Contents Companion Website xxv List of Figures xxvi List of Tables xxvii Preface xxviii Acknowledgments xxix 1 Introduction 1 Key Concepts 1 Knowledge of Language 3 Competence and performance 4 Variation 5 Speakers and Their Groups 7 Language and Culture 10 Directions of influence 10 The Whorfian hypothesis 11 Correlations 14 The Boundaries of Sociolinguistics 15 Methodological Concerns 17 Data 18 Research design 18 Overview of the Book 19 Chapter Summary 20 Exercises 20 Further Reading 22 References 22
Part I Languages and Communities 25 2 Languages, Dialects, and Varieties 27 Key Concepts 27 Language or Dialect? 28 Mutual intelligibility 29 The role of so identity 32 Standardization 33 The standard as an abstraction 34 The standardization process 35 The standard and language change 36 Standard English? 36 The standard–dialect hierarchy 37 Regional Dialects 38 Dialect continua 39 Dialect geography 39 Everyone has an accent 40 So Dialects 42 Kiezdeutsch ‘neighborhood German’ 43 Ethnic dialects 45 African American Vernacular English 46 Features of AAVE 47 Development of AAVE 48 Latino Englishes 50 Styles, Registers, and Genres 52 Style 52 Register 53 Genre 53 Chapter Summary 54 Exercises 54 Further Reading 56 References 57 3 Defining Groups 62 Key Concepts 62 Speech Communities 63 Linguistic boundaries 63 Shared norms 65 Communities of Practice 68 So Networks 70 So Identities 72 Beliefs about Language and So Groups 74 Ideologies 75 Perceptual dialectology 76 Chapter Summary 77 Exercises 77 Further Reading 78 References 79 4 Languages in Contact: Multilingual Societies and Multilingual Discourse 82 Key Concepts 82 Multilingualism as a Societal Phenomenon 83 Competencies and convergence in multilingual societies 84 La