Urban Sociolinguistics

Download or read book Urban Sociolinguistics written by Dick Smakman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Urban Sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic study of twelve urban settings around the world. Building on William Labov’s famous New York Study, the authors demonstrate how language use in these areas is changing based on belief systems, behavioural norms, day-to-day rituals and linguistic practices. All chapters are written by key figures in sociolinguistics and presents the personal stories of individuals using linguistic means to go about their daily communications, in diverse sociolinguistic systems such as: extremely large urban conurbations like Cairo, Tokyo, and Mexico City smaller settings like Paris and Sydney less urbanised places such as the Western Netherlands Randstad area and Kohima in India. Providing new perspectives on crucial themes such as language choice and language contact, code-switching and mixing, language and identity, language policy and planning and social networks, this is key reading for students and researchers in the areas of multilingualism and super-diversity within sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and urban studies.

Download or read book Linguistic Landscape in the City written by Elana Shohamy and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

Download or read book Sociolinguistic Variation in Urban Linguistic Landscapes written by Sofie Henricson and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban linguistic landscapes reflect and create sociolinguistic, societal and urban dynamics. This book explores these relations scientifically and, focusing on the linguistic landscapes of selected cities in northern and southern Europe, sheds light on how urban areas with diverse profiles differ, and how linguistic landscapes change through tourism and migration, or in times of crisis. The book puts forward sophisticated and novel ways of approaching urban sociolinguistics and enhances understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced when studying sociolinguistic variation in these linguistic landscapes. This book is targeted especially at scholars in the field of urban sociolinguistics wishing to approach the subject through the lens of linguistic landscapes. It also raises interesting points to anyone involved in language planning and policy reflection, as well as those engaged in urban redevelopment planning. Last but not least, it offers theoretical and methodological guidance to students and researchers in a wider variety of disciplines.

Download or read book Language and Social Structure in Urban France written by David Hornsby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The coming together of linguistics and sociology in the 1960's, most notably via the work of William Labov, marked a revolution in the study of language and provided a paradigm for the understanding of variation and change. Labovian quantitative methods have been employed successfully in North America, the UK, Scandinavia and New Zealand, but have had surprisingly little resonance in France, a country which poses many challenges to orthodox sociolinguistic thinking. Why, for example, does a nation with unexceptional scores on income distribution and social mobility show an exceptionally high degree of linguistic levelling, that is, the elimination of marked regional or local speech forms? And why does French appear to abound in 'hyperstyle' variables, which show greater variation on the stylistic than on the social dimension, in defiance of a well-established theory than such variables should not occur? This volume brings together leading variationist sociolinguists and sociologists from both sides of the Channel to ask: what makes France'exceptional'? In addressing this question, variationists have been forced to reassess the accepted interdisciplinary consensus, and to ask, as sociolinguistics has come of age, whether concepts and definitions have been transposed in a way which meaningfully preserves their original sense and, crucially, takes account of recent developments in sociology. Sociologists, for their part, have focused on the largely neglected area of language variation and its implications for social theory. Their findings therefore transcend the case study of a particularly enigmatic country to raise important theoretical questions for both disciplines.

Download or read book Urban Matters written by Arne Ziegler and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city as a complex socio-cultural structure plays a central role, economically, administratively as well as culturally. Factors such as higher population density, a more expansive infrastructure, and larger social and cultural diversity compared to rural areas have a substantial impact on urban society and urban communication. Focusing on the latter, the contributions to this volume discuss the characteristics and dynamics of urban language use, considering aspects such as contact, variation and change, as well as identity, indexicality, and attitudes, but also spatial factors including mobility, urbanisation/counterurbanisation, and diffusion processes. The collected articles provide an update of ‘first wave’ approaches of variationist sociolinguistics, but also establish a connection to ‘third wave’ research for readers from a broad range of fields, especially sociolinguistics, variationist linguistics, and dialectology. The book presents modern methodological and conceptual ideas and a wealth of new findings but also serves as a reference work, combining theoretical discussions with results from recent empirical studies.

Download or read book Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City written by Dick Smakman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-22 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City focuses on how individuals navigate conversation in highly diversified contexts and provides a broad overview of state of the art research in urban sociolinguistics across the globe. Bearing in mind the impact of international travel and migration, the book accounts for the shifting contemporary studies to the workings of language choices in places where people with many different backgrounds meet and exchange ideas. It specifically addresses how people handle language use challenges in a broad range of settings to present themselves positively and meet their information and identity goals. While a speaker’s experience runs like a thread through this volume, the linguistic, cultural and situational focus is as broad as possible. It runs from the language choices of Chinese immigrants to Beijing and Finnish immigrants to Japan to the use of the local lingua franca by motor taxi drivers in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, and how Hungarian students in their dorm rooms express views on political correctness uninhibitedly. As it turns out, language play, improvisation, humour, lies, as well as highly marked subconscious pronunciation choices, are natural parts of the discourses, and this volume provides numerous and extensive examples of these techniques. For each of the settings discussed, the perspective is taken of personalised linguistic and extra-linguistic styles in tackling communicative challenges. This way, a picture is drawn of how postmodern individuals in extremely different cultural and situational circumstances turn out to have strikingly similar human behaviours and intentions. Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City is of interest to all those who follow theoretical and methodological developments in this field. It will be of use for upper level students in the fields of Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Linguistic Anthropology and related fields in which urban communicative settings are the focus.

Download or read book Urban Diversities and Language Policies in Medium-sized Linguistic Communities written by Emili Boix and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2015 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines medium-sized linguistic communities in urban contexts against the backdrop of the language policies which have been implemented in these respective areas. The book aims to improve our understanding of how and why languages live and decay, and of how intercultural cities, where communities show interest in each other's culture and language, can be better built and encouraged.