You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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.
“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 ...
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...
This book is a study of the L1 attrition of German among German Jews who emigrated to anglophone countries under the Nazi regime. It places the study of language attrition within the historical and sociocultural framework of Weimar and Nazi Germany, applying issues of identity and identification to first language loss and maintenance. Morphosyntactic features of German are looked at in free spoken discourse, in an analysis of both ‘interferences’ or ‘errors’ and their overall (correct) use. The picture of L1 proficiency which emerges from these investigations is then related to a taxonomy of intensity of persecution, clearly demonstrating this to be the decisive factor in language attrition, while showing other factors such as age at emigration and intermediate use to be inconclusive.In order to give a full and tangible picture of language attrition and maintenance, the book comes with an Audio-CD, featuring excerpts from more than twenty of the interviews analyzed.
This study is concerned with the ways in which a dozen " knowledge-based societies" of Western Europe and the English-speaking world respond to unprecedented cultural and linguistic diversity resulting from the flow of immigrants and refugees since World War II. It asks how public policy has sought to use schooling to minimize the potentially divisive and inequitable effects of this diversity and to provide opportunities to the children of immigrants. It asks also how the nature of each of these societies affects the meaning of integration into each of them.
Ideological heterogeneity in mass plays in Flanders and the Netherlands In many European countries mass theatre was a widespread expression of ‘community art’ which became increasingly popular shortly before the First World War. From Max Reinhardt’s lavish open-air spectacles to socialist workers’ Laienspiel (lay theatre), theatre visionaries focused on ever larger groups for entertainment as well as political agitation. Despite wide research on the Soviet and German cases, examples from the Low Countries have hardly been examined. However, mass plays in Flanders and the Netherlands had a distinctive character, displaying an ideological heterogeneity not seen elsewhere. Mass Theatre in Interwar Europe studies this peculiar phenomenon of the Low Countries in its European context and sheds light on the broader framework of mass movements in the interwar period.
In a new era of global conflict involving non-state actors, At War with Words offers a provocative perspective on the role of language in the genesis, conduct and consequence of mass violence. Sociolinguistics meets political science and communication studies in order to examine interdependence between armed conflict and language. As phenomena attributed only to humans, both armed conflict and language are visible on two axes: language as war discourse, and language as a social policy subject to change by the victorious. In this unique volume, internationally known contributors provide original data and new insights that illuminate roles of text and talk in creating identities of enemies, ju...
This monograph deals with variable tag questions. These are utterances with a variable interrogative tag, like It's peculiar writing, isn't it, and the semi-variable tag innit, such as Nice, innit. The aim is to provide a corpus-based, comprehensive semantic-pragmatic typology of British English tag questions. Compared to existing descriptions, the proposed typology is novel in three ways. Firstly, whereas almost all existing typologies are single-layered classifications, the functions of tag questions are categorized into two parallel dimensions of interpersonal meaning: the speech function and the stance layer. Secondly, semantic generalizations are proposed for clusters of grammatical, intonational and conversational properties. Thirdly, the bottom-up description is based on a sizeable amount of authentic, spontaneous conversations, which are analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively.
What does it mean to be a traditional Koryak in the modern world? How do indigenous Siberians express a culture that entails distinctive customs and traditions? For decades these people, who live on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Siberia, have been in the middle of contradictory Soviet/Russian colonial policies that celebrate cultural and ethnic difference across Russia yet seek to erase those differences. Government institutions both impose state ideologies of culture and civilization and are sites of community revitalization for indigenous Siberians. ø In Living with Koryak Traditions, Alexander D. King reveals that, rather than having a single model of Koryak culture, Koryaks themselves are engaged in deep debates and conversations about what ?culture? and ?tradition? mean and how they are represented for native peoples, both locally and globally. To most Koryaks, tradition does not function simply as an identity marker but also helps to maintain moral communities and support vulnerable youth in dire times. Debunking an immutable view of tradition and culture, King presents a dynamic one that validates contemporary indigenous peoples? lived experience.
This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating t...