Observing that a linguistically principled characterisation of standard English remains elusive, this chapter explores the indeterminacy surrounding standard English, as well as reasons why a broad consensus on what it comprises is challenging to achieve. This indeterminacy is particularly acute with regard to the concept of standard spoken English, where uncertainty has been exacerbated by the failure of the prescriptive grammatical enterprise to acknowledge systematic structural differences between written and spoken English as well as formal and informal speech. Although linguistic accounts stress that standard English is best conceptualised as an abstraction to which actual usage conforms to a greater or less extent, there remains a gulf between academic and public understanding of the standard language. This disconnect facilitates the perpetuation of obfuscatory ideologies which inform public discourse about standard English. These include tenacious beliefs in the infallibility of its norms and its putative superiority to non-standard varieties, which are routinely dismissed as ‘incorrect,’ ‘vulgar’ and ‘uneducated’, when not altogether discounted as English. Empirically accountable analyses of naturally occurring discourse furnish an indispensable corrective to highly idealised prescriptive accounts of usage, which often fail to capture many of the implicit regularities of actual speech.

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.

As an increasingly established research field, family language policy (FLP) provides a very useful lens to view how bi/multilingual home language-use patterns are influenced by socio-political ideologies and economic factors at the macro level and by family members’ language ideology at the micro level. This chapter starts with an introduction to FLP and outlines the development phases of the field. It then provides a discussion of the major research contributions to the field. Following that, it provides a synthesis of the extant research on how FLP is established and maintained in a range of countries and contexts, particularly in multilingual families. The synthesis focuses on internal factors, such as emotion, identity and cultural practices, and child agency in the negotiation of a family language policy. Lastly, insights gleaned from the more diverse range of social contexts are taken into consideration when making implications for parents, educators, and policy makers and a call for future research.

Both psychology and medicine insist on the ‘right’ way to speak and increasingly attempt to control the language both clinicians and other stakeholders use. Such guides range from article suggestions of replacing certain words to more comprehensive and formal guides of how to communicate (e.g. the guide of the BPS’ Clinical Psychology Division’s Guidelines on Language). In this chapter we explore constructions of language and clinical communication in clinical language guides. Methodologically, our study is anchored in the constructionist view of discourse, taking a qualitative critical discourse studies perspective on the data. Our argument is twofold. First, we argue that the guides represent language and linguistic communication as outside any context, either situational or societal. Second, as the guides focus solely on lexical material, ignoring the grammatical form, they ignore a significant aspect of the communicative interaction. Analysing interactional clinical data, we argue against such assumptions. We end the chapter by making a point of the futility of clinical language guides, stressing the negotiability of clinical communication.

Several conditions of the Korean diaspora offer unique opportunities for the study of language contact. These include the diverse routes and sites of migration that have defined the movement of overseas Koreans throughout the past century; the relatively strong linguistic and cultural homogeneity of Korean society and the prominent role that the Korean language plays as an index of Korean identity; and the recent shift from long-term migration towards flexible, short-term migration that characterizes the Korean diaspora today. This chapter addresses these issues through a survey of the history and sociolinguistic conditions of the Korean diaspora. After an overview of the Korean diaspora’s historical and geographical context, it considers the general trends of language maintenance and attrition in various Korean communities around the world. It also considers how language ideology serves as an important condition for the language maintenance of diasporic Koreans, as well as the more recent rise of flexible migration and shifting linguistic practice in the Korean diaspora.

In Belgium, Piet Van Avermaet and Sven Sierens offer a joint biography where "Dutch" and local dialects were their norm. Both of them grew up in a multilingual environment with migrant classmates. As researchers, they turned to a critical sociolinguistic perspective to propose functional multilingual learning to give multilingual students a chance to use their linguistic repertoires.

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 provides an overview of the sociolinguistic dimensions of heritage language acquisition and use across a variety of settings. Principal theoretical concepts and methodological approaches that address macro, meso, and micro level considerations, including history, context, community, and culture as well as identity, investment, and ideology are described. It considers ‘the social turn’ in language acquisition research more broadly and explains its relationship to heritage language studies, highlighting, in particular, linguistic variability. The chapter identifies key trends in the fields of heritage language acquisition and socialization, and describes the crucial impact of social variables such as generation, social class, ethnicity and race, and gender and sexuality in processes of heritage language acquisition and use. Finally, potential future areas of research focused on the sociolinguistic realities of heritage language users and their communities are highlighted. Overall, this chapter provides readers a glimpse into the sociolinguistic complexity of heritage language speakers, learners, and their communities.

Continental West Germanic and North Germanic languages have been spoken in the Americas for several hundred years, and many are alive as heritage languages today, though often used only by elderly speakers. This chapter examines these languages from several perspectives. First, we look at social and historical contexts of bilingualism. Second, we describe the varieties used, e.g., the extent to which people knew a standard language, along with associated language attitudes and ideologies. Third, we look at key structural properties of Germanic heritage languages with examples from phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and the lexicon, revealing parallels in development and change across languages. Finally, we note some patterns and language maintenance and shift.

Third wave treats linguistic variation as “a social semiotic system” (Eckert 2012, 94) and examines the emergence of social meaning in the stylistic enactment of social personae (Eckert 2012 and 2016). This chapter further develops this emergent perspective on sociolinguist variation. Drawing on my research on Cosmopolitan Mandarin in China, I treat linguistic innovation and change as emergent stylistic resources that create meanings about (new) social distinction. I combine quantitative analysis of production data with examination of metapragmatic discourse to shed light on the processes through which the social meanings of this innovative linguistic style emerge. The analyses reveal a contested indexical field mediated by changing ideologies about social and linguistic normativity and authenticity. This chapter shows that Cosmopolitan Mandarin participates in a broader sociopolitical process of the transformation of stylistic regimes in China.

This chapter explores plural or ‘polynomic’ standards, with special emphasis on the case of Corsica, where a polynomic standard is officially enshrined in Corsican language policy and practice. The principle of ‘polynomy’ is the mutual recognition, by all speakers and writers, of the legitimacy of all varieties of Corsican. Nowhere is this more visible than in orthographic standards, where there is a baseline of sound-to-spelling conventions to be used by writers to write as they speak. The chapter begins with a comparison of the Corsican case with the handful of other contexts in which variant spelling standards are legitimated. The discussion continues with polynomy in school contexts, where the polynomic standard for Corsican is visible to students in allof their Corsican textbooks, but is actively taught to varying degrees. The standard also exists in maximal contrast with French standard language ideology and practice that shapes most of these students’ schools. The chapter then analyses the ‘banal polynomy’ of public signage and webpages in both the public and private sphere, before closing with a critical assessment of the ways in which a polynomic standard both enables and constrains social actors, and its implications for how a minority language is defined and used.

In this chapter, I argue that the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF) can be fruitfully framed as the study of sociolinguistic change. In adopting a sociolinguistic change perspective, researchers who take an interest in ELF and change are invited to move beyond a focus on language change and to pursue a more comprehensive and holistic interest in the processes of social and linguistic change that arise from – and give rise to – the contemporary widespread use of English as a lingua franca. I illustrate the argument by providing examples from research into the internationalization of Danish universities since the late 1990s, showing how the introduction of ELF as a language of teaching and learning involves change in multiple dimensions, including language ideology, discursive practices and social norms.

This substantial introduction covers Trump’s divisive verbal shock tactics during his rise. It offers a history of presidential oratory and speech style, discusses Trump’s use of social media, and his rhetorical feedback loop with his supporters. It analyzes the way the “culture wars” over so-called “politically correct language” feed into Trump’s popularity and the dismay of his critics. Trump supporters often refuse the notion that word choice creates problems, arguing instead that linguistic care stokes oversensitivity, or that it evades harsh realities that harsh language merely describes. They also feel his simple, profane verbal style and even his spelling and grammatical errors reflect his “authenticity” and positive masculinity. Trump’s critics, meanwhile, believe his insulting words and hate speech incite violence while his style denotes lack of education and care, possibly even dementia, while demoting the verbal standards expected of a president. Disagreements over Trump’s verbal style and propriety have sometimes played out over class lines. Trump’s well documented prevarications have exhausted journalists and seemed to influence his supporters, some of whom take his statements as merely hyperbolic articulations of a deeper underlying truth.

Though he may deny it, Trump’s statements and actions cumulatively point toward the notion that “making America great again” means bringing it back to an era of more overt White supremacy. And whiteness, for Trump, is mapped onto the English language and particular ways of speaking it, while White superiority is encoded in his word choices, his metaphors, and his mockery. Since several chapters in this section address the way language is weaponized in service of Trump’s authoritarian White nationalism, this section introduction furnishes some broader context from linguistic anthropology addressing how racism and xenophobia often play out in Trump’s language. These include his aversion to Arabic and Spanish, both of them stand-ins for native speakers; the covert and overt racism in his use of Mock Spanish (Hill 2008); and his dehumanizing word choice to describe immigrants as polluting and dangerous. All these techniques prove relevant as a backdrop to the chapters that follow.

Trump’s entire presidential campaign had anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx sentiment at its core, but in August of 2018, at an event honoring the border patrol, Trump praised Latinx Border Patrol agent Adrian Anzaldúa for his role in the arrest of two US citizens who were transporting immigrants across the US Mexico. In a seeming non sequitur, Trump also remarked that Anzaldúa “speaks perfect English.” This back-handed tribute invokes the patronizing assumption that Latinx individuals are not expected by to speak English well; the guise of flattery, then, reinforces the ideological hostility toward people of color Trump has promulgated. This chapter argues the above episode is emblematic of a process termed “raciolinguistic exceptionalism,” a rhetorical strategy that exceptionalizes one individual while racializing and demonizing an entire group. The authors show how this specific incident highlights the White supremacist, colonial relations through which ideologies of language and race are formed, embedded, and maintained. They also argue that raciolinguistic exceptionalism is a bipartisan process that sometimes easily flies under the radar because the connections it relies on are not obviously racist to hegemonic White speakers, who constantly have to be reminded not to infantilize people of color for speaking “such good English.”

In our introductory chapter, we argued that applied linguistics must be more explicit about the ways in which English is conceptualised in and for the domains of language learning, teaching, and assessment. Now, after eighteen chapters that uncover, advocate, and contest beliefs about the nature of ‘English’ in a range of contexts and from a range of perspectives, we take stock of the project and consider its uses. We don’t have the space here to reference all the arguments and evidence put forward by the authors of these chapters, but we will emphasise those points that we feel have helped to meet the aims of the book. Naturally, we give particular consideration to Pennycook’s companion commentary in the previous chapter.