Edwards), Sweden (Lilian Nygren-Junkin), Italy (Monica Barni and Carla Bagna) and Europe at large (Guus Extra and Kutlay Yağmur).

The theme of this collection is a discussion of the notions of 'norms' and 'standards', which are studied from various different angles, but always in relation to the English language. These terms are to be understood in a very wide sense, allowing discussions of topics such as the norms we orient to in social interaction, the benchmark employed in teaching, or the development of English dialects and varieties over time and space and their relation to the standard language. The collection is organized into three parts, each of which covers an important research field for the study of norms and standards. Part 1 is entitled "English over time and space" and is further divided into three thematic subgroups: standard and non-standard features in English varieties and dialects; research on English standardization processes; and issues of standards and norms in oral production. Part 2 deals with "English usage in non-native contexts," and Part 3 is dedicated to "Issues on politeness and impoliteness." The notions of standards and norms are equally important concepts for historical linguists, sociolinguists with a variationist background, applied linguists, pragmaticians, and discourse analysts.

Within the European context, linguistic diversity can be studied at the level of both official state languages and non-national languages. This comprehensive overview offers insightful crossnational and crosscontinental perspectives on non-national languages in terms of both regional and immigrant languages. The book focuses on mapping linguistic diversity in both the private and public domain. Methodological issues and empirical outcomes are explored for a variety of European and non-European countries and languages.

The book consists of four parts. Part 1 provides an introduction to the subject, as well as an overview and discussion of migration statistics and language use. Part 2 deals with the mapping of regional languages in Europe, exemplified by case studies on Welsh, Basque, and Frisian. Part 3 focuses on immigrant languages in Europe and includes case studies from both national (Switzerland, Italy, France) and crossnational (Multilingual Cities Project) perspectives. Part 4 turns to mapping linguistic diversity abroad with case studies on Australia, South Africa, Turkey, and Japan.

Globalization has many faces. One of them is the transformation of language regimes. This book provides an in-depth account of how two second-tier languages, Japanese and German, are affected by this process. In the international arena, they no longer compete with English, but their status in their home countries and as foreign languages in third countries is in flux. Original empirical and theoretical contributions are presented in this up-to-date study of language regime change.

The desirability of a single all-purpose language for all communication needs is seldom questioned. It is simply taken for granted in many advanced countries, such as Japan and the German-speaking countries. However, it is not clear whether German and Japanese can sustain their full functional potential if their own speakers use these languages in certain domains with decreasing frequency. The advantages of borderless communication in a single language, on one hand, and maintaining highly cultivated all-purpose languages, on the other, are obvious. The question of whether and how these two principles can be reconciled in the age of globalization is not. In this book, leading scholars present their answers: Ulrich Ammon, Tessa Carroll, Nanette Gottlieb, Patrick Heinrich, Takao Katsuragi, John Maher, Kiyoshi Hara, Elmar Holenstein, Konrad Ehlich, Fumio Inoue, and Florian Coulmas.

The present volume grew out of the 30th International LAUD Symposium, held on April 19–22, 2004 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. The conference, "Empowerment through Language", was centrally concerned with the concept of power and/or empowerment as observed in the status and use of language(s) and their speakers in bilingual and multilingual communities. The book discusses the theoretical issues inherent in the relation between language and power, the empowerment strategies involved in language policy and language planning situations, and the issue of language endangerment in Africa, i.e., the fate of minority languages and their speakers and the sociopolitical factors perpetuating their exclusion from access to knowledge and skills.

The volume constitutes a collection of papers by prominent linguists from many countries who explore the exciting interdisciplinary area of language, power, and linguistic empowerment. Broadly speaking, the papers focus on the theoretical and sociolinguistic problems related to the role of power in language policy and language planning situations in multilingual settings, language choices, code switches, and associated topics. Thus, the aim of the volume is to open up language policy and language planning issues as observed in multilingual contexts (nations, institutions, other settings, and domains) to the wider community of critical sociolinguistics by concentrating on the relationship between language and power. More particularly, it offers a decidedly sociolinguistic perspective to the study of language and power, which likewise has been tackled from other perspectives in the areas of sociology and political science. This interdisciplinary relationship is important both for linguistics and for the sociology of language. In this way, the book is an important contribution to general linguistics, sociolinguistics, minority issues in multilingual settings as well as the social sciences.

In honor of his upcoming 80th birthday (2006) , Fishman's colleagues and former students are preparing five volumes by him or about him, this being one of them.

This volume explores the reversing language shift (RLS) theory in the Mexican scenario from various viewpoints: The sociohistorical perspective delves into the dynamics of power that emerged in the Mexican colony as a result of the presence of Spanish. It examines the processes of external and internal Indianization affecting the early European protagonists and the varied dimensions of language shift and maintenance of the Mexican colonial period.

The Mexican case sheds light upon language contact from the time in which Western civilization came into contact with the Mesoamerican peoples, for the encounter began with a demographic catastrophe that motivated a recovery mission. While the recovery of Mexican indigenous languages (MIL) was remarkable, RLS ended after fifty years of abundant productivity in MIL. Since then, the slow process of recovery is related to demographic changes, socioreligious movements, rebellion, confrontation, and survival strategies that have fostered language maintenance with bilingualism and language shift with culture preservation.

The causes of the Chiapas uprising are analyzed in connection with the language attitudes of the indigenous peoples, while language policy is discussed in reference to the new Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2003). A quantitative classification of the MIL is offered with an overview of their geographic distribution, trends of macrosocietal bilingualism, use in the home domain, and permanence in the original Mesoamerican settlements. Innovative models of bilingual education are presented along with relevant data on several communities and the philosophies and methodologies justifying the programs. A model of Mazahua language use is presented along the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale.

Australia is host to many languages - English, indigenous, migrant, and contact. Its multilingualism, the sociopolitical changes that have been impacting upon them, and its wide-ranging language policy efforts are well-known. What has been missing so far is a comprehensive, integrative study of the entire 'habitat' of languages - the contacts and interactions that have been taking place from the beginning of colonization to the present day with their linguistic outcomes.

This book and its companion, Australia's Many Voices. Australian English - The National Language, develop and apply such an approach. The present book deals with non-mainstream varieties of English, indigenous, migrant, and contact languages. Based on census and other data to 2003, it addresses themes such as language demographics, language shift, and socio-psychological factors that bear upon it. Language change is discussed from the angle of the uprooting of indigenous languages from their original context, of transplantation, and of contact with English. Pidgins and creoles are located inside the Pacific context of the nineteenth century.

This study provides an analysis of language and language-education policies to 2003 and connects this theme with the role of Australian English, the national language. It suggests that Australia's habitat is reaching a new stage of plurilingual tolerance.

The book is of interest for specialists from a wide range of language and policy disciplines. Its discursive, non-technical style makes it accessible to non-specialists with no background in linguistics.

Australia's English raises many questions among experts and the general public. What is it like? How has English changed by being transplanted to other parts of the world? Does the rise of AusE and other varieties endanger the role of English as a world language? Past studies have often been selective, focusing on the esoteric and non-typical, and ignoring the contact situation in which Australian English has developed.

This book and its companion, Australia's Many Voices. Ethnic Englishes, Indigenous and Migrant Languages. Policy and Education, develop and apply a comprehensive and integrative approach that anchors English in the entire 'habitat' of Australia's languages that it both upset and transformed. Based on a wide range of data and on the assumption that all manifestations of Australian English must cohere as a system, this book retraces the social, psycholinguistic and linguistic history of the language. It locates the contact with indigenous and migrant languages and with American English in the appropriate sociohistorical context and shows how several layers of migration have shaped it. As it stratified, it was gradually accepted and developed into a fully-fledged national variety or epicentre of English that could be raised to the status of national language. Implications on educational policy and attempts to reach out into the Asia-Pacific region have followed logically from national status.

The study is of interest for specialists of English and Australian Studies as well as a range of other disciplines. Its discursive, non-technical style and presentation makes it accessible to non-specialists with no background in linguistics.

Minglang Zhou's highly erudite and well-researched volume on the policies concerning writing reforms for China's minorities since 1949 provides an original and well-reasoned summary of a complex process. It documents how different script reforms meet dramatically different fates according to local preferences, history, cross-border ties, and the vitality of previously-used scripts. It convincingly shows that no single variable is decisive in the success of a script, and that language planners' fixation with technical details is doomed to failure, without careful coordination of extra-code factors. It also documents the little-known Sino-Soviet cooperation in the area of writing reforms. In a style accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, Zhou's book is of interest to language planners, sinologists, applied linguists, writing theorists, and ethnologists.

How and why do changes happen when and where they do? Is it possible to explain changes that occurred centuries ago? These are the central questions addressed in this book, in which the author argues that the development of numerous features of medieval (and modern) Spanish can best be explained as the results of koineization, a process in which mixing among speakers of different dialects leads to the rapid formation of a new mixed and generally simplified variety. The book includes a complete introduction to koineization and detailed study of three stages of dialect mixing in medieval Spanish.

This volume contributes to the debates about the social aspects of bilingualism, focusing on the various opportunities and challenges bilingualism presents to today's society. The contributions in this volume are of a prospective stance, delineating directions for future research on bilingualism and/or identifying important issues which have been under-researched or which are still of a controversial nature. All the contributions are from leading international scholars who have researched and published extensively in the field of bilingualism. To facilitate further discussions of the issues raised in the volume, there are study questions and suggested reading attached to each of the main chapters.

This volume focuses on the interface of different motivating factors that contribute to language change. It combines linguistic case studies with current theoretical debate and contains hitherto unpublished data from English, French, Karaim, Modern Greek, Jordanian, Spanish, Latin and Arabic.

The multilingual situation in Cameroon and the status of English as a co-official language constitute a unique and fascinating case for sociolinguistic investigation. Drawing from first-hand material, the author investigates several aspects of this complex configuration, including the historical development of English in Cameroon, the various languages and lingua franca areas, the linguistic policy, the de facto status of English and the situation in the anglophone provinces. The speech community of the Anglophones is highlighted as a rare example of an ethnicity tied to the second language. Apart from important sociolinguistic findings, the work includes a novel, corpus-based analysis of Cameroon English. Certain lexical phenomena are explained by the cognitive coding of culture - particularly the African cultural model of community, which also underlies the self-perception of the Anglophones - a perspective hitherto neglected in the study of the New Englishes.