This book is a sociolinguistic examination of the Russian speech of the American “Third Wave”, the migration from the Soviet Union which began in the early 1970s under the policy of détente. Within the framework of bilingualism and language contact studies, it examines developments in emigré Russian with reference to the late Cold-War period which shaped them and the post-Soviet era of today. The book addresses matters of interest not only to Russianists, but to linguists of various theoretical persuasions and to sociologists, anthropologists and cultural historians working on a range of related topics. No knowledge of the Russian language is assumed on the part of the reader, and all linguistics examples are presented in standard transliteration and fully explicated.

This volume offers a synthetic approach to language variation and language ideologies in multilingual communities. Although the vast majority of the world s speech communities are multilingual, much of sociolinguistics ignores this internal diversity. This volume fills this gap, investigating social and linguistic dimensions of variation and change in multilingual communities. Drawing on research in a wide range of countries (Canada, USA, South Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu), it explores: connections between the fields of creolistics, language/dialect contact, and language acquisition; how the study of variation and change, particularly in cases of additive bilingualism, is central to understanding social and linguistic issues in multilingual communities; how changing language ideologies and changing demographics influence language choice and/or language policy, and the pivotal place of multilingualism in enacting social power and authority, and a rich array of new empirical findings on the dynamics of multilingual speech communities.

While much has been written about Gibraltar from historical and political perspectives, sociolinguistic aspects have been largely overlooked. This book describes the influences which have shaped the colony’s linguistic development since the British occupation in 1704, and the relationship between the three principal means of communication: English, Spanish and the code-switching variant Yanito. The study then focuses its attentions on the communicative forms and functions of Gibraltarian English. The closing of the border between Gibraltar and Spain (1969-1982), which effectively isolated the colony, had important social and linguistic repercussions. This volume presents the first full account of the language attitudes and identity of a new generation of Gibraltarians, all of whom were born after the border was re-opened. Adopting a variationist approach, this study analyses the extent to which the language use and phonetic realisations of young Gibraltarians differ from those of previous generations and the factors conditioning language variation and change.

Language Standardization and Language Change describes the formation of an early standard norm at the Cape around 1900. The processes of variant reduction and sociolinguistic focusing which accompanied the early standardization history of Afrikaans (or ‘Cape Dutch’ as it was then called) are analysed within the broad methodological framework of corpus linguistics and variation analysis. Multivariate statistical techniques (cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and PCA) are used to model the emergence of linguistic uniformity in the Cape Dutch speech community. The book also examines language contact and creolization in the early settlement, the role of Afrikaner nationalism in shaping language attitudes and linguistic practices, and the influence of English. As a case study in historical sociolinguistics the book calls into question the traditional view of the emergence of an Afrikaans standard norm, and advocates a strongly sociolinguistic, speaker-orientated approach to language history in general, and standardization studies in particular.

Part sociolinguistic, part ethnographic, this book takes up the neglected question of how ethnic division interacts with variation and change in Northern Irish English. It identifies an idealised folk model of harmonious communities, in spite of the social divide and open conflict that have long affected the region; this model affects daily life and sociolinguistic studies alike. A reading of sociolinguistic studies from the region reveals ethnolinguistic differentiation. Qualitative analysis of material from (London)Derry shows people often stressing tolerance in their community, while accounts of their activities contain evidence of ethnic division and strife. Quantitative analysis charts six changes in (London)Derry English. Variation correlates to varying degrees with age, ethnicity, class, sex and social network. The ethnic dimension, while not the most important parameter in all cases, plays a role in relation to all the changes examined.

Many of the assumptions of Labovian sociolinguistics are based on results drawn from US and UK English, Latin American Spanish and Canadian French. Sociolinguistic variation in the French of France has been rather little studied compared to these languages. This volume is the first examination and exploration of variation in French that studies in a unified way the levels of phonology, grammar and lexis using quantitative methods. One of its aims is to establish whether the patterns of variation that have been reported in French conform to those reported in other languages. A second important theme of this volume is the study of variation across speech styles in French, through a comparison with some of the best-known English results. The book is therefore also the first to examine current theories of social-stylistic variation by using fresh quantitative data. These data throw new light on the influence of methodology on results, on why certain linguistic variables have more stylistic value, and on how the strong normative tradition in France moulds interactions between social and stylistic variation.

Divided into three main sections on Phonology, Syntax and Semantics, this new volume on variation in French aims to provide a snapshot of the state of sociolinguistic research inside and outside metropolitan France. From a diatopic perspective, varieties in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Africa and Canada are considered, mainly with respect to phonological features but also focusing on syntactic and lexical evolutions (the relative clause in Ivorian French and discourse markers in Canadian French). The acquisition of stylistic features of French figures in chapters on both first and second language learners and variation across different genres is addressed with respect to non-standard non-finite forms. Finally, a section on semantic change traces the way that interactional and other socio-historical factors affect word meaning. The volume will appeal to (socio-)linguists with an interest in contemporary French as well as to advanced undergraduates and post-graduate students of French and specialists in the field.