This collection of essays on the worldviews of the people in Malaysia focuses on the three main ethnic groups - the Malays, Chinese and Indians - as well as the indigenous peoples of Sabah. Topics include the Islamic worldview of Man, society and nature, the traditional Malay socio-political outlook, the language and worldview of the Malay peasants, as well as Malaysian folk-tales and drama. The worldview of social belonging among the Chinese and Indians, and the traditional worldviews of the indigenous peoples of Sabah are also presented.

Semelai is a previously undescribed and endangered Aslian (Mon-Khmer) language of the Malay Peninsula. This book - the first in-depth description of an Aslian language - provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Semelai. Semelai intertwines two types of morphological system: a concatenative system of prefixes, suffixes and a circumfix - acquired through extended contact with Malay - and a nonconcatenative system of prefixes and infixes (including infix reduplication), inherited from Mon-Khmer. There are distinctive word classes - Nominals, Verbs and Expressives - the latter iconic utterances which simultaneously provide information about the predicate and its arguments. Semelai has many derivational processes which change word class or affect transitivity, and it combines both head-marking and dependent-marking profiles. It also has a rich phonemic system of 20 vowels and 32 consonants. Nicole Kruspe's discussion is complemented with a generous number of illustrative examples and texts, creating a reference work that will be welcomed by descriptivists and typologists alike.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

This collection of essays developed out of a conference held in Hong Kong in 1988. The aim was to provide a forum for an exchange of views between academics working within the field of sociolinguistics, in particular between those working in the West and those working in the East. Sociolinguistics Today has taken this aim a step further to produce an overview of contemporary research into sociolinguistics worldwide. The book contains articles by acknowledged leaders in the study of language and society, and the presence of sociolinguists working in Asia provides a new and exciting challenge to the hitherto western-dominated field. The comprehensive study of Asian sociolinguistics is unique and engages with the non-Asian contributions to great effect. The range of contributors reinforces the international emphasis of the book.

“An absolutely unique work in linguistics publishing – full of beautiful maps and authoritative accounts of well-known and little-known language encounters. Essential reading (and map-viewing) for students of language contact with a global perspective.” Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie The two text volumes cover a large geographical area, including Australia, New Zealand, Melanesia, South -East Asia (Insular and Continental), Oceania, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, Mongolia, Central Asia, the Caucasus Area, Siberia, Arctic Areas, Canada, Northwest Coast and Alaska, United States Area, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The Atlas is a detailed, far-reaching handbook of fundamental importance, dealing with a large number of diverse fields of knowledge, with the reported facts based on sound scholarly research and scientific findings, but presented in a form intelligible to non-specialists and educated lay persons in general.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the English used in Singapore and Malaysia, including how children in these two countries acquire the languages used around them, particularly on their acquisition of English. This book is the first attempt to bring together studies on various aspects of this subject done by academics from the two countries. It begins with two background papers on the linguistic situation in Singapore and Malaysia, followed by studies of the cognitive development of children as it relates to language development. The third and fourth sections of the book contain papers dealing variously with the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of language use with important implications on language learning and teaching in a multilingual context.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

This book is the first of its kind on Mandarin spread in Malaysia. The author investigated the language situation in the Chinese community in Johor and proposed a theoretical framework to analyze language spread. In her proposal, mass media in Mandarin and Chinese education play significant roles in Mandarin spread. Both top-down and bottom spread are found, which is different from the process of English spread elsewhere. With the spread of Mandarin, more and more Chinese abandon Chinese dialects and identify with the pan-Chinese identity. Mandarin spread is a dynamic process, which is triggered by an internal force, i.e. sociolinguistic realignment of the community. In this book, the author compares Johor with Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in terms of their sociolinguistic realignment process. This is a book for sociolinguists, language planners, students of linguistics, school teachers, and general readers