Suchergebnisse

In the last three decades the field of endangered and minority languages has evolved rapidly, moving from the initial dire warnings of linguists to a swift increase in the number of organizations, funding programs, and community-based efforts dedicated to documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. Sustaining Linguistic Diversity brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. Together, these contributions provide a state-of-the-art overview of current work in defining, documenting, and developing the world's smaller lang

Sociocultural linguistics has long conceived of languages as well-bounded, separate codes. But the increasing diversity of languages encountered by most people in their daily lives challenges this conception. Globalization has accelerated population flows, so that cities are now sites of encounter for groups that are highly diverse in terms of origins, cultural practices, and languages. New media technologies invent communicative genres, foster hybrid semiotic practices, and spread diversity as they intensify contact and exchange between peoples who often are spatially removed and culturally different from each other. Diversity--even super-diversity--is now the norm. In response, recent scholarship complicates traditional associations between languages and social identities, emphasizing the connectedness of communicative events and practices at different scales and the embedding of languages within new physical landscapes and mediated practices. This volume takes stock of the increasing diversity of linguistic phenomena and faces the theoretical-methodological challenges that accounting for such phenomena poses to sociocultural linguistics

People in many African communities live within a series of concentric circles when it comes to language. In a small group, a speaker uses an often unwritten and endangered mother tongue that is rarely used in school. A national indigenous language-written, widespread, sometimes used in school-surrounds it. An international language like French or English, a vestige of colonialism, carries prestige, is used in higher education, and promises mobility-and yet it will not be well known by its users. The essays in Languages in Africa explore the layers of African multilingualism as they affect lang