During the nineteenth century, Irish-speaking communities declined almost to the point of extinction. But in 1922 the new Irish state launched a broad strategy to re-establish Irish as a national language. This book looks at that policy and its impact over the last seventy years. Padraig O Riagain focuses not only on the evolving structure of bilingualism in Ireland but also on the process of bilingual reproduction. His analysis is based on a series of language surveys conducted between 1973 and 1993.
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If the Japanese are exclusive, why are they now borrowing so many linguistic characteristics from English for their own language? Is there a way to understand language contact that is valid across time and space? By examining the 2000-year-old history of how Japan has been influenced by other language groups, Loveday offers general insights into the social causes and patterns of language contact, as well as the nature of linguistic change.

This book explores a case of linguistic shift in the Balkans by focusing on Arvanitika, an Albanian variety spoken in Greece which is under threat through a process of attrition. The author looks in detail at the various factors relating the linguistic to the non-linguistic aspects of the shift.

This study focuses on the social motivations for codeswitching, that is, the use of two or more linguistic varieties in the same conversation. Using data from multilingual African contexts (mostly from conversations studied in Kenya), Carol Myers-Scotton advances a theoretical argument which aims at a general explanation of these motivations. She treats codeswitching as a type of skilled performance, not as the "alternative strategy" of a person who cannot carry on a conversation in the language in which it began. When engaging in codeswitching, speakers exploit the socio-psychological values...

How and why do adults modify their language when they move to a new area? In this detailed study of rural dialect users who have moved to the Norwegian city of Bergen, Kerswill throws light on this widespread phenomenon. The book is concerned with the theory of language change through language and dialect contact, and with the theory and practice of sociolinguistics. While the approach is broadly quantitative, the author shows the importance of ethnographic and social-psychological explanations.

This study of minority languages documents the linguistic consequences of contact and restriction. First providing sociohistorical and sociolinguistic backgrounds, the book analyzes the effect contact with English and language-use restriction has had on the evolution of the French dialect spoken in predominately English-speaking Ontario, Canada. Addressing such fundamental theoretical issues as the interplay between linguistic and extralinguistic causes of structural change and the mechanisms of linguistic change in bilingual communities, this work will appeal to linguists interested in...

This study examines the simultaneous acquisition of Norwegian and English by two first-born children each with one American and one Norwegian parent. Lanza investigates the issue of language mixing in relation to language dominance and the child's differentiation between the two languages in relation to the communicative demands of the context.

Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, Drechsel presents a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and ethnohistorical study of Mobilian Jargon, a Muskogean-based American Indian pidgin of the Mississippi valley. Though linguistic and extralinguistic evidence points to Mobilian Jargon's pre-Columbian origin, it was primarily spoken between 1700 and the mid-twentieth century, when it functioned as a lingua franca among linguistically diverse southeastern Native American groups, and in contact between these groups and non-Indians. Drechsel's study questions the universality of some concepts...

The Old City of Jerusalem, small and densely populated, is a complex microcosm of Israeli society. It is a multilingual community characterized by unequal power relations between the speakers of the two official languages of Israel--Arabs and Jews. The authors begin with a sociolinguistic sketch of the Old City in the present day. They then provide a historical background to their field study, discussing Jewish multilingualism from the period of the Second Temple until modern times, the sociolinguistics of revival and spread of Hebrew. They go on to develop a model of the rules of language...