Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages: A Socially-Anchored Approach (Impact: Studies in Language, Culture and Society, 52)

Grenoble, Lenore A.,Kantarovich, Jessica

ISBN 10: 9027212570 / ISBN 13: 9789027212573

Published by John Benjamins Pub Co, 2022

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0004038774

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages: A Socially-Anchored Approach (Impact: Studies in Language, Culture and Society, 52)
• Publisher: John Benjamins Pub Co
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027212570
• ISBN 13: 9789027212573
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

Focusing on language contact involving Russian, and the linguistic varieties that emerged from that contact in different social settings, this book analyzes issues and methodologies in reconstructing both the linguistic effects of language contact and the social contexts of usage. In-depth analyses of Odessan Russian, a southern Russian contact variety with Yiddish and Ukrainian elements, and Russian lexifier pidgins illustrate the reconstruction process, which involves making the most of all available documentation, particularly literature and stereotypical descriptions. Historical sociolinguistics of this kind straddles the fields of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and contact; this book brings together the methods and theories of these areas to show how they can result in a rich reconstruction of linguistic and socially-conditioned variation. We reconstruct the circumstances and social settings that produced this variation, and demonstrate how to reconstruct which variants were used by different types of speakers under different circumstances, and what kinds of social identities they indexed.