The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the...

The series contributes to the development of promising new approaches to the sociolinguistic, sociohistorical and linguistic anthropological study of social issues that centrally involve language. In particular, while still addressing the fundamental insights gleaned from variationist studies, foremost among which is the open-ended, heterogeneous nature of human language in all its varieties, it focuses on new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, in the social and cultural study of language that go beyond the more traditional concerns of sociolinguistics (for example,...

This series creates a space for innovative scholarship examining the ways language functions as a powerful meaning-making resource for constructing identities, managing relationships and building communities. Grounded in new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, and engaging a diverse range of communicative and textual practices, the series embraces work from variationist sociolinguistics through to discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics. Monographs and edited volumes are welcomed, as is any work that explicitly situates language in its...

This series creates a space for innovative scholarship examining the ways language functions as a powerful meaning-making resource for constructing identities, managing relationships and building communities. Grounded in new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, and engaging a diverse range of communicative and textual practices, the series embraces work from variationist sociolinguistics through to discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics. Monographs and edited volumes are welcomed, as is any work that explicitly situates language in its...

This series creates a space for innovative scholarship examining the ways language functions as a powerful meaning-making resource for constructing identities, managing relationships and building communities. Grounded in new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, and engaging a diverse range of communicative and textual practices, the series embraces work from variationist sociolinguistics through to discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics. Monographs and edited volumes are welcomed, as is any work that explicitly situates language in its...

This series creates a space for innovative scholarship examining the ways language functions as a powerful meaning-making resource for constructing identities, managing relationships and building communities. Grounded in new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, and engaging a diverse range of communicative and textual practices, the series embraces work from variationist sociolinguistics through to discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics. Monographs and edited volumes are welcomed, as is any work that explicitly situates language in its...