Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances

Description

This leading team of scholars presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users. The authors refer to this network of interlinked changes as the new conditions surrounding small languages (Sami, Corsican, Irish and Welsh) in peripheral sites. Starting from the conviction that peripheral sites can and should inform the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the book explores how new modes of reflexivity, more transactional frames for authenticity, commodification of peripheral resources, and boundary-transgression with humour, all carry forward change. These types of change articulate a blurring of binary oppositions between centre and periphery, old and new, and standard and non-standard. Such research is particularly urgent in multilingual small language contexts, where different conceptualisations of language(s), boundaries, and speakers impact on individuals' social, cultural, and economic capital, and opportunities.

Sari Pietikainen is Professor of Discourse Studies in the Department of Languages, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Alexandra Jaffe is the author of Ideologies in Action (1999), a prize-winning book on language politics on Corsica. Dr Helen Kelly-Holmes is Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics and New Media and Director of the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Nik Coupland is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, and Honorary Professor at the Department of Nordic Research, University of Copenhagen.

'Reading the book, the authors' passion for small languages and the selected languages in particular is very evident. This results in convincingly written passages in which the authors' virtuosity in the field of sociolinguistics combines with interesting and sometimes even amusing examples from Corsican, Welsh, Irish and Sami.' Sven Leuckert, The Linguist List