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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS

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This Companion to Sociolinguistics has been collected together for anyone who is interested in how and why diverse people speak and write differently: in other words, it is aimed at everyone. Anyone who has ever noticed an accent, or puzzled over a dialect phrase, or wondered why road signs are in several languages; anyone who adjusts their speech or writing in different situations, or cannot imitate the way that older people or younger people talk, or feels excluded by the way another group speaks; anyone who has ever tried to create an impression of themselves in an interview or e-mail, anyone who has ever made a snap decision on the basis of someone’s voice, anyone who has ever been in an argument – in all these situations, you have been involved in the field of sociolinguistics. This book opens up this area for newcomers to the study of language, and provides a useful reference guide and resource for more advanced sociolinguists.
The field of sociolinguistics in the early twenty-first century is a mature, confident and vibrant discipline. At its core is a concern for the observable facts of language variation and principled thinking about the reasons and consequences of this variation and change. The fact that language changes is indisputable and inevitable, and it is this fact of change, spread unevenly across time and space, that leads to linguistic variation. Sociolinguistic interest in variation and change can be drawn in a straight line back to the earlier traditional concerns of dia- lectology and philology, which described the different varieties that make up a language and traced the historical development of particular features of vocabulary and grammar.
Though traditional dialectology was inevitably also interested in differences in pronunciation, it was largely the invention of portable recording equipment in the form of the desk-sized tape-recorder that marked the birth of sociolinguistics. This allowed researchers to compare accent variation reliably and allowed them to investigate speech directly, rather than by inference from written documents and extrapolations of sound-change rules into the past. Provided with the means of hearing and replaying speech precisely, sociolinguists could focus on individual sounds and explore correlations not just with the geographical location of speakers, but also with their age, gender, class, education, outlook, politics, and so on. In the urban settings in which most people in industrialized nations live, new socio- linguistic techniques illuminated the processes of human society and language

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Detail Information

Series Title

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Call Number

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Publisher

USA : Routledge., 2007

Collation

1-297

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0–203–44149–4

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

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Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Sociology

Specific Detail Info

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