Results by title
100 books match the query 'Sociolinguistics' and 9 start with a
A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity
Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno ActivismSherina Feliciano-Santos
Rutgers University Press, 2021
A Grammar of Gaddi
Preeti Kumari, Shreya Mehta, Anjali Nair, Anusuya Nayak, Yangchen Roy, and Vyom Sharma
University College London, 2026
The first comprehensive descriptive grammar of the understudied Indo-Aryan Pahari language, Gaddi.
A Grammar of Gaddi is the first long-form descriptive grammar of the Pahari Indo-Aryan language, Gaddi (also called Bharmauri), spoken by the Gaddi people, a traditionally pastoral community in India. The volume presents a meticulous linguistic analysis of Gaddi, showcasing its phonemic inventory, phonotactics, syllable structure, and its phonological and morpho-phonological processes.
A Grammar of Khowar
Descriptive and Comparative AnalysisElena Bashir
University College London, 2025
Grammar of Khowar is the first comprehensive English-language study of Khowar, a unique Indo-Aryan language spoken in northern Pakistan. Drawing on over thirty years of field research, Elena Bashir provides a detailed snapshot of the language at a critical moment in its evolution, as increasing cultural and economic pressures accelerate linguistic change.
The book presents Khowar’s phonology, morphology, and syntax, alongside an in-depth analysis of how its grammatical structures shape the way speakers conceptualize the world. Rife with original example sentences—many sourced from oral texts recorded in multiple villages—this work preserves linguistic data that might otherwise be lost. A special appendix includes a thirty-page sample text in Khowar’s Perso-Arabic script, followed by a romanized transcription and English translation, offering an invaluable resource for scholars.
A critical contribution to South Asian linguistics, this book underscores the urgency of studying and preserving endangered mountain languages before they fade from use.
A Language for the World
The Standardization of SwahiliMorgan J. Robinson
Ohio University Press, 2022
This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond.
Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories.
Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili’s standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa.
The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.
A New Language, A New World
Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945Nancy C. Carnevale
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Aazheyaadizi
Worldview, Language, and the Logics of DecolonizationMark D. Freeland
Michigan State University Press, 2020
Africa in Translation
A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814-1945Sara Pugach
University of Michigan Press, 2022
The study of African languages in Germany, or Afrikanistik, originated among Protestant missionaries in the early nineteenth century and was incorporated into German universities after Germany entered the “Scramble for Africa” and became a colonial power in the 1880s. Despite its long history, few know about the German literature on African languages or the prominence of Germans in the discipline of African philology. In Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945, Sara Pugach works to fill this gap, arguing that Afrikanistik was essential to the construction of racialist knowledge in Germany. While in other countries biological explanations of African difference were central to African studies, the German approach was essentially linguistic, linking language to culture and national identity. Pugach traces this linguistic focus back to the missionaries’ belief that conversion could not occur unless the “Word” was allowed to touch a person’s heart in his or her native language, as well as to the connection between German missionaries living in Africa and armchair linguists in places like Berlin and Hamburg. Over the years, this resulted in Afrikanistik scholars using language and culture rather than biology to categorize African ethnic and racial groups. Africa in Translation follows the history of Afrikanistik from its roots in the missionaries’ practical linguistic concerns to its development as an academic subject in both Germany and South Africa throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Jacket image: Perthes, Justus. Mittel und Süd-Afrika. Map. Courtesy of the University of Michigan's Stephen S. Clark Library map collection.
Amy, Wendy, and Beth
Learning Language in South BaltimoreBy Peggy J. Miller
University of Texas Press, 1982
Amy, Wendy, and Beth, the 1980 recipient of the New York Academy of Sciences Edward Sapir Award, is a lively in-depth study of how three young children from an urban working-class community learned language under everyday conditions. It is a sensitive portrayal of the children and their families and offers an innovative approach to the study of language development and social class.
A major conclusion of the study is that the linguistic abilities of working-class children are consistent with previous cross-cultural accounts of the development of communicational skills and, as such, lend no support to past claims that children from the lower classes are linguistically deprived. Instead, Amy, Wendy, and Beth emerge as able and enthusiastic language learners; their families, as caring and competent partners in the language socialization process.
Sound scholarship and original findings about a hitherto neglected population of children lend special value to this work not only for scholars in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, but for educators and policymakers as well.
An Irish-Speaking Island
State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870Nicholas M. Wolf
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
As late as 1840, Ireland had as many as four million Irish speakers—a significant proportion of the total population—who could be found in every county of the island and in all social classes and religious persuasions. Their impact on the modern history of Ireland and the United Kingdom cannot be captured by a simple conclusion that they became anglicized. Rather, Nicholas M. Wolf explores the complex ways in which the transition from Irish to English placed a premium on adaptive bilingualism and shaped beliefs and behavior in the domestic sphere, religious life, and oral culture within the community. An Irish-Speaking Island will interest not only historians but also scholars of linguistics, folklore, politics, literature, and religion.
Winner, Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture, American Conference for Irish Studies
Winner, Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books, American Conference for Irish Studies