Language Diversity in the Sinophone World offers interdisciplinary insights into social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of multilingualism in the Sinophone world, highlighting language diversity and opening up the burgeoning field of Sinophone studies to new perspectives from sociolinguistics. The book begins by charting historical trajectories in Sinophone multilingualism, beginning with late imperial China through to the emergence of English in the mid-19th century. The volume uses this foundation as a jumping off point from which to provide an in-depth comparison of modern language planning and policies throughout the Sinophone world, with the final section examining multilingual practices not readily captured by planning frameworks and the ideologies, identities, repertoires, and competences intertwined within these different multilingual configurations. Taken together, the collection makes a unique sociolinguistic-focused intervention into emerging research in Sinophone studies and will be of interest to students and scholars within the discipline.

The Sinophone framework emphasises the diversity of Chinese-speaking communities and cultures, and seeks to move beyond a binary model of China and the West. Indeed, this strikingly resembles attempts within the queer studies movement to challenge the dimorphisms of sex and gender. Bringing together two areas of study that tend to be marginalised within their home disciplines Queer Sinophone Cultures innovatively advances both Sinophone studies and queer studies. It not only examines film and literature from Mainland China but expands its scope to encompass the underrepresented ‘Sinophone’ world at large (in this case Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond). Further, where queer studies in the U.S., Europe, and Australia often ignore non-Western cultural phenomena, this book focuses squarely on Sinophone queerness, providing fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from works by the famous director Tsai Ming-Liang to the history of same-sex soft-core pornography made by the renowned Shaw Brothers Studios. By instigating a dialogue between Sinophone studies and queer studies, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of modern and contemporary China studies, particularly to those interested in film, literature, media, and performance. It will also be of great interest to those interested in queer studies more broadly.

This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.

This book is the first of its kind to provide an integrative look at World Englishes, (second) language acquisition, and sociolinguistics in a variety of contexts of English around the globe with a focus on the language of children and adolescents. It thus aims to bridge the paradigm gaps that have been identified between these approaches but have rarely been explored in greater detail. The range of topics includes the areas of first and second language acquisition; sociolinguistic variation and awareness; language use and choice; family language policies; language attitudes and perception; modelling children’s and adolescents’ language in World Englishes; the role of child language acquisition in processes of language change; as well as methodologies of eliciting speech and writing from children and adolescents. The book combines qualitative and quantitative approaches and draws on psycholinguistic, corpus-linguistic, and ethnographic methodologies. What unites the contributions to the volume is that they all address the theoretical implications that a joint approach between World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition has, i.e. why it is fruitful and how it can contribute to a deeper understanding of the different research paradigms.

English as a global lingua franca interacts with other languages across a wide range of multilingual contexts. Combining insights from linguistics, education studies, and psychology, this book addresses the role of English within the current linguistic dynamics of globalization. It takes Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai as case studies to illustrate the use of English in different multilingual urban areas, arguing that these are places where competing historical assessments, and ideological conceptions of monolingualism and multilingualism, are being acted out most forcefully. It critically appraises the controversial concept of multilingual advantages, and studies multilingual cross-linguistic influence in relation to learning English in bilingual heritage contexts. It also scrutinises multilingual language policies in their impact on attitudes, identities, and investment into languages. Engaging and accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and advanced students of bi- and multilingualism, globalization, linguistic diversity, World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and second/third language acquisition.

This volume sets out to investigate the linguistic ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, with chapters that combine empirical and theoretical approaches to the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. One important feature of this publication is that the five parts of the collection deal with such key issues as the historical dimension, language policies and language planning, contemporary societal multilingualism, multilingual language acquisition, and the localized Englishes of global cities. The first four sections of the volume provide a multi-levelled and finely-detailed description of multilingual diversity of three global cities, while the final section discusses postcolonial Englishes in the context of multilingual language acquisition and language contact.

This important contribution to the sociolinguistics of Asian languages breaks new ground in the study of language standards and standardization in two key ways: in its focus on Asia, with particular attention paid to China and its neighbours, and in the attention paid to multilingual contexts. The chapters address various kinds of (sometimes hidden) multilingualism and examine the interactions between multilingualism and language standardization, offering a corrective to earlier work on standardization, which has tended to assume a monolingual nation state and monolingual individuals. Taken together, the chapters in this book thus add to our understanding of the ways in which multilingualism is implicated in language standardization, as well as the impact of language standards on multilingualism. The introduction, Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 are free to download as open access publications. You can access them here: Introduction: https://zenodo.org/record/5749388#.YaiwuNDP3cs Chapter 6: https://zenodo.org/record/5749522#.Yaiw-9DP3cs Chapter 8: https://zenodo.org/record/5749586#.Yai0RNDP3cs