Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change

Book excerpt: Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change focuses on the influence of sociocultural terms on the forms of languages. The selection first underscores the sociocultural dimensions of language change and language evolution and speech style. Discussions focus on the relation of speech style and language evolution, linguistic evidence of language evolution, autonomy of code and style, language contact phenomena, and extension of the concept of language. The book then takes a look at speech and social prestige in the Belizian speech community; Japanese numeral classifiers; and speculations on the growth of ethnobotanical nomenclature. Topics include appearance of varietal names, differentiation and formation of specific names, six universal categories of ethnobotanical nomenclature, salience of speech, and prestige, social success, and language. The publication elaborates on color categorization in West Futunese; creolization and syntactic change in New Guinea Tok Pisin; relexification processes in Philippine Creole Spanish; and the historical and sociocultural aspects of the distribution of linguistic variants in highland Chiapas, Mexico. The selection is a valuable source of data for language experts and researchers interested in the sociocultural dimensions of language change.