"A treasure trove for sociolinguistic researchers and students alike. Edited by three leading sociolinguists, the 39 chapters cover a wealth of valuable material... And the cast list reads like a veritable Who′s Who of sociolinguistics, with a refreshing number of younger scholars included along with more familiar, well-established names... This is a book that I will reach for often, both for research and teaching purposes. I will recommend it to my postgraduate students, and many of the chapters will provide excellent material for discussion in our advanced undergraduate sociolinguistics course."
- Janet Holmes, Discourse Studies
"The best, the most complete and the most integrated handbook of sociolinguistics of the past decade.
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- Joshua A. Fishman, NYU and Stanford University
This Handbook answers a long-standing need for an up-to-date, comprehensive, international, in-depth critical survey of the history, trajectory, data, results and key figures involved in sociolinguistics. It consists of six inter-linked sections:
- The History of Sociolinguistics
- Sociolinguistics and Social Theory
- Language, Variation and Change
- Interaction
- Multilingualism and Contact
- Applications
The result is a work of unprecedented coverage and insight. It is all here, from the foundational contributions to the field to the impact of new media, new technologies of communication, globalization, trans-border fluidities and agendas of research.
The book will quickly be recognized as a benchmark in the field. It will provide a basis for reckoning its origins and pathways of development as well as an authoritative account of the central debates and research issues of today.
Ruth Wodak is Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University. Her research interests focus on discourse studies; identity politics; racism, antisemitism and other forms of discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work.
She was awarded the Lebenswerk-Preis in 2018, which honors outstanding life work of personalities who are promoting and achieving gender equality.
She was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University (Washington, DC). She is a member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö).
Ruth is co-editor of the SAGE journal Discourse & Society, and of the journals Critical Discourse Studies and Journal of Language and Politics. Recent book publications include: The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (2011), Critical Discourse Analysis (4 volumes, 2013), Migration, Identity and Belonging (with G. Delanty and P. Jones, 2011), The Discursive Construction of History: Remembering the German Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, and A. Pollak, 2008), The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria (with M. Krzyzanowski, 2009), The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (with B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill, 2010), Analyzing Fascist Discourse: Fascism in Talk and Text (with J. E. Richardson, 2013), and Rightwing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (with M. KhosraviNik and B. Mral, 2013).
Barbara Johnstone is on the faculty of the Rhetoric Program at Carnegie Mellon University, where she teaches courses in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, style, and research methods. She is currently Editor of the journal
Language in Society, and I am working on a project about the enregisterment of dialect in Pittsburgh. Professor Johnstone is interested in the connections between discourse and place and in the role of the individual in language and linguistic theory.
Barbara Johnstone′s previous work has been in these areas:
Discourse structure and function: forms and functions of narrative; women′s and men′s narrative; functions of repetition in discourse and their implications for linguistic theory; cross-cultural study of rhetorical discourse; current work on the individual voice in linguistic and rhetorical theory, on the rhetorical construction of place and local identity through discourse about local speech in Pittsburgh.
Sociolinguistics: Regional/social variation in discourse structure and strategy; interactional sociolinguistics; ethnography of communication; gender and regional variation in discourse style; methodology in qualitative sociolinguistics; current work on urban North Midland English in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Editor, Language in Society,2005-present.
Rhetoric, history and theory: Persuasive talk; cross-cultural study of persuasive styles in the U.S. and the Middle East.
Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Sociolinguistics and is co-editor of two book series, Edinburgh Sociolinguistics (EUP) and Studies in Language Variation (Bengamins).
