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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics
  • Cited by 31
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2011
Online ISBN:
9780511997068
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511997068
Collection:
Cambridge Handbooks of Linguistics
Series:
Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
Subjects:
Sociolinguistics, English Language and Linguistics: General Interest, Language and Linguistics
Information

Book description

The most comprehensive overview available, this Handbook is an essential guide to sociolinguistics today. Reflecting the breadth of research in the field, it surveys a range of topics and approaches in the study of language variation and use in society. As well as linguistic perspectives, the handbook includes insights from anthropology, social psychology, the study of discourse and power, conversation analysis, theories of style and styling, language contact and applied sociolinguistics. Language practices seem to have reached new levels since the communications revolution of the late twentieth century. At the same time face-to-face communication is still the main force of language identity, even if social and peer networks of the traditional face-to-face nature are facing stiff competition of the Facebook-to-Facebook sort. The most authoritative guide to the state of the field, this handbook shows that sociolinguistics provides us with the best tools for understanding our unfolding evolution as social beings.

Reviews

‘Offers breadth, depth and up-to-date insight.'

David Britain - University of Bern

'Mesthrie has succeeded in assembling an impressive list of contributors who are leading scholars in their respective subfields. Many chapters are written by authors who have themselves either edited handbooks or other survey volumes on their topic (Duranti on linguistic anthropology, Singler and Kouwenberg on Pidgins and Creoles, Tollefson on language policy and planning) or who have authored introductory monographs (Bayley and Lucas on sign languages, Blommaert on discourse and pragmatics, Coupland on style, Eades on sociolinguistics and the law, Fought on ethnicity, Muysken on code-switching, Schneider on World Englishes).'

Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer Source: Journal of Sociolinguistics

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 17 - Code-switching
    pp 301-314
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the regions with respect to linguistic systems, and examines how one can use them effectively in sociolinguistics. Wilbur Zelinsky has written extensively about regions as culture areas. Zelinsky insists that a region be genuine, and be recognized by its participants, in order for the region to be distinguished from other locations as an area in which one can observe the evidence of culture, of course including language. Zelinsky also proposes college towns as educational voluntary regions, retirement voluntary regions like those in Arizona and Florida, and "pleasuring places" where people not only visit to play at the beach or in the snow but also choose to live. Las Vegas is one of the fastest-growing places in the country. Zelinsky adds to these two basic kinds of regions one more type: the "vernacular region" or "perceptual region".
  • 18 - Language maintenance, shift, and endangerment
    pp 315-334
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Sociolinguists have always been concerned with place. This chapter summarizes emergence of dialectology in the nineteenth century in the context of the politics of the European nation-state. It summarizes the twentieth-century dialect atlas projects, conducted in the context of a renewed interest in region across the disciplines. The chapter traces ideas about place in quantitative, social-scientific approaches to variation and change. Finally, it outlines several newer ways of thinking about language and place that have emerged in the context of widespread interest in how the social world is collectively shaped in discourse and in how individuals experience language and linguistic variation. Geographers' focus on regions and regional exceptionalism mirrors dialectologists' work of the period in the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada projects. Lesley Milroy and James Milroy brought social network theory to bear on sociolinguistic issues.
  • 19 - Colonization, globalization, and the sociolinguistics of World Englishes
    pp 335-354
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter provides an overview of theoretical approaches and important studies in language, gender, and sexuality, beginning with early approaches in which gender and sex were seen as roughly equivalent, essential attributes. It discusses questions concerning the interrelation of language and gender and focusing on male-female language differences. The sociolinguistic study of language and gender traditionally was characterized as falling into one of three approaches or theories: deficit, difference, and dominance. Dominance-based approaches focus on women's relative powerlessness vis-à-vis men in describing and explaining women's vs. men's language. Robin Lakoff holds that women's language as she describes it is weaker than men's, and so she is often characterized as taking a deficit approach. The study of linguistic differences across cultures led researchers focusing on pragmatics and discourse to propose that gender-based language differences can also be conceptualized as cross-cultural differences.
  • 21 - Sociolinguistics and the law
    pp 377-395
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the consequences of linguistic diversity at the level of the individual, and the level of society, that is, the relationship of languages and their speakers within a given territory. It also considers the interaction of multilingualism and multiculturalism as two partially overlapping but non-identical concepts. Linguists tend to see multilingualism as a gradient phenomenon. Inter-Scandinavian communication is an example of what has been called receptive multilingualism with productive monolingualism. Haugen was one of the first linguists to draw attention to the fact that when Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians communicate with one another, they do not use a lingua franca. Many people become multilingual past childhood. Especially in the context of international migration and mobility, language acquisition continues for many throughout their lives. Australia is an example of a society which is characterized by extensive societal but not necessarily individual multilingualism.
  • 22 - Language and the media
    pp 396-412
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the terms 'pidgin' and 'creole' and the complications that arise from efforts to arrive at precise definitions of them, specifically with regard to determining which speech varieties are pidgins and creoles. Languages whose name contains Pidgin or a variant thereof are regionally restricted to the Pacific and to West Africa, and have English as the source of their lexicon. Languages that are called 'Creole' by their speakers are spoken on both sides of the Atlantic and include English-lexified Creolese in Guyana and Krio in Sierra Leone. Loreto Todd recognized that the term pidgin was variably used to designate makeshift contact varieties as well as fully stabilized languages. The most widely studied cases of pidgins and creoles all emerged from contact situations resulting from European colonial expansion. DeCamp proposed the creole continuum model, and Bickerton and Rickford refined and expanded upon it.
  • 23 - Language in education
    pp 413-429
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The study of code-switching has been one of the most dynamic areas in linguistics over the last three decades, at least since Poplack's influential paper on Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilingual speech in New York. The demarcation line between code-switching and bilingual interference is definitional: in the case of interference the interaction of the two languages is structural rather than involving phonetic material: words or morphemes from the two languages. This chapter presents some of the issues raised in the vast literature on code-mixing in three main sections: sociolinguistics, grammar, and language use. Code-switching capacities develop and change across the life span of an individual. The major methodological problem in the pragmatic tradition is that the interpretation of conversations in which codes are switched remains subjective. Labovian tradition of accountable analysis of naturalistic speech data is stressed in the work of Poplack and associates as in the work of MacSwan.
  • Notes
    pp 430-439
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Language maintenance, shift, and endangerment are all outcomes of the dynamics of language communities. Language maintenance can be thought of as the survival of a language in a situation where it might be expected to be endangered. Fishman points out the issue of how language maintenance is to be secured and difficult to characterize. Language shift is in some sense the complement of language maintenance: it is what happens when a language is not maintained. The progression of a language into a new setting is traditionally characterized as occurring by migration, infiltration, or diffusion, depending on whether a whole speech community moves to a new location. Language documentation includes all potentially permanent recording of a language. The crucial aim of revitalization is to act positively on the process of transmission of a language from one generation to the next.
  • References
    pp 440-522
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The attractiveness of English in many cultures derives from its identification as a linguistic gateway to economic prosperity. Global English comes in a wide range of different countries and settings, forms and functions, oscillating between the poles of formal and informal discourse, written and oral communication, international and local contacts, and as an expression of distance or social proximity. The most conventional classification is the one into countries where English is a native language (ENL), a second language (ESL), and a foreign language (EFL). In ESL countries, typically former parts of the British Empire, English fulfills important intranational functions as an official or semi-official language. The International Corpus of English (ICE) project has opened valuable research options for comparative research. The differences between speech and writing allow for the study of variability in a framework which is strongly inspired by and closely related to quantitative sociolinguistic methodology.

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