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Making Waves tells the human story of an academic field based on one-to-one interviews with 43 of the most famous scholars in Variationist Sociolinguistics. Explanations of concepts, ideas, good practice and sage advice come directly from the progenitors of the discipline.
* An authentic, inside story about the origins of Sociolinguistics as Language Variation and Change, recording the context and spirit of sociolinguistics
* Gives students access to the views on language variation of major sociolinguists such as Bill Labov and Peter Trudgill
* Offers a human story of an academic field, and is written in the style of a novel, offering complete accessibility with minimal in-group terminology
* Provides a timely audio archive of the reminiscences of the major Sociolinguists, including Labov, Fasold, Milroy, Trudgill, and Wolfram, with a companion website featuring 400 audio clips from the interviews. Visit the site at www.wiley.com/go/tagliamonte/makingwaves
List of contents
Preface viii
1 Where It Begins 1
2 Synchronicity and Sociolinguistics 25
3 A Crescendo of Research 53
4 Roots of Variationist Thinking 74
5 Sociolinguistics in the Street 88
6 Why Statistics Is in Your Head 107
7 Sociolinguistics From the Heart 121
8 Branching Out; Bursting at the Seams 131
9 Why Do You Like Variation? 158
10 Launching the Future 169
Afterword 185
Appendix A List of Interviews 186
Appendix B VSLX Family Tree 187
References 194
Index 202
About the author
Sali A. Tagliamonte is a Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is author of
Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation (2006) and
Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), among other books and has published on African American varieties; British, Irish, and Canadian dialects; as well as child, teen, television, and Internet language.
Summary
Making Waves tells the human story of an academic field based on one-to-one interviews with 43 of the most famous scholars in Variationist Sociolinguistics. Explanations of concepts, ideas, good practice and sage advice come directly from the progenitors of the discipline.
