Language Policy / Edition 1

by Bernard Spolsky

Overview

The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation in spoken language. The book discusses key approaches to stylistic variation, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521011754
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/11/2003
Series:	Key Topics in Sociolinguistics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.39(w) x 8.39(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Bernard Spolsky is Emeritus Professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Senior Associate, the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland.

Table of Contents

1. Language practices, ideology and beliefs, and management and planning; 2. Driving out the bad; 3. Pursuing the good and dealing with the new; 4. The nature of language policy and its domains; 5. Two monolingual polities - Iceland and France; 6. How did English spread?; 7. Does the US have a language policy or just civil rights?; 8. Language rights; 9. Monolingual polities under pressure; 10. Monolingual polities with recognised linguistic minorities; 11. Partitioning language space - two, three, many; 12. Resisting language shift; 13. Conclusions.

Editorial Reviews

"It is one of the virtues of this book that what one author suggests or asserts may be supplemented or argued with by another. Reading these papers is therefore not unlike attending a thoughtful debate carried on by experts...it is a rigorous and well-referenced (there is a 32-page bibliography) exploration of style from a variety of perspectives. In addition, the work provides fascinating critiques of the many viewpoints presented during the workshop." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

"Taking into account this gathering of refined versions of classical approaches to style with others completely new perspectives on the one hand, and the extensive reflections on each of these that other experts offer, the book constitutes an excellent up to date of research into the role of style in sociolinguistic variation and represents a serious attempt to solve the problems that its analysis poses. The collection is a fundamental reference, therefore, for students and academics whose works have to deal more or less directly with the complex but at the same time fascinating task of interpreting stylistic variation in speech." Estudios de Sociolinguistica Virginia Acuna Ferreira, Universidade de Vigo

From the Publisher