Language Regard: Methods, Variation and Change

Bringing together a team of renowned international scholars, this volume provides a wide-ranging collection of historical and state-of-the-art perspectives on language regard, particularly in the context of language variation and language change, and importantly, highlights the range of new methodologies being used by linguists to explore and evaluate it. The importance of language regard to the inquiry of language variation and change in the field of sociolinguistics is increasingly being recognized, yet misunderstandings about its nature and importance continue to exist. This volume provides scholars and students of sociolinguistics, with the tools and theory to pursue such inquiry. Contributions and research come from Europe, North America, and Asia, and language varieties such as Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and American Sign Language are discussed.

Betsy E. Evans is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her research concentrates on linguistic variation and how that relates to the functions of language in marking identity, status, group solidarity, and cultural values and draws heavily on perceptions and attitudes of language variation.

Erica J. Benson is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. Her areas of interest include American social and regional dialects, language variation and change, folk linguistics, and the role of the individual in language regard.

James N. Stanford is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He researches language variation and change in underrepresented indigenous minority languages, including Sui, Hmong, and other languages of China and southeast Asia. He is co-editor, with Dennis Preston of Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (2009).