Smakman Dick, Heinrich Patrick (eds.) Urban Sociolinguistics: The City as a Linguistic Process and Experience

Routledge, 2017. — 261 p. — ISBN 1138200360, 9781138200364.From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Urban Sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic study of twelve urban settings around the world. Building on William Labov’s famous New York Study, the authors demonstrate how language use in these areas is changing based on belief systems, behavioural norms, day-to-day rituals and linguistic practices. All chapters are written by key figures in sociolinguistics and presents the personal stories of individuals using linguistic means to go about their daily communications, in diverse sociolinguistic systems such as:
extremely large urban conurbations like Cairo, Tokyo, and Mexico City
smaller settings like Paris and Sydney
less urbanised places such as the Western Netherlands Randstad area and Kohima in India.Providing new perspectives on crucial themes such as language choice and language contact, code-switching and mixing, language and identity, language policy and planning and social networks, this is key reading for students and researchers in the areas of multilingualism and super-diversity within sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and urban studies.Introduction: why cities matter for a globalising sociolinguistics. Dick Smakman and Patrick Heinrich
Urbanisation and linguistic multitude. Florian Coulmas
The global south
Introduction to part I: megacities
Cairo: the linguistic dynamics of a multilingual city. Reem Bassiouney and Mark Muehlhaeusler
Mexico City: diversity and homogeneity. Roland Terborg and Virna Velázquez
Old variables, new meanings: resignification of rural speech variants in São Paulo’s urban ecology. Livia Oushiro and Maria del Carmen Parafita Couto
Dubai: language in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city. Ingrid Piller
Kohima: language variation and change in a small but diverse city in India. Shobha Satyanath
The global north
Introduction to part II: world cities
The language of London and Londoners. Susan Fox and Devyani Sharma
Tokyo: standardization, ludic language use and nascent superdiversity. Patrick Heinrich and Rika Yamashita
The city as a result of experience: Paris and its nearby suburbs. Christine Deprez
The Randstad area in the Netherlands: emergent and fluid identity-locality production through language in use • Leonie Cornips, Vincent de Rooij and Dick Smakman
Notes on the language ecology of the City of Angels: Los Angeles, California, 1965–2015. Reynaldo F. Macías, Arturo Díaz and Ameer Drane
Sydney’s intersecting worlds of languages and things. Emi Otsuji and Alastair Pennycook
Moscow: diversity in disguise. Kapitolina Fedorova and Vlada Baranova
Postscript: a proposal for street use surveys