This third edition of Miriam Meyerhoff’s highly successful textbook provides a solid, up-to-date appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field and covers foundation issues, recent advances and current debates. It presents familiar or classic data in new ways, and supplements the familiar with fresh examples from a wide range of languages and social settings. It clearly explains the patterns and systems that underlie language variation in use, as well as the ways in which altern...

Doing Sociolinguistics: A practical guide to data collection and a**nalysis provides an accessible introduction and guide to the methods of data collection and analysis in the field of sociolinguistics. It offers students the opportunity to engage directly with some of the foundational and more innovative work being done in the quantitative or variationist paradigm.Divided into sixteen short chapters, Doing Sociolinguistics:can be used as a...

The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages offersa state-of-the-art collection of original contributions in the area of Pidgin and Creole studies. Providing unique and equal coverage of nearly all parts of the world where such languages are found, as well as situating each area within a rich socio-historical context, this book presents fresh and diverse interdisciplinary perspectives from leading voices in the field. Divided into three sections, its analysis covers:...

Do women talk more than men? Does text messaging make you stupid? Can chimpanzees really talk to us? This fascinating textbook addresses a wide range of language myths, focusing on important big-picture issues such as the rule-governed nature of language or the influence of social factors on how we speak. Case studies and analysis of relevant experiments teach readers the skills to become informed consumers of social science research, while suggested open-ended exercises invite students to...

This ground-breaking work is a detailed account of an innovative and in-depth study of the attitudes of in excess of 500 Japanese learners towards a number of standard and non-standard as well as native and non-native varieties of English speech. The research conducted refines the investigation of learner attitudes by employing a range of pioneering techniques of attitude measurement. These methods are largely incorporated from the strong traditions that exist in the fields of social psych...

Humans are social animals and are constantly interacting with each other through conversation, written communication, symbols and other expressions . Discourse: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the analysis of those interactions and the many forms and meanings they can take. The book draws on a range of international case studies and examples from literature, political speech, advertising and newspaper articles to address key questions such as:

This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and ...

In the last five hundred years or so, the English language has undergone remarkable geographical expansion, bringing it into contact with other languages in new locations. It also caused different regional dialects of the language to come into contact with each other in colonial situations. This book is made up of a number of fascinating tales of historical-sociolinguistic detection. These are stories of origins - of a particular variety of English or linguistic feature - which together te...

This is a systematic and critical appraisal of the variety of ways in which people's attitudes to language have been researched internationally over recent decades. The authors explain this complex field through clear reviews and commentary on previous work, while also offering a demonstration of language attitude research in one specific and important context, the English language in Wales. In addition to discussing different ways of expressing attitudes, from teenagers' and teachers' att...

This volume showcases recent sociolinguistic research about Wales and offers contributions from scholars working on Welsh, English and other languages spoken in the country. The chapters present a range of frameworks and methodologies used in sociolinguistics and apply them to the Welsh linguistic context. This context is very distinctive compared to the rest of the UK and represents a prime ground to observe different aspects of the interplay between language and society. The structure of...

Through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that combines critical sociolinguistic ethnography, multi-modality, reflexivity, and discourse analysis, this groundbreaking book reveals the multiple (and sometimes simultaneous) ways in which individuals engage and invest in representations of languages and identities.This timely work is the first to consider the significance of multilingualism and its relationship to citizenship as well as the development of linguistic repertoires as ...

Childly Language explores how attitudes and cultural assumptions about children and childhood are revealed in contemporary English. It addresses such questions as: How is concern for children's safety and welfare reflected in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary English? and When we say that an adult is being 'childish', what are we saying about the characteristics of children?