The "one-nation-one-language" assumption is as unrealistic as the well-known Chomskyan ideal of a homogeneous speech community. Linguistic pluricentricity is a common and widespread phenomenon; it can be understood as either differing national standards or differing local norms. The nine studies collected in this volume explore the sociocultural, conceptual and structural dimensions of variation and change within pluricentric languages, with specific emphasis on the relationship between national varieties. They include research undertaken in both the Cognitive Linguistic and socolinguistic tradition, with particular emphasis upon the emerging framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Six languages, all more or less pluricentric, are analyzed: four Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch and Swedish) and two Romance languages (Portuguese and French). The volume describes patterns of phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic variation, and perception and attitudes in relation to these pluricentric languages. It makes use of advanced empirical methods able to account for the complex interplay between conceptual and social aspects of pluricentric variation and other forms of language-internal variation.

The studies collected in this volume explore the sociocultural, conceptual and structural dimensions of variation and change within pluricentric languages, with specific emphasis on the relationship between national varieties. The volume describes patterns of phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic variation, and language attitudes. It brings together Cognitive Linguistics and sociolinguistics and makes use of advanced empirical methods. The volume addresses a wider audience of scholars including linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and language planners and teachers.

The studies collected in this volume explore the sociocultural, conceptual and structural dimensions of variation and change within pluricentric languages, with specific emphasis on the relationship between national varieties. The volume describes patterns of phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic variation, and language attitudes. It brings together Cognitive Linguistics and sociolinguistics and makes use of advanced empirical methods. The volume addresses a wider audience of scholars including linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and language planners and teachers.

This book unpacks a 30-year debate about the pluricentricity of German. It examines the concept of pluricentricity, an idea implicit to the study of World Englishes, which expressly allows for national standard varieties, and the notion of "pluri-areality," which seeks to challenge the former. Looking at the debate from three angles – methodological, theoretical, and epistemological – the volume draws on data from German and English, with additional perspectives from Dutch, Luxembourgish, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, to establish if and to what degree "pluri-areality" and pluricentricity model various sociolinguistic situations adequately. Dollinger argues that "pluri-areality" is synonymous with "geographical variation" and, as such, no match for pluricentricity. Instead, "pluri-areality" presupposes an atheoretical, supposedly "neutral", data-driven linguistics that violates basic science-theoretical principles. Three fail-safes are suggested – the uniformitarian hypothesis, Popper’s theory of falsification and speaker attitudes – to avoid philological incompatibilities and terminological clutter. This book is of particular interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, World Englishes, Germanic languages and linguists more generally.

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.

Exploring Russian as a pluricentric language, this book provides a panoramic view of its use within and outside the nation and discusses the connections between language, politics, ideologies, and cultural contacts. Russian is widely used across the former Soviet republics and in the diaspora, but speakers outside Russia deviate from the metropolis in their use of the language and their attitudes towards it. Using country case studies from across the former Soviet Union and beyond, the contributors analyze the unifying role of the Russian language for developing transnational connections and show its value in the knowledge economy. They demonstrate that centrifugal developments of Russian and its pluricentricity are grounded in the language and education policies of their host countries, as well as the goals and functions of cultural institutions, such as schools, media, travel agencies, and others created by émigrés for their co-ethnics. This book also reveals the tensions between Russia’s attempts to homogenize the 'Russian world' and the divergence of regional versions of Russian reflecting cultural hybridity of the diaspora. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will prove useful to researchers of Russian and post-Soviet politics, Russian studies, Russian language and culture, linguistics, and immigration studies. Those studying multilingualism and heritage language teaching may also find it interesting.

"This book presents a detailed overview of the evolution of the Catalan identity and how Catalonia has been shaped by many geographic and cultural influences"--

Cognitive Sociolinguistics draws on the rich theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and focuses on the social factors that underlie the variability of meaning and conceptualization. In the last decade, the field has expanded in various way. The current volume takes stock of current and emerging advances in the field in short academic contributions. The studies collected in this book have a usage-based approach to language variation and change, drawing on the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and are sensitive to social variation, be it cross-linguistic or language-internal. Three types of contributions are collected in this book. First, it contains theoretical overview papers on the domains that have witnessed expansion in recent years. Second, it presents novel research ideas in proof-of-concept contributions, aimed at blue-sky research and out-of-the-box linguistic analyses. Third, it showcases recent empirical studies within the field. By combining these three types of contributions, the book provides an encompassing overview of novel developments in the field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics.