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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 focus of this book is on immigrant groups and immigrant languages with a recent or earlier background of migration to industrialized countries in Western and Northern Europe. After presenting some basic concepts in the area of language and immigration, the book focuses on demographic statistics of immigrant groups in European Community countries and Scandinavia, and on research in the field of immigrant language varieties.
In almost every part of the world, minority languages are threatened with extinction. At the same time, dedicated efforts are being made to document endangered languages, to maintain them, and even to revive once-extinct languages. The present volume examines a wide range of issues that concern language endangerment andlanguage revitalization. Among other things, it is shown that languages may be endangered to different degrees, endangerment situations in selected areas of the world are surveyed and definitions of language death and types of language death presented. The book also examines causes of language endangerment, speech behaviour in a language endangerment situation, structural chan...
“How we’re going about it” provides a space for teachers’ voices in the nexus between research and practice by outlining specific cases of innovative approaches to language teaching and learning as they have been applied in the classroom. The volume includes descriptions of some of the most representative recent work and practice in the field while at the same time covering a wide geographic scope. The case descriptions help synthesize research and teaching practice in a way that is accessible to busy teachers, teacher trainers or anyone interested in language development. Each chapter focuses on a similar approach taken by teachers and researchers from different countries and while ...
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.
It is a feature of the twenty-first century that world languages are displacing local languages at an alarming rate, transforming social relations and complicating cultural transmission in the process. This language shift—the gradual abandonment of minority languages in favor of national or international languages—is often in response to inequalities in power, signaling a pressure to conform to the political and economic structures represented by the newly dominant languages. In its most extreme form, language shift can result in language death and thus the permanent loss of traditional knowledge and lifeways. To combat this, indigenous and scholarly communities around the world have und...
The dimensions of time and space fundamentally cause and shape the variability of all human language. To reduce investigation of this insight to manageable proportions, researchers have traditionally concentrated on the “deepest” dialects. But it is increasingly apparent that, although most people still speak with a distinct regional coloring, the new mobility of speakers in recently industrialized and postindustrial societies and the efflorescence of communication technologies cannot be ignored. This has given rise to a reconsideration of the relationship between geographical place and cultural space, and the fundamental link between language and a spatially bounded territory. Language ...
Taking an international perspective, this volume explores numerous issues - gender, socio-economic and linguistic background, teachers' expectations, pedagogical approaches, parental support, educational policies (e.g. priority policies, multilingual policies, early start policies) - and their effects on equity in education.
This volume is the first comprehensive survey of the sociolinguistic studies on Japanese. Japanese, like other languages, has developed a highly diverse linguistic system that is realized as variation shaped by interactions of linguistic and social factors. This volume primarily focuses on both classic and current topics of sociolinguistics that were first studied in Western languages, and then subsequently examined in the Japanese language. The topics in this volume cover major issues in sociolinguistics that also characterize sociolinguistic features of Japanese. Such topics as gender, honorifics, and politeness are particularly pertinent to Japanese, as is well-known in general sociolingu...