Sociolinguistics is the study of the different ways in which various groups of people use language. This book provides a brief yet comprehensive introduction to the field. It explores how sociolinguistics is linked to other disciplines such as history, politics and gender studies.

Over the last 50 years, language policy has developed into a major discipline, drawing on research and practice in many nations and at many levels. This is the first Handbook to deal with language policy as a whole and is a complete 'state-of-the-field' survey, covering language practices, beliefs about language varieties, and methods and agencies for language management. It provides a historical background which traces the development of classical language planning, describes activities associated with indigenous and endangered languages, and contains chapters on imperialism, colonialism,...

Language policy is all about choices. If you are bilingual or plurilingual, you have to choose which language to use. Even if you speak only one language, you have choices of dialects and styles. Some of these choices are the result of management, reflecting conscious and explicit efforts by language managers to control the choices. This book presents a specific theory of language management. Bernard Spolsky reviews research on the family, religion, the workplace, the media, schools, legal and health institutions, the military and government. Also discussed are language activists,...

Historical sociolinguistics is a comparatively new area of research, investigating difficult questions about language varieties and choices in speech and writing. Jewish historical sociolinguistics is rich in unanswered questions: when does a language become 'Jewish'? What was the origin of Yiddish? How much Hebrew did the average Jew know over the centuries? How was Hebrew re-established as a vernacular and a dominant language? This book explores these and other questions, and shows the extent of scholarly disagreement over the answers. It shows the value of adding a sociolinguistic...

Addressing a wide range of issues in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and multilingualism, this volume focuses on language users, the 'people.' Making creative connections between existing scholarship in language policy and contemporary theory and research in other social sciences, authors from around the world offer new critical perspectives for analyzing language phenomena and language theories, suggesting new meeting points among language users and language policy makers, norms, and traditions in diverse cultural, geographical, and historical contexts.

Identifying and...