Top linguists from diverse fields address language varieties in the South.   Language Variety in the South Revisited is a comprehensive collection of new research on southern United States ...English by foremost scholars of regional language variation. Like its predecessor, Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White (The University of Alabama Press, 1986), this book includes current research into African American vernacular English, but it greatly expands the scope of investigation and offers an extensive assessment of the field. The volume encompasses studies of contact involving African and European languages; analysis of discourse, pragmatic, lexical, phonological, and syntactic features; and evaluations of methods of collecting and examining data. The 38 essays not only offer a wealth of information about southern language varieties but also serve as models for regional linguistic investigation.
More than forty years ago it was demonstrated that the African continent can be divided into four distinct language families. Research on African languages has accordingly been preoccupied with ...reconstructing and understanding similarities across these families. This has meant that an interest in other kinds of linguistic relationship, such as whether structural similarities and dissimilarities among African languages are the result of contact between these languages, has never been the subject of major research. This 2007 book shows that such similarities across African languages are more common than is widely believed. It provides a broad perspective on Africa as a linguistic area, as well as an analysis of specific linguistic regions. In order to have a better understanding of African languages, their structures, and their history, more information on these contact-induced relationships is essential to understanding Africa's linguistic geography, and to reconstructing its history and prehistory.
This book proposes a multidisciplinary assessment of the impact of complex diversity on language politics and policies, analysing how the legacies of the old interact with the challenges of the new. ...Its main focus is on the interplay of multilingualism on the one hand, and the dynamics of transnationalism, globalisation, and Europeanisation on the other. This interplay confronts contemporary societies with unprecedented questions, as they face the need to come to grips with increasingly varied and pervasive manifestations of linguistic and cultural diversity. This volume develops an integrative approach that identifies the key social and political dimensions at hand, offering an innovative contribution to the ongoing conversation on the manifestations and management of multilingualism.
Dieser Sammelband dokumentiert die thematische und interdisziplinäre Breite der Forschungen zum Zusammenhang von Sprache und Kolonialismus. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt auf der Verknüpfung von ...Untersuchungen zu historisch-kolonialen und gegenwärtig-postkolonialen Themen, Perspektiven und Fragestellungen. Die aus der Sicht unterschiedlicher Fächer und Teilfächer wie etwa Germanistik, Niederlandistik, Anglistik und Afrikanistik verfassten Beiträge behandeln Themen aus den Bereichen Toponymie, Diskursanalyse, Standardsprachenideologie, Sprachattitüden, Sprachkontakt, Sprache und Migration, Kulturmission, christliche Missionierung, Kodifizierung und Sprachenpolitik. Die Analysen sprachlicher Praktiken lassen den Kolonialismus als eine Verflechtungsgeschichte zwischen Kolonien und Metropolen erkennen, die weit über die faktische Kolonialzeit hinausreicht und bis heute sowohl in den Nachfolgestaaten der historischen Kolonien als auch im europäischen Raum der früheren Kolonialmetropolen Relevanz hat.
Tropical Tongues Salmon, William Noel; Gómez Menjívar, Jennifer Carolina
The University of North Carolina Press eBooks,
2018
eBook
Odprti dostop
Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize examines the precarious state of languages in coastal Belize. In the period following the country's independence ...in 1981, Kriol has risen to the level of a national language. While the prestige enjoyed by English and Spanish is indisputable, a range of historical and socio-economic developments has given Kriol an elevated status in the coastal districts at the potential expense of more vulnerable minority languages also spoken there. Using fieldwork, ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys of language attitudes and use, Gómez Menjívar and Salmon show the attenuation of Mopan and Garifuna alongside the stigmatized yet robust Kriol language. Language endangerment studies generally focus on the loss of a minority language to a European language. Tropical Tongues presents a fresh perspective on language shift and loss by examining how large-scale economic restructuring can unsettle relationships among minority languages. An open access edition of Tropical Tongues is available through a partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.
This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller's (2000) and Müller and Hulk's (2001) hypotheses on ...cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in the study of bilingualism. It also reflects the enormous increase in different language combinations (including dialects) being investigated, and the use of new methodologies. Moreover, the volume illustrates the growing interdisciplinarity of cross-linguistic influence research, considering extra-linguistic cognitive and social factors besides linguistics. It demonstrates that the time is ripe for a more integrated approach from different disciplines such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to obtain a better understanding of bilingual child acquisition. As such, it is of interest to (psycho/socio)linguists, psychologists and education specialists who study or want to learn about (child) bilingualism.
Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is an English-lexified Atlantic expanded pidgin/creole spoken in some form by an estimated 50% of Cameroon's population, primarily in the anglophone west regions, but ...also in urban centres throughout the country. Primarily a spoken language, CPE enjoys a vigorous oral presence in Cameroon, and the linguistic examples illustrating this description are drawn from a spoken corpus consisting of a range of text types, including oral narratives, radio broadcasts and spontaneous conversation. The authors' typologically-framed investigation of the features of the language, from its phonetics, phonology and lexicon to its syntax and discourse structure, allows the reader a clear view of the linguistic character of CPE, offering a comprehensive description of the language that will be of interest to creolists as well as linguists interested in African languages, contact linguistics and comparative linguistics.
Language-contact phenomena in Mesoamerica and adjacent regions present an exciting field for research that has the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of language contact and ...the role that it plays in language change. This volume presents and analyzes fresh empirical data from living and/or extinct Mesoamerican languages (from the Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, Totonac-Tepehuan and Otomanguean groups), neighboring non-Mesoamerican languages (Apachean, Arawakan, Andean languages), as well as Spanish. Language-contact effects in these diverse languages and language groups are typically analyzed by different subfields of linguistics that do not necessarily interact with one another. It is hoped that this volume, which contains works from different scholarly traditions that represent a variety of approaches to the study of language contact, will contribute to the lessening of this compartmentalization. The volume is relevant to researchers of language contact and contact-induced change and to anyone interested both in the historical development and present features of indigenous languages of the Americas and Latin American Spanish.
This book explores scholarly challenges within the fields of Anglophone language, literature, and culture. The section focusing on language details issues falling within two areas: namely, language ...contact and the language-culture relationship, and stylistic and syntactic perspectives on the English language. The literature part investigates twentieth-century American, English, and Australian literature, dealing with both poetry and prose and discussing topics of identity, gender, metafiction, postmodern conditions, and other relevant theoretical issues in contemporary literature. The culture part treats theoretical approaches in cultural studies that are vital in today's cultural context, especially in Central European universities, the Irish language and culture, and contemporary cultural phenomena inspired by the growing ubiquity of technological intrusions into various fields of cultural production.