Pluricentric Languages in an Immigrant Context

This monograph attempts to explore the notion of pluricentric languages in relation to language maintenance and shift in an immigrant situation (Australia). The three languages selected (Spanish, Arabic, Chinese) are all pluri-centric in different ways and are all languages of international significance. Analysis of the differences in language maintenance processes and patterns between the three languages, and between the different subgroups within the relevant communities, help pinpoint some of the basic factors in language maintenance as well as some of the more ambivalent or variable factors. It has also been possible to consider to what extent the language gives rise to communities based on language rather than national origins. Among the findings of the study is the significance of the major immigration vintage of the group on language maintenance attitudes and practices. This partly reflects changing policies and attitudes in mainstream Australian society. The book will be an important source for sociolinguists, political scientists and those who are working in the fields of applied linguistics and ethnic relations.

Michael Clyne is Professorial Fellow in Linguistics and Director of the Research Unit for Multilingualism and Cross-Cultural Communication at the University of Melbourne. His books include Language and Society in German-Speaking Countries (Cambridge, 1984), Community Languages: the Australian Experience (Cambridge, 1991), Pluricentric Languages (1992), The German Language in a Changing Europe (Cambridge, 1995), and Intercultural Communication at Work (Cambridge, 1995).

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

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