Social Life of Words : A Historical Approach

A new approach to sociolinguistics, introducing the study of the social meaning of English words over time, and offering an engaging and entertaining demonstration of lexical sociolinguistic analysis

The Social Life of Words: A Historical Approach explores the rise and fall of the social properties of words, charting ways in which they take on new social connotations. Written in an engaging narrative style, this entertaining text matches up sociolinguistic theory with social history and biography to discover which kind of people used what kind of word, where and when. Social factors such as class, age, race, region, gender, occupation, religion and criminality are discussed in British and American English.

From familiar words such as popcorn, porridge, café, to less common words like burgoo, califont, etna, and phrases like kiss me quick, monkey parade, slap-bang shop, The Social Life of Words demonstrates some of the many ways a new word or phrase can develop social affiliations. Detailed yet accessible chapters cover key areas of historical sociolinguistics, including concepts such as social networks, communities of practice, indexicality and enregisterment, prototypes and stereotypes, polysemy, onomasiology, language regard, lexical appropriation, and more. The first book to take a focused look at lexis as a topic for sociolinguistic analysis, The Social Life of Words:

• Introduces sociolinguistic theories and shows how they can be applied to the lexicon
• Demonstrates how readers can apply sociolinguistic theory to their own analyses of words in English and other languages
• Provides an engaging and amusing new look at many familiar words, inviting students to explore the sociolinguistic properties of words over time for themselves

Part of Wiley Blackwell’s acclaimed Language in Society series, The Social Life of Words is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and linguists working in sociolinguistics, lexical semantics, English lexicology, and the history and development of modern English.

Laura Wright is a Professor of English Language at the University of Cambridge. She is a historical sociolinguist who tracks the social history of English. Her books include Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names, The Multilingual Origins of Standard English, Southern English Varieties Then and Now, and Multilingual Practices in Language History: New Perspectives.