This chapter presents an overview of Multicultural London English (MLE), the urban contact vernacular that has emerged in London in recent years. It starts with a discussion of how similar varieties have been reported across other European cities and have become known as multiethnolects, meaning that they are not restricted to any particular ethnic group but are available to anyone, including speakers from non-immigrant backgrounds. The chapter then focuses on the specific social and historical circumstances that have led to the emergence of MLE, from its beginnings in the 1980s to the present day. After presenting the linguistic characteristics of MLE, a discussion follows of the ways in which MLE has been perceived in the media and by users and non-users of MLE, and how attitudes towards the variety may influence its trajectory in the future. While there is some suggestion that the variety (or some variation thereof) may not be restricted to London, it is not clear whether MLE will stabilise to an everyday vernacular spoken in inner-city neighbourhoods and beyond or whether it will divide along social and ethnic lines. The chapter concludes with a discussion of new research being undertaken to answer some of these issues.

Documents attitudes of makers and users toward dictionaries and analyzes attitudes of makers and users and the sometime tension between what users expect and makers provide. Dictionaries evoke strong feelings – often of respect, even reverence, sometimes of disrespect and outrage; they play an outsized role in people’s lives because of the profoundly intimate link between a lexicon and the culture and values of the society whose lexicon it is. A dictionary is viewed by speakers of the enregistered language as a mirror reflecting their culture, and by outsiders as a window into the culture. Creation of a dictionary is itself a kind of enactment – viewed, especially by speakers whose language has not been regarded as real or equal, as recognizing their language. A few nations have instituted academies to patrol their language, in part by crafting dictionaries. Dictionary makers’ attitudes are expressed in the frontmatter and, more reliably, in the entries and contents. In recent decades, users have addressed makers directly, insisting that dictionaries speak not only to their lexical needs but that they accurately mirror their social, political, and ethical values.

In this chapter we examine a number of present-day varieties of Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). We begin by describing the Scots–SSE continuum, with its roots in earlier socio-cultural developments. We then turn to the present day, examining the attitudes towards different varieties of Scots across geographic and social dimensions. The main part of the chapter focuses on recent research on the many varieties of Scots, providing a detailed picture of the phonological and morphosyntactic forms found therein. In terms of phonology, Scots and SSE overlap, but remain divergent, especially given a number of phonological changes in Scots over the twentieth century, and continued Scots regional variation. The analysis of morphosyntax shows a core of forms shared across most varieties, including SSE, and these are largely stable. A number of other ‘home-grown’ forms are increasing in use across Scotland. Overall, our analysis shows that Scots is maintaining its own distinctive pathway in the twenty-first century.

It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

While the desire for “One Nation, One Language” has played a key role in language policies around the world, I argue that it is not really what drives the English-only movement in the United States. Some previous work on language and power oversimplifies how power works, since a policy seeming quaint and innocuous (and therefore impervious to criticism) can be just as powerful as a policy framed in terms of nationalism or globalization. Instead, drawing on Jan Blommaert’s theory of “upscaling,” I argue that downscaling plays just as pivotal a role in the English-only movement, and I examine examples that cut across my interviews, archival research, observations, and policy documents. I begin by analyzing examples of downscaling on its own, then turn toward situations where people engage in both upscaling and downscaling in a single text or interaction. Ultimately, scaling in either direction can be a way to claim linguistic authority. At the same time, sometimes policymakers do not walk this tightrope successfully, and there can be discursive dissonance. I argue that this sort of dissonance played a role in the eventual downfall of Frederick County’s Official English ordinance.

To explain Latinization of the Roman West, scholars have long searched for evidence of a language policy mandating the use of Latin. They have found none under the Principate. The Roman centre was not interested in policies involving all its subjects, and elite Romans were uninterested in languages other than Latin and Greek and had no concerns about their use, as long as the Empire’s functioning remained intact. Indeed, it is not clear that any such policy would have made much sense for provincials in illiterate and translingual environments. However, though there may not have been an Empire-wide policy of Latinization, there were certainly language ideologies and multiple narrowly focused facets of language management concerning the use of Latin and Greek in the running of the Empire.

Like many other sub-fields of sociolinguistics, two seemingly unbridgeable gaps exist in the sociolinguistic study of multilingualism and identity in urban settings. First, existing studies tend to examine Western and/or English-speaking societies only; and moreover, they do so by using either quantitative or qualitative methods and rarely considering both approaches. As a result, relevant theories have been developed without taking into consideration cases outside these sites using a more comprehensive methodological approach. This chapter presents a case study of urban multilingualism in Ningbo in Eastern China to demonstrate how investigations of non-Western/non-English multilingual settings incorporating interdisciplinary methodologies can help to validate, challenge and, more importantly, expand our understanding of the sociolinguistics of multilingual identity, both theoretically and methodologically. Informed by a variationist approach and mixed-methods designs, the case study not only presents the multilingual sociolinguistic reality of Ningbo, but also shows how an interdisciplinary perspective enriches the field of sociolinguistics.

This chapter focuses on young students’ attitudes towards the partner languages in dual-language immersion (DLI) programmes, as well as attitudes towards the speakers of these languages with implications for students’ identities as bilingual/biliterate learners in this educational context. The chapter uses example findings with primary school students (5–8 year olds) acquiring Spanish and English in a US DLI programme who are part of a multi-year research and evaluation project. Students are compared with student peers in their school’s English-medium classrooms to help understand potential differences in language attitudes stemming from their instructional experiences. This work is part of a growing call to consider the ‘whole child’ in developmental contexts and a need to employ multidisciplinary and longitudinal methods to better understand the impact of bilingual educational settings on children’s growth and well-being, moving beyond a narrow focus on academic achievement and language proficiency outcomes.

This chapter outlines how the discourse analysis of print media can be used to examine language attitudes and discusses the main strengths and limitations of this method. One significant strength lies in the fact that the printed press is an important means by which ideas about language are (re)produced. Analyses of the metalanguage used in the press can therefore be particularly revealing about language attitudes in a given society. An example of a limitation is the fact that print media texts vary enormously in terms of their context and audience. This makes a restricted practice of discourse analysis problematic, but equally too broad a practice may become effectively meaningless. The chapter provides an overview of the main discourse analytical approaches that have been applied to language attitude studies, and then narrows the focus to examine critical discourse analysis (CDA) in particular, outlining its strengths and limitations, giving examples of how it can be used to analyse and interpret data, and discussing key practical issues in planning and designing CDA research. The chapter concludes with a case study evaluating attitudes towards French using a corpus of language columns in French newspapers, thereby exemplifying the main points made in the chapter.

Language contact is at its most intense within one and the same individual. This chapter discusses the dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon of individual bilingualism, which emerges when individuals learn to understand multiple language varieties. Individual bilingual language use may contribute to societal processes of language change, language maintenance, and language loss. It is as yet not fully clear how bilingual individuals affect such larger processes, but cross-linguistic influence in comprehension and production, patterns of language choice, and variable levels of proficiency across the lifespan all play a role. These in turn depend on individuals' contexts for learning and using languages throughout the lifespan. The chapter exemplifies some of these on the basis of bilinguals' language biographies (including Frederick the Great's). Language learning histories and opportunities for using each language help explain the large variability in language skills and use among bilinguals. New languages can be learned until well into adulthood. Their number is constrained only by learning opportunities and motivation. Previously learned languages, including languages learned very early in life, can be lost through lack of use and practice. Language attitudes play a large role in all of this.

The introduction to this volume sums up and discusses some of the issues fundamental to the study of syntactic variation, such as the problem of semantic equivalence (since syntactic variants often have different meanings), the delimitation of syntactic alternations, the relation between linguistic and social conditioning of syntactic variables, and the explanatory frameworks that are proposed in the chapters to account for the linguistic choices speakers make when employing syntactic alternants.

In this chapter we investigate the role of socio-psychological motivations in accounts of grammatical change. Laboratory and corpus evidence is presented to substantiate the impact of dynamic prestige meanings (associated with non-posh media cool) on the diffusion of the object pronoun hun 'them' as a subject in Netherlandic Dutch. In a speaker evaluation experiment, 185 listener-judges rated speech stimuli with standard and non-standard pronouns on pictures which were the best instantiations, according to a preceding norming task, of the evaluation dimensions old prestige (superiority), new prestige (dynamism), and disapproval. While subject-hun was found to be significantly less superior than the standard pronoun, it was perceived to be no less dynamic. The impact of this dynamic prestige meaning was further investigated on the basis of a dataset of tweets. Regression analysis demonstrated that the preference for hun could be adequately predicted on the basis of production proxies of hun’s social meaning. Taken together, all the available data suggest that the social meaning of hun is a pivotal determinant of its diffusion, viz. its use as a consciously deployed 'stylizer', but also the internal conditioning of its non-conscious use as a pronoun alternative.

This chapter describes some prevalent ideologies and attitudes found in minority language communities. It emphasizes the importance of listening to attitudes expressed in a community, and identifying the underlying ideologies, before developing programs to improve negative attitudes. Particularly in cases of linguistic discrimination and language trauma (e.g. Breton, Kashubian Polish), changing language ideologies is a long-term process and must be handled sensitively. The best approach is to make people aware of ideologies and how they function, through education, media and other means. Case studies address ideologies leading to the loss of Zadar Arbanasi in Croatia, and a positive shift in attitudes to Guernesiais, although these are not necessarily followed by action. In the Isle of Man, in order to change perceptions of Manx it is necessary to avoid arguments about the authenticity of the modern form of the language. In Jeju (Korea) Jejudommal is seen as a language in which emotions can be expressed more richly than in Standard Korean. Negative attitudes and ideologies associated with speaking Nahuatl are described.

This chapter begins with a review of the early literature on William Labov’s 1972 concept of the linguistic lame, its influence on the study of African American English, and its role in shaping linguistic perceptions of middle-class speakers. The chapter then proceeds with a summary of the small, but growing, body of research on the use of AAE by middle-class speakers, including studies of social stratification, intraspeaker variation, performative language practices, and attitudes and perceptions. The chapter ends with an overview of the topics covered in subsequent chapters of the book.