What makes a speech community? How do they evolve? Speech communities are central to our understanding of how language and interactions occur in society. In this book readers will find an overview of the main concepts and critical arguments surrounding how language and communication styles distinguish and identify groups.

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.

This collection of essays presents a picture of research on women and language in Britain. The contributors cover a range of British speech communities, linguistic events and settings using approaches from sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

The social development of English as a world language emerges from a comprehensive account of our current knowledge of it as well as the gaps in understanding which future research can remedy.

Sociophonetics focuses on the relationship between phonetic or phonological form on the one hand, and social and regional factors on the other, working across fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences and psycholinguistics. Covering methodological, theoretical and computational approaches, this engaging introduction to sociophonetics brings new insights to age-old questions about language variation and change, and to the broader nature of language. It includes examples of important work on speech perception, focusing on vowels and sibilants throughout to provide detailed exemplification. The accompanying website provides a range of online resources, including audio files, data processing scripts and links. Written in an accessible style, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences and psycholinguistics. See book website at http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/sociophonetics/

AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS The new eighth edition of An Introduction to Sociolinguistics brings this valuable, bestselling textbook up to date with the latest in sociolinguistic research and pedagogy, providing a broad overview of the study of language in social context with accessible coverage of major concepts, theories, methods, issues, and debates within the field. This leading text helps students develop a critical perspective on language in society as they explore the complex connections between societal norms and language use. The eighth edition contains new and updated coverage of such topics as the societal aspects of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), multilingual societies and discourse, gender and sexuality, ideologies and language attitudes, and the social meanings of linguistic forms. Organized in four sections, this text first covers traditional language issues such as the distinction between languages and dialects, identification of regional and social variation within languages, and the role of context in language use and interpretation. Subsequent chapters cover approaches to research in sociolinguistics—variationist sociolinguistics, ethnography, and discourse analytic research—and address both macro– and micro-sociolinguistic aspects of multilingualism in national, transnational, global, and digital contexts. The concluding section of the text looks at language in relation to gender and sexuality, education, and language planning and policy issues. Featuring examples from a variety of languages and cultures that illustrate topics such as social and regional dialects, multilingualism, and the linguistic construction of identity, this text provides perspectives on both new and foundational research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Eighth Edition, remains the ideal textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate course in sociolinguistics, language and society, linguistic anthropology, applied and theoretical linguistics, and education. The new edition has also been updated to support classroom application with a range of effective pedagogical tools, including end-of-chapter written exercises and an instructor website, as well as materials to support further learning such as reading suggestions, research ideas, and an updated companion student website containing a searchable glossary, a review guide, additional exercises and examples, and links to online resources.