Overview

This book examines language change in the social context of the relationships between language, identity, and social meaning in post-insular and urbanizing societies. Using ethnographically informed quantitative analysis, Childs and Van Herk consider situations where widespread social change has created a new orientation toward the traditional language features of a community and has resulted in linguistic change. Through a community-focused linguistic analysis, this book proposes some principles for understanding how urbanization can affect language change and the role that community identity and ideologies can have on the ways in which language features change. Expanded more broadly, findings from this book inform the ways in which language variation can be seen within broader discussions of identity creation and maintenance, urbanization, and community-based ideologies of place and self. Drawing on ten years of fieldwork and analysis, this volume describes language change in a post-insular society and situates it within contemporary sociolinguistic theory. Childs and Van Herk illustrate how these processes of language change can play out through a case study based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's newest and most isolated province. Because of its focus on urbanization and identity, this work will have implications for not only quantitative sociolinguistics, but also fields such as anthropology, historical linguistics, community studies, and sociology.ã

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9781138125070

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This book provides a timely and innovative study of a formerly isolated speech community undergoing rapid social and linguistic change. -James Walker, York University, Canada

Author Information

Becky Childs is an Associate Professor of English and Associate Chair of the English department at Coastal Carolina University, where is she is a Fellow of The Waccamaw Center and affiliate faculty in the Anthropology Program and Women's and Gender Studies. Gerard Van Herk is the Canada Research Chair in Regional Language and Oral Text at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in eastern Canada.

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