The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses 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 scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines - anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

The book presents case studies of immigrant minority groups and immigrant minority languages in Europe and abroad, analysed from demographic, sociolinguistic, and educational perspectives. The demographic perspective focuses on the role of language and ethnicity in multicultural population statistics, the sociolinguistic perspective on the vitality of immigrant minority languages, and the educational perspective on the status of immigrant minority languages in education.

This Reader collects in one volume the key readings on language, ethnicity and race. Using linguistic and cultural analysis, it explores changing ideas of race and the ways in which these ideas shape human communication.

Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today’s society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present—the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism—including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory—and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.

After the growth of English and American dialectology since the 1930’s and the expansion of sociolinguistics since the 1960’s, the study of ‘world English’ has emerged in recent years to join these other disciplines. This bibliography is intended to reflect what has been achieved in this area and to serve as an indispensible research tool for further investigations. The bibliography is divided into three parts, each one is preceded by a preface which explains the procedures followed and each of the sections is followed by an index. It classifies the items according to specific areas, ethnic groups, or similar topics.

This volume addresses the issues arising from the recent devolution referenda by exploring the historical development of the proposals, the importance of national and regional identities, the changing policies of the political parties and the approaches of business and other major groups towards devolution. It also looks at the impact on electoral reform coming from the proposal that proportional representation be used to elect the regional assemblies and how the new assemblies are to be financed. Finally the book discusses the implications of a devolved British state where different countries and regions achieve different levels of autonomy at different paces.

Whilst in certain quarters it may be fashionable to suppose that there is no such thing as society historians have had no difficulty in finding their subject. The difficulty, rather, is that the advance has occurred through such an outpouring of research and writing that it is hard for anyone but the specialist to keep up with the literature or grasp the overall picture. In these three volumes, as is the tradition in Cambridge Histories, a team of specialists has assembled the jigsaw of recent monographic research and presented an interpretation of the development of modern British society since 1750, from three complementary perspectives: those of regional communities, of the working and living environment, and of social institutions. Each volume is self-contained, and each contribution, thematically defined, contains its own chronology of the period under review. Taken as a whole they offer an authoritative and comprehensive view of the manner and method of the shaping of society in the two centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic change.

A collection of pivotal papers from 1986-1993 on bilingualism and bilingual education, grouped in sections on policy and legislation, implementation of bilingual policy in schools, bilingualism in instruction, and using the bilingualism of the school community. Articles conclude with suggested student activities and discussion questions, encouraging students to take on an advocacy-oriented role. The reader can be used alone or with the publisher's Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. No index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Explores contemporary issues of ethnic, cultural, and national identities and their influence on the social construction of identity, from the perspectives of seven nations: China, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Ukraine, Wales, & the U.S.