The Romance languages offer a particularly fertile ground for the exploration of the relationship between language and society in different social contexts and communities. Focusing on a wide range of Romance languages – from national languages to minoritised varieties – this volume explores questions concerning linguistic diversity and multilingualism, language contact, medium and genre, variation and change. It will interest researchers and policy-makers alike.

This manual provides an extensive overview of the importance and use of Romance languages in the media, both in a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Its chapters discuss language in television and the new media, the language of advertising, or special cases such as translation platforms or subtitling. Separate chapters are dedicated to minority languages and smaller varieties such as Galician and Picard, and to methodological approaches such as linguistic discourse analysis and writing process research.

This volume provides the first comprehensive reference work in English on the French language in all its facets. It offers a wide-ranging approach to the rich, varied, and exciting research across multiple subfields, with seven broad thematic sections covering the structures of French; the history of French; axes of variation; French around the world; French in contact with other languages; second language acquisition; and French in literature, culture, arts, and the media. Each chapter presents the state of the art and directs readers to canonical studies and essential works, while also exploring cutting-edge research and outlining future directions. The Oxford Handbook of the French Language serves both as a reference work for people who are curious to know more about the French language and as a starting point for those carrying out new research on the language and its many varieties. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students as well as established scholars, whether they are specialists in French linguistics or researchers in a related field looking to learn more about the language. The diversity of frameworks, approaches, and scholars in the volume demonstrates above all the variety, vitality, and vibrancy of work on the French language today.

This manual focuses on teaching Italian as a foreign language in the academic field, taking into consideration the various subjects and disciplines that can be found in a university course in Italian Studies. Various chapters are included within that range, for example, from Italian phonetics and dialectology to art as a means to deepen elements of the Italian language, to morphology with word formations, and to translation as well as subtitling. The range also covers technology as a tool for telecollaboration, academic writing, and learning Italian through geography or the language of vulgarity. Besides, the manual takes into consideration the use of the Italian press for learning, together with the use of comics and cartoons to teach the Italian language. The contribution aims to be a point of reference both for teachers and students who are focusing on linguistics, philology, didactics, and pedagogy. It lays emphasis on the teaching methodology, the instruments of teaching, and the available resources. It also seeks to deal with the various teaching problems and reflects on the disciplines as well as alternative proposals for teaching.

This volume brings together two particularly dynamic areas of contemporary research on the French language. The chapters showcase the most innovative current scholarship in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and in the burgeoning field of historical sociolinguistics which lies at their intersection. The research across the volume is strongly data-centred, drawing on a wide range of both well-established and more novel theoretical and methodological approaches in order to open up new perspectives on the study of the French language in the twenty-first century. Although it is written in English, the work presented here is underpinned by a range of different approaches from across the Francophone and Anglophone worlds. Particular emphasis is placed on combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, on diversifying tools, methods, and objects of inquiry, and on adopting comparative and multilingual perspectives where these shed new light on important questions relating to French. In these ways, Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French highlights some of the most exciting new directions for linguistic research on the French language.

Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - starts with the emergence of multilingual populations. Multilingualism involving plurilingualism can have various consequences beyond borrowing, interference, and code-mixing and -switching, including the emergence of lingua francas and new language varieties, as well as language endangerment and loss. Bringing together contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the second in a two-volume set - engages the reader with the manifold aspects of multilingualism and provides state-of-the-art research on the impact of population structure on language contact. It begins with an introduction that presents the history of the scholarship on the subject matter. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with multilingualism embedded in specific population structures worldwide as well as their outcomes. It is essential reading for anybody interested in how people behave linguistically in multilingual or multilectal settings.

This book is a collection of innovative studies on language contact. It contains novel works on unexplored issues related to language contact in different settings and aims to contribute multi-perspective insights to the current state of the art on language contact. Novel approaches to contact-related change, variation, attrition, and emergence of new varieties are explored from the lens of sociolinguistic, typological, synchronic, and diachronic perspectives. The contact settings vary from official and majority languages to minority, endangered and/or non-official varieties in different parts of the world.

The intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels, but its effect on the prosody of these languages has received little attention to date. Based on semi-spontaneous and read speech data from 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intonation of Spanish and Catalan as spoken in Girona, with a focus on the speakers’ bilingualism. These contact varieties share numerous intonational properties, with differences mainly in the frequency of specific tunes in certain contexts. However, they also exhibit significant variation, often linked to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall, the intonation of these contact varieties results from substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan. The book is particularly relevant to scholars researching prosody, language contact, variation, and multilingualism.

The Continuity of Linguistic Change presents a collection of selected papers in honour of Professor Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. The essays revolve around the study of linguistic variation and the mechanisms and processes associated with linguistic change, a field to which Villena-Ponsoda has dedicated so many years of research. The authors are researchers of renowned international prestige who have made significant contributions in this field. The chapters cover a range of related topics and provide modern theoretical and methodological perspectives, addressing the structural, cognitive, historical and social factors that underlie and promote linguistic change in varieties of Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. The reader will find contributions that explore topics such as phonology, acoustic phonetics and processes deriving from the contact between languages or linguistic varieties, specifically levelling, koineisation, standardisation and the emergence of ethnolects.

The Mediterranean island of Corsica, a French territory, experiences mobility in the form of locals’ mass exodus to the Continent, the arrival of immigrants at rates similar to Paris, and a booming tourist industry with millions of visitors each year. What, then, are the multilingual dynamics on the island—languages emerging from above (French), a middle ground (Corsican), and sideways (languages of immigrants and tourists)? What multilingual subjectivities are articulated? Mendes analyzes competing conceptualizations of linguistic multiplicity, what he calls countervocalities, in which languages are constantly rearranging in variously imagined hierarchies. Countervocalities explores different dimensions of institutional multilingualism, namely those related to policies, practices, and ideologies within and extending from education settings. The chapters address reclamation, imposition, and erasure of different languages on Corsica, moving from inside the school, to artefacts from the schoolscape, to discourses about language teaching. The study fruitfully analyzes an array of interactional and artefactual data types. This productive alternation offers a cross-section of attitudes toward and representations of multilingual dynamics while foregrounding the role of mobility and language in understandings of place and what counts as local.