Post-Insularity and Language Change

This book examines language change in the social context of the relationships between language, identity, and social meaning in post-insular and urbanizing societies. Using ethnographically informed quantitative analysis, Childs and Van Herk consider situations where widespread social change has created a new orientation toward the traditional language features of a community and has resulted in linguistic change. Through a community-focused linguistic analysis, this book proposes some principles for understanding how urbanization can affect language change and the role that community identity and ideologies can have on the ways in which language features change. Expanded more broadly, findings from this book inform the ways in which language variation can be seen within broader discussions of identity creation and maintenance, urbanization, and community-based ideologies of place and self.

Drawing on ten years of fieldwork and analysis, this volume describes language change in a post-insular society and situates it within contemporary sociolinguistic theory. Childs and Van Herk illustrate how these processes of language change can play out through a case study based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's newest and most isolated province. Because of its focus on urbanization and identity, this work will have implications for not only quantitative sociolinguistics, but also fields such as anthropology, historical linguistics, community studies, and sociology.