This collection of essays developed out of a conference held in Hong Kong in 1988. The aim was to provide a forum for an exchange of views between academics working within the field of sociolinguistics, in particular between those working in the West and those working in the East. Sociolinguistics Today has taken this aim a step further to produce an overview of contemporary research into sociolinguistics worldwide. The book contains articles by acknowledged leaders in the study of language and society, and the presence of sociolinguists working in Asia provides a new and exciting challenge to the hitherto western-dominated field. The comprehensive study of Asian sociolinguistics is unique and engages with the non-Asian contributions to great effect. The range of contributors reinforces the international emphasis of the book.

This book is based on a close study of modern drama texts. In the first section – Dialogue – it studies specific drama texts. Drama has been neglected by linguistic studies of literature, and this book develops a new area of literary-linguistic stylistics. It demonstrates how recent advances in the sociolinguistic analysis of conversation (discourse analysis) can account for readers’ and audiences’ intuitions about dramatic dialogue. The second section – Discourse – uses these studies to develop a powerful and general model of spoken discourse. As well as accounting for the utterance-by-utterance organization of dramatic texts, it provides a descriptive model for the analysis of naturally occurring conversation. Literary texts and natural conversation are used to illustrate each other.

In acquiring communicative competence, children must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Although rules for appropriate language use may vary from culture to culture, they are usually sensitive across languages to many of the same factors, including the context and the topic of the discourse, and the sex, age, familiarity and relative status of the speaker and the listener. There is available detailed evidence of the ways in which adults consistently modify their speech to foreigners, of phonological, syntactic, and lexical markings of language in professional settings, and of differences in men’s and women’s speech that are tied to their roles in society. This book examines young children’s knowledge of the sociolinguistic rules that govern appropriate language use, exploring (i) the repertoire of registers (ie speech varieties) that young children possess; (ii) the linguistic devices that they use to mark distinct registers; (iii) the way their skill in using these registers develops.

Despite a vast amount of study, literacy is still a very confused topic, which requires the integration of findings from different areas. Reading and writing are psychological skills, but they are also linguistic skills (since people read and write meaningful language) and social skills (since written language serves particular functions in different societies). In this book Michael Stubbs provides a basis for a sociolinguistic theory of literacy. He believes that a systematic theory of literacy must be based on an understanding of a number of factors, such as the relationship between written and spoken language, including how English spelling works and how it is related to spoken English. Also of paramount importance are the social, educational and technological pressures on written language, which are particularly powerful in the case of an international language like English; the social and communicative functions which written language serves – largely administrative and intellectual functions; and the variability of spoken language and the relative uniformity of written language. The book also discusses the arguments behind deprivation theory as an explanation of educational failure. Reading failure is not well understood, but the author stresses that a vital element is the attitude of teachers towards the child’s language. He emphasizes that it is important that teachers should understand as much as possible about the relationship between written language and the child’s spoken language. Such understanding, he argues, can only increase tolerance of regional, social and ethnic diversity in language.

This text provides an introduction to the field of sociolinguistics for second and foreign language teachers. This book provides an introduction to the field of sociolinguistics for second and foreign language teachers. Chapters cover the basic areas of sociolinguistics, including regional and social variations in dialects, language and gender, World English, and intercultural communication. Each chapter has been specially written for this collection by an individual who has done extensive research on the topic explored. This is the first introductory text to address explicitly the pedagogical implications of current theory and research in sociolinguistics. The book will also be of interest to any teachers with students from linguistically diverse backgrounds.

The volume collects original studies highlighting contemporary trends in historical sociolinguistics, as well as current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. Distinctive features of the book, which make it appealing to a wider audience, are the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters and the range of languages addressed.

This book is based on a close study of modern drama texts. In the first section – Dialogue – it studies specific drama texts. Drama has been neglected by linguistic studies of literature, and this book develops a new area of literary-linguistic stylistics. It demonstrates how recent advances in the sociolinguistic analysis of conversation (discourse analysis) can account for readers' and audiences' intuitions about dramatic dialogue. The second section – Discourse – uses these studies to develop a powerful and general model of spoken discourse. As well as accounting for the utterance-by-utterance organization of dramatic texts, it provides a descriptive model for the analysis of naturally occurring conversation. Literary texts and natural conversation are used to illustrate each other.