This book explores the interwoven relationship between language, media, and society in post-Apartheid South Africa. The author examines selected case studies from the sociolinguistic landscape of South African television, analysing dominant language ideologies and illuminating the challenges, opportunities, and potential for transformation. He argues for the power of television in shaping language ideologies, fostering cultural understanding, and advocating for more inclusive and equitable language usage in the media. This book contributes to the field of sociolinguistics by emphasizing the complexity of multilingualism in South Africa and inviting ongoing exploration and dialogue in this landscape. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Sociolinguistics, Media Studies, African Culture and History, and Language Policy and Planning.

This book, which combines scholarly articles with interviews, seeks to imagine a decolonized sociolinguistics. All the chapters are firmly grounded in southern approaches to knowledge production, focusing not only on epistemology but also on the complex relationship between epistemology and ontology. The chapters address issues ranging from author positionality to the central theorists of a southern sociolinguistics, and roam from the language classroom to the church, in ways which invite us to begin to decolonize ourselves and rethink normative assumptions about everything from academic writing to research methods and language teaching. The book provides scholars and teachers with inspiration for how to teach linguistics in ways that challenge colonial hegemonies and that allow one to ‘do’ sociolinguistics otherwise. It also makes a powerful argument that debates about decolonization, southern theory and social justice are not just academic pursuits: what is at stake is our future and how we imagine it.

This book challenges the predominance of mainstream sociolinguistic theories by focusing on lesser known sociolinguistic systems, from regions of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, the European Mediterranean, and Slavic regions as well as specific speech communities such as those speaking Nivkh, Jamaican Creole, North Saami, and Central Yup’ik. In nineteen chapters, the specialist authors look at key sociolinguistic aspects of each region or speech community, such as gender, politeness strategies, speech patterns and the effects of social hierarchy on language, concentrating on the differences from mainstream models. The volume, introduced by Miriam Meyerhoff, has been written by the leading expert of each specific region or community and includes contributions by Rajend Mesthrie, Marc Greenberg and Daming Xu. This publication draws together connections across regions/communities and considers how mainstream sociolinguistics is incomplete or lacking. It reveals how lesser-known cultures can play an important role in the building of theory in sociolinguistics. Globalising Sociolinguistics is essential reading for any researcher in sociolinguistics and language variation and will be a key reference for advanced sociolinguistics courses.

An up-to-date, theoretically informed study of male, in-group, street-aligned, youth language practice in various urban centres in Africa.

This book examines the present and future of televised election debates, from the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate of 1960 to the age of digital interactive multimedia. A number of contributors, from various perspectives - debate producers, participants and pundits - and from a variety of countries - Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, UK, Israel - discuss the significance of TV debates in what is the first international study of this important political phenomenon.

Offers a survey of research trends in sociolinguistics around the world. This work focuses on traditional variationist sociolinguistics and on the areas of bi- and multilingualism together with diglossia and code-switching, language and culture, language and power and language planning.

An innovative and insightful exploration of varieties of English in contemporary South Africa.