This book explores the ways in which migrants’ experience in today’s multilingual and multicultural society informs language use and processing, behavioural patterns, and perceptions of self-identity. Drawing on survey data from hundreds of Italian migrants living in English- speaking countries, in conjunction with more focused interviews, this volume unpacks reciprocal influences between linguistic, cultural, and psychological variables to shed light on how migrants emotionally engage with the local and heritage dimensions across public and private spaces. Visualising the impact of a constant shifting of linguistic and cultural practices can enhance our understanding of migration experiences, foreign language acquisition, language processing and socialisation, inclusion, integration, social dynamics, acculturation tendencies, and cross-cultural communication patterns. Overall, this book appeals to students and scholars interested in gaining nuanced insights into the linguistic, cultural, and psychological underpinnings of migration experiences in such disciplines as sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and social psychology.

The handbook Language and Emotion is intended to give a historical and systematic profile of the area. It will aim to connect contemporary and historical theories, approaches, and applications and to cover eastern and western perspectives of language, communication, and emotion. It will present all relevant aspects of language and emotion and thus contribute significantly to research in the field of linguistics and semiotics of emotion.

Diversity is a buzzword of our times and yet the extent of religious diversity in Western societies is generally misconceived. This ground-breaking research draws attention to the journey of one migrant religious institution in an era of religious superdiversity. Based on a sociolinguistic ethnography in a Tamil Saivite temple in Australia, the book explores the challenges for the institution in maintaining its linguistic and cultural identity in a new context. The temple is faced with catering for devotees of diverse ethnicities, languages, and religious interpretations; not to mention divergent views between different generations of migrants who share ethnicity and language. At the same time, core members of the temple seek to continue religious and cultural practices according to the traditions of their homelands in Sri Lanka, a country where their identity and language has been under threat. The study offers a rich picture of changing language practices in a diasporic religious institution. Perera inspects language ideology considerations in the design of institutional language policy and how such policy manifests in language use in the temple spaces. This includes the temple’s Sunday school where heritage language and religion interplay in second-generation migrant adolescents’ identifications and discourse.

The volume explores the social, cultural, and historical forms of “language” that have come to be associated with “Asia” as a global phenomenon and their implications for better understanding the contemporary linguistic and political landscape in Asias. The book examines the flows of migration, people, cultures, and language resources within, across, through, to, and from Asias in tandem with social, political, and ideological factors, drawing on case studies of global iterations of a wide range of Asian national and cultural imaginaries. In so doing, the volume builds on the growing body of scholarship on the sociolinguistics of globalization in its critical inquiries into the linguistic and cultural practices that have come to be constitutive of national or supranational localities toward unpacking the forces of globalization more broadly. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, linguistic anthropology, Asian Studies, and Asian American studies.

Anchored within current issues and debates in the field of Linguistic Landscape (LL) scholarship, this edited volume is concerned with politics of language and the semiotic construction of space in multilingual and multi-ethnic Asian countries. Spanning Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, the chapters explore how different individuals and collectivities use semiotic resources in different spaces – schools, airports, streets and shops as well as online platforms – to reinforce or contest existing social structures, bearing strong implications for language maintenance and cultural revitalization, construction of ethnolinguistic and national identities, and socioeconomic mobility. Part I looks into how globalization and its accompanying forces and influences – such as the importance of English in socioeconomic mobility – come into contact with local Asian cultures and languages. Part II examines minority languages, demographically and socio-politically established in the countries, shedding light on the role of LL that plays in both their minorization and revitalization processes. Part III investigates how LL is utilized as a site for constructing identities to pursue socioeconomic, political and cultural goals. It is within this perspective that the presence and salience of English in the LL of the countries along with the use of the Asian languages is analyzed and understood, shedding light on how Asian heritage languages and cultures are preserved and/or certain identities in the times of political unrest or economic development are expressed. This fascinating insight into linguistic landscapes in Asia will be of interest to researchers, students and policy makers in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics anywhere in the world.

This innovative collection brings together a range of perspectives on the notions of "orderly heterogeneity" and "social meaning", shedding light on how structured variation and indexicalities of social meaning "cohere" within linguistic communities. This book fills a gap in research on language variation by critically considering the position articulated by Weinrich, Labov, and Herzog in 1968 that linguistic diversity is systematically organized in ways that reflect and construct social order. The volume investigates such key themes as covariation and co-occurrence restrictions; indexicality, perception and social meaning; coherence and language change; and the structure and measurement of coherence at different levels of analysis. This collection advances our understanding of the coherence of linguistic communities through empirical investigations of larger and more diverse sets of variables, language varieties, speech styles, and communities, as afforded by the development and advancement of new methods and models in sociolinguistic research. This book is of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and formal linguistics, as well as those interested in developments on research methods in linguistics.

This collection brings together work from scholars across sociolinguistics, World Englishes and linguistic landscapes to reflect on developments and future directions in Irish English, building on the ground-breaking contributions of Jeffrey Kallen to the discipline. Taking their cue from Kallen’s extensive body of work on Irish English, the 20 contributors critically examine advances in the field grounded in frameworks from variationist sociolinguistics and semiotic and border studies in linguistic landscapes. Chapters cover pragmatic, cognitive sociolinguistic, sociophonetic, historical and World Englishes perspectives, as well as two chapters which explore the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland through the lens of perceptual dialectology and linguistic landscape research. Taken together, the collection showcases the significant role Kallen has played in the growth of Irish English studies as a field in its own right and the impact of this work on a new wave of researchers in the field today and beyond. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of varieties of English, variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape research.

This book explores the ways in which migrants’ experience in today’s multilingual and multicultural society informs language use and processing, behavioural patterns, and perceptions of self-identity. Drawing on survey data from hundreds of Italian migrants living in English- speaking countries, in conjunction with more focused interviews, this volume unpacks reciprocal influences between linguistic, cultural, and psychological variables to shed light on how migrants emotionally engage with the local and heritage dimensions across public and private spaces. Visualising the impact of a constant shifting of linguistic and cultural practices can enhance our understanding of migration experiences, foreign language acquisition, language processing and socialisation, inclusion, integration, social dynamics, acculturation tendencies, and cross-cultural communication patterns. Overall, this book appeals to students and scholars interested in gaining nuanced insights into the linguistic, cultural, and psychological underpinnings of migration experiences in such disciplines as sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and social psychology.

The use of English as a global lingua franca has given rise to new challenges and approaches in our understanding of language and communication. One area where ELF (English as a lingua franca) studies, both from an empirical and theoretical orientation, have the potential for significant developments is in our understanding of the relationships between language, culture and identity. ELF challenges traditional assumptions concerning the purposed 'inexorable' link between a language and a culture. Due to the multitude of users and contexts of ELF communication the supposed language, culture and identity correlation, often conceived at the national level, appears simplistic and naïve. However, it is equally naïve to assume that ELF is a culturally and identity neutral form of communication. All communication involves participants, purposes, contexts and histories, none of which are 'neutral'. Thus, we need new approaches to understanding the relationship between language, culture and identity which are able to account for the multifarious and dynamic nature of ELF communication.

This book brings together essays which cover a number of key areas: Gender, Disability, Media, Sports, Literature, Religion, Land and Youth, Music. Through an examination of the situation in Kenya, the essays opens new ways of understanding forms of local.