This collection of different perspectives on language variation serves as a companion volume to New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English.

Arabic, one of the official languages of the United Nations, is spoken by more than half a billion people around the world and is of increasing importance in today’s political and economic spheres. The study of the Arabic language has a long and rich history: earliest grammatical accounts date from the 8th century and include full syntactic, morphological, and phonological analyses of the vernaculars and of Classical Arabic. In recent years the academic study of Arabic has become increasingly sophisticated and broad.

This state-of-the-art volume presents the most recent research in Arabic linguistics from a theoretical point of view, including computational linguistics, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. It also covers sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and discourse analysis by looking at issues such as gender, urbanization, and language ideology. Underlying themes include the changing and evolving attitudes of speakers of Arabic and theoretical approaches to linguistic variation in the Middle East.

Despite the significant presence of Cuban immigrants in the United States, current research on Cuban Spanish linguistics remains underexplored. This volume addresses this lacuna in Cuban Spanish research by providing a state-of-the-art collection of articles from a range of theoretical perspectives and linguistic areas, including phonological and phonetic variation, morphosyntactic approaches, sociolinguistic perspectives, and heritage language acquisition. Given increasing interest in Cuban Spanish among graduate students and faculty, this volume is a timely and highly relevant contribution to Hispanic linguistics and Cuban Spanish dialectology in particular.

Subramaniam reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into interdisciplinary areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.

Measured Language: Quantitative Studies of Acquisition, Assessment, and Variation focuses on ways in which various aspects of language can be quantified and how measurement informs and advances our understanding of language. The metaphors and operationalizations of quantification serve as an important lingua franca for seemingly disparate areas of linguistic research, allowing methods and constructs to be translated from one area of linguistic investigation to another.

Measured Language includes forms of measurement and quantitative analysis current in diverse areas of linguistic research from language assessment to language change, from generative linguistics to experimental psycholinguistics, and from longitudinal studies to classroom research. Contributors demonstrate how to operationalize a construct, develop a reliable way to measure it, and finally validate that measurement—and share the relevance of their perspectives and findings to other areas of linguistic inquiry. The range and clarity of the research collected here ensures that even linguists who would not traditionally use quantitative methods will find this volume useful.

A sweeping exploration of the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells.

We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn’t the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.

Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms—in English, for example, we speak of time “passing us by”—speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for “time” at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors themselves: a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What’s more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like “floral” or “stinky,” whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen.

Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one’s “left” or “right,” while others use geocentric words like “east” and “west”? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into the fundamentals of human communication and experience.

Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

When the Oakland, California, school board called African American English "Ebonics" and claimed that it "is not a black dialect or any dialect of English," they reignited a debate over language, race, and culture that reaches back to the era of slavery in the United States. In this book, John Baugh, an authority on African American English, sets new parameters for the debate by dissecting and challenging many of the prevailing myths about African American language and its place in American society.

Baugh's inquiry ranges from the origins of African American English among slaves and their descendants to its recent adoption by standard English speakers of various races. Some of the topics he considers include practices and malpractices for educating language minority students, linguistic discrimination in the administration of justice, cross-cultural communication between Blacks and whites, and specific linguistic aspects of African American English. This detailed overview of the main points of debate about African American language will be important reading for both scholars and the concerned public.

This selection of Peter Trudgill's major works since 1988, appearing here in updated and revised form, reveals major recurring themes in his work on linguistic diversity. This book evinces his deep concern that the world's linguistic diversity is diminishing at an alarming rate. The linguistic future is likely to be very different from the past, because increased language contact among peoples will result in the creation of fewer new languages to balance the language deaths. The essays here manifest Trudgill's conviction that linguists must make every effort to study minority languages and dialects before they vanish. The book also demonstrates his sense of the obligation that linguists have to educate the public about why linguistic diversity is valuable.

The book deals with a number of specific but related topics. One area is the role of English in the world, and the nature of Standard English or Englishes. Another is language as a human issue, reflecting the author's concern that the results of sociolinguistic research should be made available to assist, wherever possible, with the solution of educational and other real-world problems. A third focus is on the problematic and interconnected relationships among nation and language and dialect, but, unlike the work of most other writers in this field, this book looks closely at the linguistic characteristics of the varieties concerned. The final major emphasis is on sociohistorical linguistics: in particular, the relationship between colonial and motherland varieties of English; dialect contact and language contact; and the sociolinguistically informed dialectology of linguistic theory, linguistic description, and the applications of linguistics. The major overall unifying theme of the book is linguistic variation and, as the diachronic outcome of linguistic variation, linguistic change.

Ernst Mayr is perhaps the most distinguished biologist of the twentieth century, and Systematics and the Origin of Species may be one of his greatest and most influential books. This classic study, first published in 1942, helped to revolutionize evolutionary biology by offering a new approach to taxonomic principles and correlating the ideas and findings of modern systematics with those of other life science disciplines. This book is one of the foundational documents of the “Evolutionary Synthesis.” It is the book in which Mayr pioneered his new concept of species based chiefly on such biological factors as interbreeding and reproductive isolation, taking into account ecology, geography, and life history.

In his new Introduction for this edition, Mayr reflects on the place of this enduring work in the subsequent history of his field.

This edited volume, based on papers presented at the 2017 Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics (GURT), approaches the study of language variation from a variety of angles. Language variation research asks broad questions such as, "Why are languages' grammatical structures different from one another?" as well as more specific word-level questions such as, "Why are words that are pronounced differently still recognized to be the same words?" Too often, research on variation has been siloed based on the particular question—sociolinguists do not talk to historical linguists, who do not talk to phoneticians, and so on. This edited volume seeks to bring discussions from different subfields of linguistics together to explore language variation in a broader sense and acknowledge the complexity and interwoven nature of variation itself.

Twenty-four linguists analyze natural and social differences in language form, use, and attitudes.

Aging and cancer may be manifestations of genetic, or epigenetic, changes in somatic cells. Through research, laboratory analysis of these related processes has become possible. Cells can be removed from the body, kept warm in laboratory glassware, nourished by artificial solutions, and studied for years, or even decades. Two types of cultures have emerged: Primary cultures, grown from cells obtained directly from living animals, may grow well for generations, but ultimately cease to divide. Established cultures, on the other hand, may grow and divide indefinitely. It is a striking fact that most, if not all, established cultures consist of cells that are heteroploid, having an abnormal chromosome complement that may include structural rearrangements as well as abnormalities of chromosome number.

Most established cultures are also neoplastic on behavior and morphology—in this, they resemble cancers—and established cultures are, in fact, often grown from cancer cells. Interest in the role of chromosomes in neoplasia has recently been overshadowed by an emphasis on tumor viruses. This book should reawaken the former interest. It will also arouse new interest in the role of epigenetic mechanisms of animal cells, in contrast to the classic genetic processes. As Dr. John Littlefield writes: “The relationship between the overcoming of senescence, the appearance of heteroploidy, and the acquisition of neoplastic qualities is not yet clear, but it is of such great theoretical and practical importance as to demand attention and new ideas.”

With increasing frequency, readers of literature are encountering barely intelligible, sometimes unrecognizable languages created by combining one or more languages with English. Evelyn Ch'ien argues that weird English constitutes the new language of literature, implicitly launching a new literary theory.

Weird English explores experimental and unorthodox uses of English by multilingual writers traveling from the canonical works of Nabokov and Hong Kingston to the less critiqued linguistic terrain of Junot Díaz and Arundhati Roy. It examines the syntactic and grammatical innovations of these authors, who use English to convey their ambivalence toward or enthusiasm for English or their political motivations for altering its rules. Ch'ien looks at how the collision of other languages with English invigorated and propelled the evolution of language in the twentieth century and beyond.

Ch'ien defines the allure and tactical features of a new writerly genre, even as she herself writes with a sassiness and verve that communicates her ideas with great panache.