Bringing together a team of renowned international scholars, this volume provides a wide-ranging collection of historical and state-of-the-art perspectives on language regard, particularly in the context of language variation and language change, and importantly, highlights the range of new methodologies being used by linguists to explore and evaluate it. The importance of language regard to the inquiry of language variation and change in the field of sociolinguistics is increasingly being...

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries afterward, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this "dead language" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Juergen Leonhardt offers the story of the first "world language," from antiquity to the present.

Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, often in unexpected and previously undocumented ways. The study is based on a group of matching corpora, known as the 'Brown family' of corpora, supplemented by a range of other corpus materials, both written and spoken, drawn mainly from the later twentieth century. Among the matters receiving particular attention are the influence of ...

The interactions of the Celtic-speaking communities of Southern Gaul with the Mediterranean world have intrigued commentators since antiquity. This book combines sociolinguistics and archaeology to bring to life the multilingualism and multiple identities of the region from the foundation of the Greek colony of Massalia in 600 BC to the final phases of Roman Imperial power. It builds on the interest generated by the application of modern bilingualism theory to ancient evidence by modelling...

In this handbook, scholars from around the world offer an up-to-date account of the state of the art in different areas of onomastics, in a format that is both useful to specialists in related fields and accessible to the general reader. Since Ancient Greece, names have been regarded as central to the study of language, and this has continued to be a major theme of both philosophical and linguistic enquiry throughout the history of Western thought. The investigation of name origins is more...

In South America indigenous languages are extremely diverse. There are over one hundred language families in this region alone. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. The book aims to uncover regional patterns and potential deeper genealogical relations between the languages. Based on a large-scale database of features from sixty languages, the book analys...

Analysing Variation in English brings together a range of perspectives on the collection, analysis and broader relevance of variable language data. In the first half of the book, the focus is firmly on the description and comparison of methods for collecting and analysing examples of variation in language. Novel quantitative and computational methods are introduced and exemplified alongside more traditional approaches. The innovative second half of the book establishes and tests the releva...

The great diversity of ethnicities and languages in Africa encourages a vision of Africa as a fragmented continent, with language maps only perpetuating this vision by drawing discrete language groups. In reality, however, most people can communicate with most others within and across linguistic boundaries, even if not in languages taught or learned in schools. Many disciplines have looked carefully at language movement and change on the continent, but their lack of interaction has prevent...

This book explores the linguistic and cultural identities of Sicilians in Australia, through conversations gathered within the family, survey data and interviews. The study is placed in the context of the family migrant experience and the shifting attitudes towards immigrant languages in Australia.

This volume examines the use of French in European language communities outside France from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The phenomenon of French language usage is explored in a wide variety of communities, namely Bohemian, Dutch, medieval English, German (Prussian), Italian, Piedmontese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Each chapter offers unique insight into the existence of francophonie in a given language community by providing illustrations of lang...

This volume illustrates how language revival movements in Russia and elsewhere have often followed a specific pattern of literacy bias in the promotion of a minority’s heritage language, partly neglecting the social and relational aspects of orality. Using the Vepsian Renaissance as an example, this volume brings to the surface a literacy-orality dualism new to the discussion around revival movements. In addition to the more-theoretically oriented scopes, this book addresses all the actors...

Based on an eight-year study of a family on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, this book explores why the children in the family do not often speak Gaelic, despite the adults' best efforts to use the language with them, as well as the children's attendance at a Gaelic immersion school.