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Routledge
Sociolinguistics

Welcome to the online resources accompanying The Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader and Doing Sociolinguistics: a practical guide to data collection and analysis, and supporting the Routledge textbook, Introducing Sociolinguistics (Miriam Meyerhoff).

Exercises, web and video links, and commentaries on the tasks in the books are included in a single Resources section for students and teachers to explore together.

  • Link to supplementary exercises for all the books, including some interactive ones. You’ll find something here to support every chapter in the book. Teachers, you can import the interactive exercises into your Virtual Learning Environments.
  • Engage with the concept questions and commentaries to further explore the questions, themes and issues raised in each topic.
  • Watch and listen to the video clips to better understand the nuances of language variation described.
  • Use the online glossary to test yourself on the key concepts underpinning the study of sociolinguistics.

About the Books

Introducing Sociolinguistics, 3rd edition

This second edition of Miriam Meyerhoff’s highly successful textbook is supported by the Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader and online resources common to both books. It provides a solid, up-to-date appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field covering foundation issues, recent advances and current debates. It presents familiar or classic data in new ways, and supplements the familiar with fresh examples from a wide range of languages and social settings. It clearly explains the patterns and systems that underlie language variation in use, as well as the ways in which alternations between different language varieties index personal style, social power and national identity.

New features of the second edition:

  • A wider range of approaches to politeness theory incorporating an international range of research
  • Expanded sections on multi-lingualism and code-switching, social class, dialect contact and tracking change over time
  • Linkage to the new Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader which can be used alongside this textbook, allowing students to supplement and build on material covered in the textbook.
  • A shared website serving both Reader and Textbook which includes web- and video-links, interactive exercises and an expanded online glossary at www.routledge.com/textbooks/meyerhoff      
  • A refreshed text design to assist navigation through textbook and reader

Each chapter includes exercises that enable readers to engage critically with the text, break out boxes making connections between sociolinguistics and linguistic or social theory, and brief, lively add-ons guaranteed to make the book a memorable and enjoyable read. With a full glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading, this text gives students all the tools they need for an excellent command of sociolinguistics.

The Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader

Both a companion to Introducing Sociolinguistics, Miriam Meyerhoff’s bestselling textbook, and a stand-alone Reader in sociolinguistics, this collection includes classic foundational readings and more recent innovative articles.

Intended to be highly user-friendly, The Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader includes substantial section introductions, further reading, a reader’s guide on how to use the book and an introductory chapter providing advice on how to undertake qualitative and quantitative research. This introduction is supplemented by exercises focussing on data handling and collection.

The Reader is divided into six sections and each section is thematically organised. Each reading is accessible to beginning students of sociolinguistics but the entire selection is assembled to also help advanced students focus on themes, principles and concepts that cut across different researchers’ work. Beginning and advanced students are supported by content questions to assist understanding of essential features in the readings, and concept questions which help advanced students make connections across readings, apply theory to data, and critically engage with the readings. A companion website supports and connects the Reader and textbook with structured exercises, links to associated websites and video examples, plus an online glossary.

The Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader is essential reading for students on courses in sociolinguistics, language and society and language and variation.

Authors:
Allan Bell ● Jennifer Hay ● Stefanie Jannedy ● Norma Mendoza-Denton ● Qing Zhang ● John Laver ● Sachiko Ide ● Dennis R. Preston ● Thomas Purnell ● William Idsardi ● John Baugh ● Gibson Ferguson ● Isabelle Buchstaller ● Jinny K. Choi ● Don Kulick ● Christopher Stroud ● Jan-Peter Blom ● John J. Gumperz ● David Britain ● Monica Heller ● Ben Rampton ● Miriam Meyerhoff ● Nancy Niedzielski ● William Labov ● Rika Ito ● Sali Tagliamonte ● Gillian Sankoff ● Hélène Blondeau ● Peter Trudgill ● Richard Cameron ● Lesley Milroy ● James Milroy ● Paul Kerswill ● Ann Williams ● Terttu Nevalainen ● Penelope Eckert ● Janet Holmes ● Stephanie Schnurr ● Niloofar Haeri ● Elinor Ochs ● Scott Fabius Kiesling ● Rusty Barrett

Editors’ biographies

Miriam Meyerhoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.  Her work investigates language variation and the interplay between language and social identities, using qualitative and quantitative methods. She is author of Introducing Sociolinguistics, and co-editor of the Handbook of Language and Gender, as well as Social Lives in Language and the Creole Language Library.

Erik Schleef is lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester, UK. His research interests include language variation and change, language and gender, and language acquisition in immigrant contexts. He has lived and taught in the US, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland.

Doing Sociolinguistics: A practical guide to data collection and analysis 

This book provides an accessible introduction and guide to the methods of data collection and analysis in the field of sociolinguistics. It offers students the opportunity to engage directly with some of the foundational and more innovative work being done in the quantitative or variationist paradigm.
Divided into sixteen short chapters, Doing Sociolinguistics:

  • can be used as a core text in class or as an easy reference whilst undertaking research
  • walks readers through the different phases of a sociolinguistic project, providing all the knowledge and skills students will need to conduct their own analyses of language
  • features excerpts from key research articles; exercises with real data from the authors’ own research; sample answers to the exercises; and further reading
  • is supported by the Routledge Sociolinguistics Companion website (www.routledge.com/textbooks/meyerhoff) and will feature further online exercises with sound files.

Designed to function as both a core text for methods classes in sociolinguistics and as a companion to the Routledge textbook Introducing Sociolinguistics, this book will be essential reading for all students studying and researching in this area.

Authors’ biographies

Miriam Meyerhoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.  Her work investigates language variation and the interplay between language and social identities, using qualitative and quantitative methods. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Language and Gender, as well as Social Lives in Language and the Creole Language Library.

Erik Schleef is Senior Lecturer in the Division of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester, UK. His research focuses on discourse, phonetic and phonological variation and change in dialects of the British Isles, the acquisition of variation, sociolinguistics and perception, and language and gender in educational settings. He has lived and taught in the US, Great Britain, Germany, and Switzerland.

Laurel MacKenzie is Lecturer in the Division of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research focuses on phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic variation in dialects of English and the integration of variation and formal linguistic theory.