In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language acquisition. It argues that categories are initiated bottom...

This article explores area studies contributions to sociolinguistics by examining Sunni reformers’ use of the Arabic term al-qāida, or a ‘‘pragmatic base.” Material is drawn from an audiocassette collection formerly owned by Usāma Bin Lādı n. Divergent approaches to the qāida suggest that the term functions a base for many forms of spatial, temporal, social, and ethical orientation. Much of the...

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether different kinds of variation lead to different cogni...

The emerging interdisciplinary work in language politics and language policy and planning studies demonstrates a rising interest among researchers in the interface between sociolinguistics, political science and philosophy. Much of the resulting cross-disciplinary work, however, tends to focus on the subject matters (politics, language) themselves rather than explore the broader issues that tra...

This commentary reviews the papers in this volume as successful attempts at unthinking a legacy of nation-state sociolinguistics, enabled by developments in Europe-based sociolinguistics and US-based linguistic anthropology. After offering arguments on why superdiversity should best be seen as an advanced and synthetic perspective on language and society and pointing out its fundamentally criti...

How is it possible that we can tell whether someone is from New York City or Texas or Minnesota simply by listening to their speech? The fact that ordinary people have no trouble with this task is a minor miracle! Sociolinguists and dialectologists have ignored the ability of naïve listeners to distinguish one dialect from another and to attach them to a specific geographical region. Recent wor...