Sociolinguistics from the Periphery

Small Languages in New Circumstances

Sari Pietikäinen, Alexandra Jaffe, Helen Kelly-Holmes, Nikolas Coupland

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781107123885
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316592823
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This leading team of scholars presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users. The authors refer to this network of interlinked changes as the new conditions surrounding small languages (Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh) in peripheral sites. Starting from the conviction that peripheral sites can and should inform the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the book explores how new modes of reflexivity, more transactional frames for authenticity, commodification of peripheral resources, and boundary-transgression with humour, all carry forward change. These types of change articulate a blurring of binary oppositions between centre and periphery, old and new, and standard and non-standard. Such research is particularly urgent in multilingual small language contexts, where different conceptualisations of language(s), boundaries, and speakers impact on individuals' social, cultural, and economic capital, and opportunities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1 Small languages in new circumstances?
• 2 Reflexivity and small languages: the ‘meta’ imperative in late modernity
• 3 Conventional and transactional authenticities in small-culture tourism
• 4 Expanding possibilities for commodification: luxury, mobility, visuality
• 5 Transgression, small languages and changing boundaries
• 6 A view from the periphery: sociolinguistics, small languages and change
• References
• Index