When Creoles and Spanish Collide: Language and Culture in the Caribbean presents a contemporary look on how Creole English communities in Central America grapple with evolving Creole identity and representation, language contact with Spanish, language endangerment, discrimination, and linguistic creativity.

Covering all seven countries on the isthmus, this volume presents the first collection of original linguistic studies on Central American Spanish varieties, which have long been neglected in Hispanic Linguistics. The analyses in this collection span across disciplines such as sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, bilingualism, historical linguistics, and pragmatics. This volume bridges the gap between international and Central American scholars, as it highlights the work that has already been done by Central American scholars but is relatively unknown to scholars outside of the region. It also introduces readers to more recent work that sheds new light on Central American Spanish varieties, from both urban and rural settings as well as in bilingual communities where Spanish is in contact with indigenous languages.

Linguistic Landscape in the Spanish-speaking World is the first book dedicated to languages in the urban space of the Spanish-speaking world filling a gap in the extensive research that highlights the richness and complexity of Spanish Linguistic Landscapes. This book provides scholars with an instrument to access a variety of studies in the field within a monolingual or multilingual setting from a theoretical, sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective. The works contained in this volume aim to answer questions such as, how the linguistic landscape of certain territories includes new discourses that, ultimately, contribute to a fairer society; how the linguistic landscape of minority or low-income communities can enforce changes on language policy and who determines advertising planning; how these decisions are made and how these decisions affect vendors, customers, and the general public alike. All in all, this collective volume uncovers the voices of minority groups within the communities under study.

Urban Panamanian English presents the first detailed account of the English used by the descendants of the Afro-Caribbean builders of the Panama Canal. It offers an up-to-date sociolinguistic account of the Panamanian West Indian community of Panama City and Colón, including empirical coverage of the advanced state of language shift taking place among bilinguals. The book also showcases spoken interview data and takes stock of the variety’s grammatical features. In particular, it provides an advanced quantitative study of variation in the use of verbal -s which contributes to longstanding discussions regarding the principles constraining this variable in Englishes world-wide. This work of documentation and description richly complements existing research on Panamanian Creole English and spotlights Panama as part and parcel of the English-speaking Caribbean. As such, this book is of interest to all scholars and students of language contact, variation, and change.

Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics is a 15-chapter compilation written by both established and emerging scholars representing a wide array of theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. Each chapter presents original and significant findings, contextualizes them within the broader empirical work, and identifies directions for future research on a variety of subfields of study such as phonetics/phonology studies, formal acquisition theory, second and heritage language acquisition, language variation, and linguistic landscapes. Given its scope and significance, this volume will be of relevance to not only academics and researchers of all theoretical stripes, but also to a more general audience new to the field of Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics.

Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages and social settings, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World was originally the first single-volume collection surveying the current research trends in international sociolinguistics. This new edition has been comprehensively updated and significantly expanded, and now includes more than 50 chapters written by leading authorities and a brand-new substantial introduction by John Edwards. Coverage has been expanded regionally and there is a critical focus on Indigenous languages. This handbook remains a key tool to help widen the perspective on sociolinguistics to readers interested in the field. Divided into sections covering the Americas, Asia, Australasia, Africa, and Europe, the book provides readers with a solid, up-to-date appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field of sociolinguistics in each area. It clearly explains the patterns and systematicity that underlie language variation in use, along with the ways in which alternations between different language varieties mark personal style, social power, and national identity. The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World is the ideal resource for all students in undergraduate sociolinguistics courses and for researchers involved in the study of language, society, and power.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Decolonizing Linguistics, the companion volume to Inclusion in Linguistics, is designed to uncover and intervene in the history and ongoing legacy of colonization and colonial thinking in linguistics and related fields. Taken together, the two volumes are the first comprehensive, action-oriented, book-length discussions of how to advance social justice in all aspects of the discipline. The introduction to Decolonizing Linguistics theorizes decolonization as the process of centering Black, Native, and Indigenous perspectives, describes the extensive dialogic and collaborative process through which the volume was developed, and lays out key principles for decolonizing linguistic research and teaching. The twenty chapters cover a wide range of languages and linguistic contexts (e.g., Bantu languages, Creoles, Dominican Spanish, Francophone Africa, Zapotec) as well as various disciplines and subfields (applied linguistics, communication, historical linguistics, language documentation and revitalization/reclamation, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax). Contributors address such topics as refusing settler-colonial practices and centering community goals in research on Indigenous languages; decolonizing research partnerships between the Global South and the Global North; and prioritizing Black Diasporic perspectives in linguistics. The volume's conclusion lays out specific actions that linguists can take through research, teaching, and institutional structures to refuse coloniality in linguistics and to move the field toward a decolonized future.