Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and Multilingual Speech Communities: Celebrating the Work of Gillian Sankoff

by Meyerhoff, Miriam; Nagy, Naomi

• ISBN13: 9789027218636
• ISBN10: 9027218633
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-15
• Publisher: John Benjamins Pub Co

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Social lives in language	p. 1
Photos of Gillian : then and now	p. 17
Biographies of contributors and email addresses	p. 19
Language, mobility and (in)security : a journey through Francophone Canada	p. 27
Language repertoires and the middle class in urban Solomon Islands	p. 43
Land, language and identity : the socio-political origins of Gurindji Kriol	p. 69
"I've been speaking Tsotsitaal all my life without knowing it" : towards a unified account of Tsotsitaals in South Africa	p. 95
Tok Bokis, Tok Piksa : translating parables in Papua New Guinea	p. 111
Chiac in context : overview and evaluation of Acadie's Joual	p. 137
How to predict the evolution of a bilingual community	p. 179
How local is local French in Quebec?	p. 195
Ne deletion in Picard and in regional French : evidence for distinct grammars	p. 223
The dynamics of pronouns in the Quebec languages in contact dynamics	p. 249
Subordinate clause marking in Montreal Anglophone French and English	p. 273
Mysteries of the substrate	p. 315
Empirical problems with domain-based notions of "simple"	p. 327
Index of names	p. 357
Index of subjects	p. 361
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