Language Policy

Key Topics in Sociolinguistics

by Bernard Spolsky

The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation in spoken language. The book discusses key approaches to stylistic variation, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Language, Politics

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Bernard Spolsky was educated at Wellington College and Victoria University and received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Montreal.

He has been the head of the English Department, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the Language Policy Research Center at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he is currently Professor of English.

Bernard Spolsky has conducted and published research in language testing, second language learning, computers in the humanities, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and language policy. He has been President of TESOL, held a Guggenheim fellowship and a Mellon fellowship, and has been Senior Research Fellow at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington.

He has written several books for Oxford University Press: Conditions for Second Language Learning, Measured Words and Sociolinguistics.

Reviews

[Pompom]

Just the type of book you find surprisingly interesting but could never share with your non-geek friends.

You're all alone.

[Iulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't planning on reading this book. It was on one of my reading lists for my faculty. The professor wrote us that we can read one of the three books he sent us for his seminar and this was the shortest of them all.
I don't necessarily regret reading it, it's just that I had other priorities in terms of reading and I didn't focus as I would have liked when reading it.
Language policy, as another study field, is quite interesting. It combines politics, culture, ethnic issues, economics as well. Language is seen as a tradable commodity. Maybe it seems too much, but if you come to think of it, taking into account globalization, if you are pretty proficient in English (and here I'm talking about those who don't have English as mother-tongue, like me, for instance), there are chances that you'll be better paid, it gets you a sort of prestige.
At first, Spolsky tries to give his definitions for the concepts discussed (being a quite new field then - when Spolsky got his book published - and now as well, a consensus wasn't reached at the level of terminology) in his book and after that, analyzes different ethnic and language policy issues. One of the problems he brought to attention is the language policy of the English speaing countries and former colonies, as well, and possible causes for the language reaching the status lingua franca.
It's a quite exhaustive study and you need to have patience while reading the analysis and to let it sink in.

[Amber]

I'm just going to retake the class, at which time
I will read the whole book.