Culpeper J., Kerswill P., Wodak R., McEnery T., Katamba F. (eds.) (2018) English Language. Description, Variation and Context (2nd Ed.), London: Palgrave (Chapters 11, 17, 19, 20, 21).
Contents
The course aims at illustrating the main dimensions of variation, i.e. social, geographical, situational, in the use of contemporary English in everyday speech patterns in multicultural/multilingual contexts of interaction where: ◦ such language alternation phenomena as code-switching and code-mixing stand out both as key conversational practices in marking the speakers’ ethnolinguistic identity and as crucial vehicles of intercultural/interlinguistic mediation; ◦ new hybrid varieties of English, often resulting from language contact, emerge, and ◦ linguistic identities are constantly open to renegotiation, reconstruction and reinterpretation through language use. The theoretical sociolinguistic framework will be supported by examples taken from multilingual audiovisual products, belonging to different genres, whose dialogues, presenting instances of code-switching as well as of hybrid language varieties, faithfully represent the richness and complexities of everyday speech patterns in real-life multilingual societies.
