In Language Contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack His Jacket, Robin Sabino draws on fieldwork with a last speaker and research from a range of disciplines laying bare the crucial roles of community and resistance in creole genesis.

This book argues that Linguistics, in common with other disciplines such as Anthropology and Sociology, has been shaped by colonization. It outlines how linguistic practices may be decolonized, and the challenges which such decolonization poses to linguists working in diverse areas of Linguistics. It concludes that decolonization in Linguistics is an ongoing process with no definite end point and cannot be completely successful until universities and societies are decolonized too. In keeping with the subject matter, the book prioritizes discussion, debate and the collaborative, creative production of knowledge over individual authorship. Further, it mingles the voices of established authors from a variety of disciplines with audience comment and dialogue to produce a challenging and inspiring text that represents an important step along the path it attempts to map out.

Issues in multilingualism and its implications for communities and society at large, language acquisition and use, language diversification, and creative language use associated with new linguistic identities have become hot topics in both scientific and popular debates. A ubiquitous aspect of multilingualism is language contact. This book contains twelve articles that discuss specific aspects of Contact Linguistics. These articles cover a wide range of topics in the field, including creoles, areal linguistics, language mixing, and the sociolinguistic aspects of interactions with audiences. The book is dedicated to Pieter Muysken whose work on pidgin and creole languages, mixed languages, code-switching, bilingualism, and areal linguistics has been ground-breaking and inspirational for the authors in this book, as well as numerous other scholars working on the various facets of this rapidly expanding field.

Heritage languages, such as the Turkish varieties spoken in Berlin or the Spanish used in Los Angeles, are non-dominant languages, often with little prestige. Their speakers also speak the dominant language of the country they live in. Often heritage languages undergo changes due to their special status. They have received a lot of scholarly attention and provide a link between academic concerns and educational issues. This book takes a language contact perspective: we consider heritage languages from the perspective of their history, their structural properties, and their interaction with other surrounding languages.

Surveying a wide range of languages and approaches, this Handbook is an essential resource for all those interested in language standards and standard languages. It not only explores the standardization of national European languages, it also offers fresh insights on the standardization of minoritized, indigenous and stateless languages.

Exploring the nature of possible relationships between Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies, this volume examines various ways in which Integrational Linguistics can be used to support the decolonizing interests of Southern Epistemologies, particularly the lay-oriented nature of Integrational Linguistics that Southern Epistemologies find productive as a ‘positive counter-discourse.’ As both an anti-elitist and antiestablishment way of thinking, these chapters consider how Integrational Linguistics can be consistent with the decolonial aspirations of Southern Epistemologies. They argue that the relationship between Southern Epistemologies and Integrational Linguistics is complicated by the fact that, while Integrational Linguistics is critical of what it calls a segregationist view of language, i.e., ‘the language myth,’ Southern Epistemologies in language policy and planning and minority language movements find the language myth helpful in order to facilitate social transformation. And yet, both Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies are critical of approaches to multilingualism that are founded on notions of ‘named’ languages. They are also both critical of linguistics as a decontextualized, and institutionalized extension of ordinary metalinguistic practices, which at times influence the prejudices, preconceptions and ideologies of dominant western cultures. This book will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and students not only within the field of integrational linguistics, but also in other language and communication fields, in particular the dialogic, distributed, and ecological-enactive approaches, wherein integrational linguistics has been subjected to scrutiny and criticism.

The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages offers a state-of-the-art collection of original contributions in the area of Pidgin and Creole studies. Providing unique and equal coverage of nearly all parts of the world where such languages are found, as well as situating each area within a rich socio-historical context, this book presents fresh and diverse interdisciplinary perspectives from leading voices in the field. Divided into three sections, its analysis covers: Space and place – areal perspective on pidgin and creole languages Usage, function and power – sociolinguistic and artistic perspectives on pidgins and creoles, creoles as sociocultural phenomena Framing of the study of pidgin and creole languages – history of the field, interdisciplinary connections Demonstrating how fundamentally human and natural these communication systems are, how rich in expressive power and sophisticated in their complexity, The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in this area.

Drawing on usage-based theory, neurocognition, and complex systems, Languaging Beyond Languages elaborates an elegant model accommodating accumulated insights into human language even as it frees linguistics from its two-thousand-year-old, ideological attachment to reified grammatical systems. Idiolects are redefined as continually emergent collections of context specific, probabilistic memories entrenched as a result of domain-general cognitive processes that create and consolidate linguistic experience. Also continually emergent, conventionalization and vernacularization operate across individuals producing the illusion of shared grammatical systems. Conventionalization results from the emergence of parallel expectations for the use of linguistic elements organized into syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. In parallel, vernacularization indexes linguistic forms to sociocultural identities and stances. Evidence implying entrenchment and conventionalization is provided in asymmetrical frequency distributions.

This book describes the results of activities undertaken to construct the CLARIN research infrastructure in the Low Countries, i.e., in the Netherlands and in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). CLARIN is a European research infrastructure for humanities and social science researchers that work with natural language data. This book introduces the CLARIN infrastructure, describes various aspects of the technical implementation of the infrastructure, and introduces data, applications and software services created in the Low Countries for a wide variety of humanities disciplines. These enable researchers to accelerate their research activities and to base their conclusions on a much larger and richer empirical base than was possible before, thus providing a basis for carrying out groundbreaking research in which old questions can be investigated in new ways and new questions can be raised and investigated for the first time. Given CLARIN's focus on language data, linguistics and particularly syntax are prominently present. However, other humanities disciplines that work with natural language data such as history, literary studies, religion studies, media studies, political studies, and philosophy are represented as well. The book is a must read for humanities scholars and students who want to understand and use the potential that the Digital Humanities offer, as well as for computer scientists and developers of research infrastructures, in particular for researchers working on the CLARIN infrastructure in other countries.