This volume brings together scholars from different disciplines, with a variety of perspectives, linguistic and literary, historical and social, to address issues of control, prescription, planning and perceptions of value, processes of establishing a standard and practices and ideologies of standardization, over the long history of the Greek language, from the age of Homer to the present day. With a wide range of topics, from contested educational initiatives to competing understandings of the Greek language, from the Hellenistic koine to cyber-Greek, the volume provides a series of informed overviews and snapshots of telling cases that both illuminate the history of Greek and explore the nature of language standardization itself. The volume will be important for students and scholars of the Greek language, past and present, and, beyond the Greek example, for sociolinguists, historians and social scientists with interests in the role of language in the construction of identities.

Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present is a collection of essays with a distinctive focus and an unusual range. It brings together scholars from different disciplines, with a variety of perspectives, linguistic and literary, historical and social, to address issues of control, prescription, planning and perceptions of value over the long history of the Greek language, from the age of Homer to the present day. Under particular scrutiny are the processes of establishing a standard and the practices and ideologies of standardization. The diverse points of reference include: the Hellenistic koine and the literary classics of modern Greece; lexicography in late antiquity and today; Byzantine Greek, Pontic Greek and cyber-Greek; contested educational initiatives and competing understandings of the Greek language; the relation of linguistic study to standardization and the logic of a standard language. The aim of this ambitious project is not a comprehensive chronological survey or an exhaustive analysis. Rather, the editors have set out to provide a series of informed overviews and snapshots of telling cases that both illuminate the history of the Greek language and explore the nature of language standardization itself. The volume will be important for students and scholars of the Greek language, past and present, and, beyond the Greek example, for sociolinguists, historians and social scientists with interests in the role of language in the construction of identities.

Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present is a collection of essays with a distinctive focus and an unusual range. It brings together scholars from different disciplines, with a variety of perspectives, linguistic and literary, historical and social, to address issues of control, prescription, planning and perceptions of value over the long history of the Greek language, from the age of Homer to the present day. Under particular scrutiny are the processes of establishing a standard and the practices and ideologies of standardization. The diverse points of reference include: the Hellenistic koine and the literary classics of modern Greece; lexicography in late antiquity and today; Byzantine Greek, Pontic Greek and cyber-Greek; contested educational initiatives and competing understandings of the Greek language; the relation of linguistic study to standardization and the logic of a standard language. The aim of this ambitious project is not a comprehensive chronological survey or an exhaustive analysis. Rather, the editors have set out to provide a series of informed overviews and snapshots of telling cases that both illuminate the history of the Greek language and explore the nature of language standardization itself. The volume will be important for students and scholars of the Greek language, past and present, and, beyond the Greek example, for sociolinguists, historians and social scientists with interests in the role of language in the construction of identities.

Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present is a collection of essays with a distinctive focus and an unusual range. It brings together scholars from different disciplines, with a variety of perspectives, linguistic and literary, historical and social, to address issues of control, prescription, planning and perceptions of value over the long history of the Greek language, from the age of Homer to the present day. Under particular scrutiny are the processes of establishing a standard and the practices and ideologies of standardization. The diverse points of reference include: the Hellenistic koine and the literary classics of modern Greece; lexicography in late antiquity and today; Byzantine Greek, Pontic Greek and cyber-Greek; contested educational initiatives and competing understandings of the Greek language; the relation of linguistic study to standardization and the logic of a standard language. The aim of this ambitious project is not a comprehensive chronological survey or an exhaustive analysis. Rather, the editors have set out to provide a series of informed overviews and snapshots of telling cases that both illuminate the history of the Greek language and explore the nature of language standardization itself. The volume will be important for students and scholars of the Greek language, past and present, and, beyond the Greek example, for sociolinguists, historians and social scientists with interests in the role of language in the construction of identities.

Scholarship surrounding the standard varieties of Ancient Greek (Attic, the Koine, and Atticistic Greek) focused from its beginnings until relatively recently on determining fixed uniformities or differences between them. This collection of essays advocates for understanding them as interconnected and continuously evolving and suggests viewing them as living organisms shaped by their speakers and texts. The authors propose approaches that integrate linguistics, sociolinguistics, and literary studies to explore how speakers navigate linguistic norms and social dynamics, leading to innovations and reshaping of standards. Each contribution challenges the dichotomy between standards and deviations, suggesting that studying linguistic diversity through socio-literary interconnectedness can enrich our understanding of language history and cultural wealth.

This book challenges the predominance of mainstream sociolinguistic theories by focusing on lesser known sociolinguistic systems, from regions of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, the European Mediterranean, and Slavic regions as well as specific speech communities such as those speaking Nivkh, Jamaican Creole, North Saami, and Central Yup’ik. In nineteen chapters, the specialist authors look at key sociolinguistic aspects of each region or speech community, such as gender, politeness strategies, speech patterns and the effects of social hierarchy on language, concentrating on the differences from mainstream models. The volume, introduced by Miriam Meyerhoff, has been written by the leading expert of each specific region or community and includes contributions by Rajend Mesthrie, Marc Greenberg and Daming Xu. This publication draws together connections across regions/communities and considers how mainstream sociolinguistics is incomplete or lacking. It reveals how lesser-known cultures can play an important role in the building of theory in sociolinguistics. Globalising Sociolinguistics is essential reading for any researcher in sociolinguistics and language variation and will be a key reference for advanced sociolinguistics courses.

This is the first volume to focus on the role of media in processes of linguistic change, one of the most contested issues in contemporary sociolinguistics. Its 17 chapters and five section commentaries present cutting-edge research from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, media linguistics, language ideology research, and minority language studies. The volume advances our understanding of linguistic change in a mediatized world in three ways. First, it introduces the notions of sociolinguistic change and mediatization to create a broader theoretical framing than the one offered by ‘the media’ and ‘language change’. Second, it takes the discussion beyond the notions of ‘influence’ and ‘effect’ and the binary distinction of ‘media’ vs. ‘community language’. Third, it examines the relation of sociolinguistic change and mediatization and from five complementary viewpoints: media influence on linguistic structure; media engagement in interaction; change in mass and new media language; language-ideological change; and the role of media for minority languages. Bringing these strands of sociolinguistic scholarship together, this volume examines their shared references and common lines of thinking.

Fascinated with the heritage of ancient Greece, early modern intellectuals cultivated a deep interest in its language, the primary gateway to this long-lost culture, rehabilitated during the Renaissance. Inspired by the humanist battle cry “To the sources!” scholars took a detailed look at the Greek source texts in the original language and its different dialects. In so doing, they saw themselves confronted with major linguistic questions: Is there any order in this immense diversity? Can the Ancient Greek dialects be classified into larger groups? Is there a hierarchy among the dialects? Which dialect is the oldest? Where should problematic varieties such as Homeric and Biblical Greek be placed? How are the differences between the Greek dialects to be described, charted, and explained? What is the connection between the diversity of the Greek tongue and the Greek homeland? And, last but not least, are Greek dialects similar to the dialects of the vernacular tongues? Why (not)? This book discusses and analyzes the often surprising and sometimes contradictory early modern answers to these questions.

A History of the Greek Language is a kaleidoscopic collection of ideas on the development of the Greek language through the centuries of its existence.

The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the ‘dialect-standard’ landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociolinguistic histories, as well as on previously unexplored sociolinguistic situations. The contributions all share the twin characteristics of (a) robust scrutiny of structural variation and its links to both structural-systemic parameters and extralinguistic variables and (b) nuanced approaches to macro- and micro- level categories, with the requisite theoretical and methodological fine-tuning. While focusing on different languages/language groups, the papers in this volume share the common foci of bringing together structural and sociolinguistic considerations and of the concomitant necessary revisiting of methodologies. The data and analyses presented yield a firmer and more nuanced understanding of the dynamic permutations of cross-dialectal and dialect-to-standard convergence and the formation of intermediate varieties in different yet comparable contexts.