Sociocultural linguistics has long conceived of languages as well-bounded, separate codes. But the increasing diversity of languages encountered by most people in their daily lives challenges this conception. Because globalization has accelerated population flows, cities are now sites of encounter for groups that are highly diverse in terms of origins, cultural practices, and languages. Further, new media technologies invent communicative genres, foster hybrid semiotic practices, and sprea...

This book argues for an approach to linguistic ethnography which departs from the singular gaze of the academic researcher, to amplify instead the voices of participants, researchers and collaborators. The authors offer an account of writing ethnography polyphonically, incorporating the complexity of individual voices. In doing so they challenge the imperative to make meaning from, and explain the culture of, ‘the other’. Together, the essays open up the emic perspective by considering the...

This book is both research report and performance piece. Here is a team of researchers as they study communication on the volleyball court. And here are the voices and actions of the volleyball coach and his players as they practise and play. Research in process and research findings are represented in a play script which brings vividly to life both ethnographic research methods and communication in the world of sport. This highly original book adds innovation and imagination to the repres...

This ethnographic drama script is adapted from observations conducted in a large city centre library in the UK. The action focuses on the staff room in the library, where the fictionalised characters of four customer experience assistants, threatened with redundancy, take their lunch and tea breaks. The ethnographic drama is a creative curation of field notes, transcripts, audio recordings, video recordings, conversations and observations. It tells a story of political tension in everyday ...

This highly original book brings compelling narratives of migration and social diversity vividly to life. At once a play script and an outcome of ethnographic research, it is a rich resource for the interpretation and representation of life in the multilingual city. The book takes an inside view of a hidden space in the city: an advice and advocacy service in a Chinese community centre. Here, advisors translate and translanguage, making sense of the bureaucratic world for clients who need ...

This book breaks new ground in its representation of the voices of people in a superdiverse city as they go about their everyday lives. Poetic, polyphonic, and compelling, it places the reader at the heart of the market hall, surrounded by the translanguaging voices of people from all over the world. Based on four years of ethnographic research, the book is a gift to the senses, evoking the smells, sights, and sounds of the multilingual city. This is a book that reimagines the conventions ...

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity provides an accessible and authoritative overview of this growing area, the linguistic analysis of interaction in superdiverse cities. Developed as a descriptive term to account for the increasingly stratified processes and effects of migration in Western Europe, ‘superdiversity’ has the potential to contribute to an enhanced understanding of mobility, complexity, and change, with theoretical, practical, global, and methodological reach...

This volume presents evidence about how we understand communication in changing times, and proposes that such understandings may contribute to the development of pedagogy for teaching and learning. It expands current debates on multilingualism, asking which signs are in use and in action, and what are their social, political, and historical implications. The volume’s starting-point is Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia’, a key concept in understanding the tensions, conflicts, and multiple voices wit...

How is our language affected by our ethnicity, gender, and region? How are our conversations and other interactions structured? How does society view and regulate language? How do we use language to present ourselves to others? In this revised and updated second edition of the popular What Is Sociolinguistics? Gerard Van Herk explores these and other intriguing questions about language, how we use it, and its relationships to society. Van Herk guides the reader on a tour through t...

Why do we speak the way we do? What are the social factors that influence our choices of expression? This best-selling introduction to the study of language and society encourages students to think about these fundamental questions, asking how and why we select from the vast range of different words, accents, varieties and languages available to us. In this new and updated edition, students are taken step-by-step through the analysis of linguistic expressions, speech varieties and language...

This comprehensive new edition of Wardhaugh’s textbook incorporates additional study features and numerous new and updated references to bring the book completely up-to-date, whilst maintaining the features that made the book so popular with lecturers and students: accessible coverage of a wide range of issues, clearly written, and with useful student study features.A fully revised new edition of Ronald Wardhaugh’s popular introduction to sociolinguistics, which now includes ...

The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics presents a comprehensive introduction to the main concepts and terms of sociolinguistics, and of the goals, methods, and findings of sociolinguistic research.Introduces readers to the methodology and skills of doing hands-on research in this fieldFeatures chapter-by-chapter classic and contemporary case studies, exercises, and examples to enhance comprehensionOffers wide-ranging coverage of topics across socioling...