This book is an exploration of the role of language at Warruwi Community, a remote Indigenous settlement in northern Australia. It explores how language use and people’s ideas about language are embedded in contemporary Indigenous life there. Using an ethnographic approach, the book examines what language at Warruwi means in the context of the history of the community, ongoing social and political changes and the continuing importance of ancestral traditions. Children growing up at Warruwi still learn to speak many small Indigenous languages. This is remarkable not just in the Australian context, where many Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but around the world as this kind of multilingualism in small languages persists only in a few remaining pockets. The way that people use many languages in their daily life at Warruwi reveals how high levels of linguistic diversity can be maintained in a small community. This detailed study of the creation of linguistic diversity is relevant to sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. More generally, this book is for linguists, anthropologists and anyone with an interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous lives.

This book discusses salient moments of multilingual encounters and brings together contributions focused on the interplay between language use by individuals and societies, and language-related inequalities or opportunities for speakers. The chapters demonstrate how biographical and speaker-centred approaches can contribute to an understanding of linguistic diversity, how researchers can empirically account for lived experiences of languages, and how such accounts are embedded in a larger discussion on social (in)equality. Together the chapters make a powerful case for the importance of speaker-centred methodologies in multilingual and multilingualism research. The book is a rich source of theoretical and methodological reflections and will thus be a valuable resource for both experienced researchers and students beginning to explore biographical research methods.

Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages and social settings, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World was originally the first single-volume collection surveying the current research trends in international sociolinguistics. This new edition has been comprehensively updated and significantly expanded, and now includes more than 50 chapters written by leading authorities and a brand-new substantial introduction by John Edwards. Coverage has been expanded regionally and there is a critical focus on Indigenous languages. This handbook remains a key tool to help widen the perspective on sociolinguistics to readers interested in the field. Divided into sections covering the Americas, Asia, Australasia, Africa, and Europe, the book provides readers with a solid, up-to-date appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field of sociolinguistics in each area. It clearly explains the patterns and systematicity that underlie language variation in use, along with the ways in which alternations between different language varieties mark personal style, social power, and national identity. The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World is the ideal resource for all students in undergraduate sociolinguistics courses and for researchers involved in the study of language, society, and power.

This book fills a gap in the literature as it uniquely approaches onomastics from the perspective of both anthropology and linguistics. It addresses names and cultures from 16 countries and five continents, thus offering readers an opportunity to comprehend and compare names and naming practices across cultures. The chapters presented in this book explore the cultural significance of personal names, naming ceremonies, conventions and practices. They illustrate how these names and practices perform certain culture-specific functions, such as religion, identity and social activity. Some chapters address the socio-political significance of personal names and their expression of self and otherness. The book also links the linguistic structure of personal names to culture by looking at their morphology, syntax and semantics. It is divided into four sections: Section 1 demonstrates how personal names perform human culture, Section 2 focuses on how personal names index socio-political transitioning, Section 3 demonstrates religious values in personal names and naming, and Section 4 links linguistic structure and analysis of personal names to culture and heritage.

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world's languages disappear this century. Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future. The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

The incredible story of the resilience and recovery of Australia's First Nations languages Australia's language diversity is truly breathtaking. This continent lays claim to the world's longest continuous collection of cultures, including over 440 unique languages and many more dialects. Sadly, European invasion has had severe consequences for the vitality of these languages. Amid devastating loss, there has also been the birth of new languages such as Kriol and Yumplatok, both English-based Creoles. Aboriginal English dialects are spoken widely, and recently there has been an inspiring renaissance of First Nations languages, as communities reclaim and renew them. Bina: First Nations Languages Old and New tells this story, from the earliest exchange of words between colonists and First Nations people to today's reclamations. It is a creative and exciting introduction to a vital and dynamic world of language. 'Years in the making, Bina offers a multidimensional reflection on how many diverse languages across this continent continue to vibrate in rich and profound ways. The emergence of Indigenous linguists Gari Tudor-Smith and Paul Williams as authors of this survey alongside Felicity Meakins signals an important and welcome shift in the Australian linguistics landscape.' —Professor Clint Bracknell, University of Western Australia, Nyungar musicologist and musician

This book provides an overview of approaches to language and culture, and it outlines the broad interdisciplinary field of anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It identifies current and future directions of research, including language socialization, language reclamation, speech styles and genres, language ideology, verbal taboo, social indexicality, emotion, time, and many more. Furthermore, it offers areal perspectives on the study of language in cultural contexts (namely Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Europe), and it lays the foundation for future developments within the field. In this way, the book bridges the disciplines of cultural anthropology and linguistics and paves the way for the new book series Anthropological Linguistics.

This book explores language maintenance and development in the linguistic lives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants as they navigate migration and diaspora, highlighting the role of women in acting as custodians and gate-keepers of family languages towards creating a sense of home. The volume features an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on work from narrative, storytelling, literary studies, and linguistic anthropology, as well as interviews with multiple generations of immigrant families, to reflect on the ways these families foster a sense of home and maintain connections to their homelands through language. Robinson showcases the voices of a diverse range of families to examine the choices women in immigrant families make between the use of family languages, dominant community languages, or a mix of the two. The volume enhances our understanding of the ways in which immigrants navigate the linguistic landscapes of home and community amid migration and diaspora. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and gender, and language and migration.

Bushnell and Moody present a rich investigation into the navigation of friendships, adopting discursive and ethnographic perspectives to examine Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English interactional data. Since the definition of friendship is hard to pin down, most sociocultural anthropologists have tended to focus on issues of kinship and descent, while leaving friendship as a residual or interstitial issue. However, this book puts friendship as the central focus and offers unique perspectives from the participants themselves. The interactional work implicated in the accomplishment of making and being friends, and the trials and tribulations of friendship, are both explored through the many detailed analyses showing how the participants navigate the calm and rough waters of friendship in and through their everyday interactions. Researchers, undergraduates, and postgraduate students in the fields of conversation analysis, pragmatics, and other social sciences will benefit from the real-life examples in the book as well as the analysis.

The second edition of the definitive reference on contact studies and linguistic change—provides extensive new research and original case studies Language contact is a dynamic area of contemporary linguistic research that studies how language changes when speakers of different languages interact. Accessibly structured into three sections, The Handbook of Language Contact explores the role of contact studies within the field of linguistics, the value of contact studies for language change research, and the relevance of language contact for sociolinguistics. This authoritative volume presents original findings and fresh research directions from an international team of prominent experts. Thirty-seven specially-commissioned chapters cover a broad range of topics and case studies of contact from around the world. Now in its second edition, this valuable reference has been extensively updated with new chapters on topics including globalization, language acquisition, creolization, code-switching, and genetic classification. Fresh case studies examine Romance, Indo-European, African, Mayan, and many other languages in both the past and the present. Addressing the major issues in the field of language contact studies, this volume: Includes a representative sample of individual studies which re-evaluate the role of language contact in the broader context of language and society Offers 23 new chapters written by leading scholars Examines language contact in different societies, including many in Africa and Asia Provides a cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for researchers, scholars, and students involved in language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language theory.