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Description:
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This volume offers a synthetic approach to language variation and language
ideologies in multilingual communities. Although the vast majority of the
world's speech communities are multilingual, much of sociolinguistics
ignores this internal diversity. This volume fills this gap, investigating
social and linguistic dimensions of variation and change in multilingual
communities. Drawing on research in a wide range of countries (Canada, USA,
South Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu), it
explores: connections between the fields of creolistics, language/dialect
contact, and language acquisition; how the study of variation and change,
particularly in cases of additive bilingualism, is central to understanding
social and linguistic issues in multilingual communities; how changing
language ideologies and changing demographics influence language choice
and/or language policy, and the pivotal place of multilingualism in
enacting social power and authority, and a rich array of new empirical
findings on the dynamics of multilingual speech communities.
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