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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 9–26

The sociolinguistic city

ORCID logo | Carnegie Mellon University

What might we learn if sociolinguists’ objects of study were cities rather than speech communities within cities? Drawing on urban sociology, I suggest that we think of a city as a site of encounter among different sociolinguistic worlds. This would force us to confront heterogeneity, to ask how and when disparate linguistic resources, language ideologies, and communicative practices bump up against each other and impinge on each other. We would have to consider urban mobilities and their sociolinguistic consequences. We would also need to rethink how sociolinguistic practices circulate in non-face-to-face contexts, asking about the role of material artifacts in this process. I illustrate each of these points with examples from my and others’ research.

Keywords: cities, urban studies, heterogeneity, encounter, mobility, circulation, Pittsburgh, Sydney, migration, sociolinguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cities as sites of encounter
    • 2.1Heterogeneity and sociolinguistic encounter
    • 2.2City mobilities and urban encounters
    • 2.3Circulation in the city: How change spreads
  • 3.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.01joh
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