Alex Steer

214 words | ~1 min

Hello internet, I'd like your advice.

I am looking for analyses and examples from anywhere in the world of shifts in language use patterns and language policy for a project I'm working on.

These might include information on language loss and endangerment, language protection schemes, language rights issues, language and ethnicity, globalisation of languages, emergence of distinctive regional standards (e.g. Chinglish, Singlish), changing official attitudes to multilingualism, conflicts over choice of language, etc. I'm also keen to see any good papers on theoretical issues in the branches of sociolinguistics that deal with language choice, language cultures and language policy. For this piece of work I'm interested in language use in the very broad and traditional sense - i.e. which languages people use to communicate. Information on morphological, lexical or syntactic change, sociolect or dialect, and similar are not really of interest for this (though always interesting in themselves).

If you've got anything, from a journal article to a newspaper item or blog post, please send it by email to alex@cantab.net, or via Twitter or Delicious to @alexsteer, or leave a comment on this post.

If you know any other language geeks, pass this on.

Thank you!