This volume presents an interactional perspective on linguistic variability that takes into account the construction of social identities through the formation of social communicative styles. It shows that style is a useful category in bridging the gap between single parameter variation and social identity. Social positioning, i.e., finding one's place in society, is one of its motivating forces. Various aspects of the expression of stylistic features are focused on, from language choice and linguistic variation in a narrow sense to practices of social categorization, pragmatics patterns, preferences for specific communicative genres, rhetorical practices including prosodic features, and aesthetic choices and preferences for specific forms of taste (looks, clothes, music, etc.). These various features of expression are connected to multimodal stylistic indices through talk; thus, styles emerge from discourse. Styles are adapted to changing contexts, and develop in the course of social processes. The analytical perspective chosen proposes an alternative to current approaches to variability under the influence of the so-called variationist paradigm.

This volume brings together scholars in sociolinguistics and the sociology of new media and mobile technologies who are working on different social and communicative aspects of the Latino diaspora. There is new interest in the ways in which migrants negotiate and renegotiate identities through their continued interactions with their own culture back home, in the host country, in similar diaspora elsewhere, and with the various "new" cultures of the receiving country. This collection focuses on two broad political and social contexts: the established Latino communities in urban settings in North America and newer Latin American communities in Europe and the Middle East. It explores the role of migration/diaspora in transforming linguistic practices, ideologies, and identities.

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This third volume on Missionary Linguistics focuses on morphology and syntax. It contains a selection of papers derived from the international conferences on missionary linguistics held in Hong Kong/Macau and Valladolid. As with the previous two volumes (2004, on general issues, and 2005, on orthography and phonology), this volume looks at methodology and descriptive techniques from a historical point of view, offering articles of interest to historiographers of linguistics, typologists, and descriptive linguists. It presents research into languages such as Tarasco (Pur'épecha), Massachusett, Nahuatl, Conivo, Sipibo, Guaraní, Vietnamese, Tamil, Southern Min Chinese dialects, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Tagalog and other Austronesian languages, such as Yapese and Chamorro.

Since the publication of the first edition of the handbook Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik , the then young discipline has changed and developed considerably. The field has left behind its status as an interdiscipline between sociology and linguistics and is now a worldwide established field. Sociolinguistics continues to contribute to solving practical problems in areas such as language planning and standardization, language policy, as well as in language didactics and speech therapy. Moreover, new topics and areas of application have arisen from the autonomy of the discipline - these have been systematically and extensively included in the second edition of the handbook. The new overall concept depicts the regional and disciplinary representativity of sociolinguistic research while offering an encyclopedia-like useablitiy for all its readers. This includes theoretical depth and stringency for readers interested in theory, as well as methodical abundance and detail for empirical researchers. The descriptions of methods are so informative and precise that they can directly be used in the preparation of project planning. Similarly, the descriptions in the practice-oriented articles are so precise that users can accurately assess to what extent they can expect a certain sociolinguistic approach to help solve their problems. With an extensive description as its goal, the second edition of the handbook Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik takes into account the current standing of the discipline and the modified structure of the field.

Code Switching, the alternating use of two or more languages ation, has become an increasingly topical and important field of research. Now available in paperback, Code-Switching in Conversation brings together contributions from a wide variety of sociolinguistics settings in which the phenomenon is observed. It addresses not only the structure and the function, but also the ideological values of such bilingual behaviour. The contributors question many views of code switching on the empirical basis of many European and non European contexts. By bringing together linguistics, anthropological and socio-psychological research, they move towards a more realistic conception of bilingual conversation action.