This is a collection of research papers on the sociolinguistics and pragmatics of New Zealand English. The book provides information on the structure and use of NZ English in a range of different social and regional contexts. Topics covered include the question of a New Zealand pidgin, change in attitudes to NZ English and differences in New Zealand women's and men's speech.

This book examines the sociolinguistics and pragmatics of New Zealand English. The book details the structure and use of NZ English in a range of different social and regional contexts. Topics covered include the question of a New Zealand pidgin, changes in attitude to NZ English and differences in New Zealand women's and men's speech.

Publisher Description

A linguistic study of New Zealand English, its vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and syntax, with sections on Maori speakers of English, weather forecasters' speech, and shifts in attitudes towards New Zealand speech. The 13 essays are illustrated with graphs and tables, and an extensive bibliography is included.

This book is a comprehensive but accessible description of English as it is spoken in New Zealand. New Zealand English is one of the youngest native speaker varieties of English, and is the only variety of English where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. It shares some features with other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English such as Australian English and South African English, but is also clearly distinct from these. For the past two decades extensive research has focused on the evolution and ongoing development of the variety. New Zealand English presents the results of this research in an accessible way.

“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Only a few centuries ago the English language consisted of a collection of dialects spoken mainly by monolinguals and only within the shores of a small island. Now the English language includes such typologically distinct varieties as pidgins and creoles, 'new' Englishes, and a range of different standard and nonstandard varieties that are spoken on a regular basis in many different countries throughout the world. English is also, of course, the main language used for communication at an international level. The use of English in such a diverse range of social contexts around the world provides us with a unique opportunity to analyse and document the linguistic variation and change that is occurring within a single language, on a far greater scale - as far as we know - than has ever happened in the world's linguistic history before. This volume is intended to give a comprehensive account of our current knowledge of variation in the use of the English language around the world. Overview papers, written by specialist authors, survey the social context in which English is spoken in those parts of the world where it is widely used. Case study papers then provide representative examples of the empirical research that has been carried out into the English that is spoken in that part of the world. The volume therefore contributes both to our understanding of the English language worldwide and to a more general understanding of language as it is used in its social context. It assesses the extent of our current knowledge of variation in the English language and points to gaps in our understanding which future research might set out to remedy.

This book presents a range of perspectives on the way language, diversity, and identity are reflected in New Zealand children’s literature, based on the published research of Nicola Daly, an associate professor in the Division of Education of the University of Waikato, and her colleagues. The book is organised into two sections. The first section examines the use of Te Reo Māori and English in the text of New Zealand picturebooks, exploring the linguistic landscape of Māori-English bilingual picturebooks. The second section, The Pedagogical Potential of Picturebooks, explores how picturebooks featuring Māori, English, New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL), and Pacific languages reflect identity and support diversity in society. Research from several educational contexts, ranging from kindergarten to university, where picturebooks are used to support learning language and learning about language is also discussed. Themes of language, identity, and diversity are explored throughout the two sections and brought together in the concluding chapter’s discussion of the power of picturebooks. This book will be of interest to scholars in children’s literature and education; it may also be relevant to scholars in linguistics library and information studies, cultural studies, and media and communication studies.

Volume two of this set covers the Middle English Period, approximately 1066-1476, and describes and analyses developments in the language from the Norman Conquest to the introduction of printing.