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About this Elements Series
Sociolinguistics is a vital and rapidly growing subfield of Linguistics that draws on linguistics, sociology, social psychology, anthropology and cultural studies. The topics covered in Cambridge Elements in Sociolinguistics will showcase how language is shaped by societal interactions and in turn how language is a central part of social processes. Increasingly sociolinguistics plays an important role in unpacking the big questions concerning race (ethnicity), class, gender, and regional and social identities. It increasingly embraces multilingualism and/or multidialectism as a societal norm of interaction, but is also open to approaches that stress language creativity and building of parts of an individual’s speech repertoire that may not belong to any “named language”.
About the Series Editors
Rajend Mesthrie is Emeritus Professor and past head of Linguistics and Research Chair in Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He has published scholarly articles over four decades on the sociolinguistics of variation and contact in relation to Indian, African and Germanic languages, and the sociology of language. He was President of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (2002-2009) and President of the International Congress of Linguists (2013-2018). Among his publications are English in Language Shift (CUP 1992), Language in South Africa (ed. CUP 2002) and The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics (ed. CUP 2011). He was co-editor of English Today (CUP) between 2008 and 2012, and editorial advisor in 2013. Other books include World Englishes (with Rakesh Bhatt, CUP 2008) and Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa (ed. CUP 2021, with Heather Brookes & Ellen Hurst-Harosh). He was series editor of the highly successful Key Topics in Sociolinguistics (CUP), which ran for two decades.
Valerie Fridland is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her work appears in numerous journals and collections such as the Journal of Phonetics, Language Variation and Change, American Speech and New Cambridge History of English. In addition to serving as lead editor for the three volume series, Speech in the Western States I, II and III, she is the author of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English, and co-author of Sociophonetics. She has a popular blog, Language in the Wild, featured on Psychology Today, and her lecture series, Language and Society, is available through The Great Courses.
Contact the Series Editors
If you would like more information about this series, or are interested in writing an Element, please contact:
Rajend Mesthrie: rajend.mesthrie@uct.ac.za
Valerie Fridland: fridland@unr.edu
