This collection of studies of the social, political, structural, and ideological dynamics of languages in multilingual speech communities honors Gillian Sankoff's pioneering work on the social lives of languages and their speakers. It serves as a companion to (indeed an expansion of) Sankoff's (1980) The Social Life of Language (University of Pennsylvania Press), which highlights the necessity of analyzing the connections between variation and change, society and developments in speakers' lives. The authors explore connections between linguistic anthropology, creolistics, language contact, language acquisition and sociolinguistics to underscore the importance of variation and change to sociolinguistic issues in plurilinguistic speech communities. Covering a wide range of geographically diverse multilingual speech communities (North America, Oceania, Africa, and Europe) with discussions on the dynamics of languages such as Bislama, Acadian French, Tok Pisin, Picard, Chiac, Tsotsitaal, and others, this book convincingly and compellingly demonstrates that anthropologically-based research and quantitative sociolinguistics complement each other in the study of languages in society. Another contribution is the challenge the book poses to what the editors call sociolinguistics' “monolingual bias”. As the editors argue, the majority of the world's population is multilingual, so keeping research focused on monolingual communities is limiting and limited. The collection thus invites us to widen our research lenses in search of the social factors that motivate language change and how language itself influences speakers' lives in society.
The book is divided into three sections: part I, “Language Ideology: From the speakers, what can we learn about languages?; part II, “Bridging Macro- and Micro-sociolinguistics”; and part III, “Quantitative Sociolinguistics: From the languages, what can we learn about the speakers?”. The first section is composed of five chapters focusing on language ideologies and attitudes towards language. The chapters consider the nooks and crannies of how individuals in a multitude of speech communities conceive of language in their lives and how these people use the languages available in their milieux to talk about the sociocultural universes they live in. Challenging the presumption that society only offers a setting for language use, the papers gathered in this section illustrate the effect social factors have on language per se and on individuals' identities as social actors. Integrating macro- and micro-sociolinguistics as well as top-down and bottom-up approaches, the three chapters in part II scrutinize sociolinguistic issues to demonstrate that features of social systems, sprung from sociohistorical and cultural developments, mold specific languages. In other words, as society develops, languages change. This section offers perspectives on how the development of societies shapes (and may be shaped by) speakers' linguistic repertoires. The final section consists of five chapters grounded in cutting-edge quantitative approaches to analyzing variation within the scope of micro-sociolinguistics. Studying languages in their contexts of use, in situ, these chapters represent the state of the art in variationist quantitative linguistic research. Guided by the assumption that linguistic performance is “a sample of the forms that could be generated by grammatical rules” (p.14), the contributions to this section illustrate how internally and externally motivated changes interact with speakers' social performances and linguistic repertoires. By this token, this section highlights the fact that the results of language contact do not emerge out of the blue, but are, contrariwise, motivated by speakers' routine adaptations to different language situations, cultural contexts and sociopolitical tensions.
