Miriam Meyerhoff Knihy

Doing A practical guide to data collection and a nalysis provides an accessible introduction and guide to the methods of data collection and analysis in the field of sociolinguistics. It offers students the opportunity to engage directly with some of the foundational and more innovative work being done in the quantitative or variationist paradigm. Divided into sixteen short chapters, Doing Sociolinguistics : Designed to function as both a core text for methods classes in sociolinguistics and as a companion to the Routledge textbook Introducing Sociolinguistics, this book will be essential reading for all students studying and researching in this area.

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.

How can developments in a contact language inform the inquiry into the structural nature of language? How do they help us better understand the nature of language change and the processes of grammaticisation? Using data from everyday conversations in Bislama (the national language of Vanuatu), this book focuses on one variable, the alternation between overt pronominal and phonetically null subjects. It shows how an emergent system of subject-verb agreement in Bislama interacts with functional constraints on the interpretability of a subject; this interaction accounts for much of the alternation between the two forms of subject. The rich array of social functions that Bislama serves in the communities studied is examined in some detail, and yet it is shown that as Bislama becomes increasingly elaborate morphosyntactically, this kind of structural innovation takes place largely independently of social factors. By adopting the methods of sociolinguistics grounded in participant observation, and being grounded in theoretical treatments of subject agreement, this volume shows how the study of change in a contact language helps to bridge issues in different subfields of linguistics.

"The Handbook of Language and Gender is a collection of articles written by a team of leading specialists in the field that examines the implications of gender ideologies for the ways we interact. The volume includes data and case-studies from interactions in a number of different social contexts and from a range of different communities, and theoretical discussions about the problems, pitfalls, and potential benefits of research on and discourses about gender." "This handbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date, and stimulating picture of the field of language and gender for students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, gender studies, communication, management, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Book jacket."--Jacket