Sociolinguistics from the Periphery

de Sari Pietikäinen, Alexandra Jaffe, Helen Kelly-Holmes, Nikolas Coupland

"This book has emerged out of our collaboration in Peripheral Multilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Contestation and Innovation in Multilingual Minority Language Sites, a four-year research project funded by the Academy of Finland in 2011. We are grateful to the Academy of Finland for providing us with this opportunity to pursue research. We started the project with the aim of examining contestation and innovation in multilingual minority language sites. Our initial premise, based on our own and others' previous research, was that language boundaries can show both fixity and fluidity, and that the negotiability of such boundaries can be studied empirically as an emergent property of discourse and social interaction. We have brought this perspective to bear not only on the tensions that arise from complex and changing multilingual processes, practices and experiences in Sami, Corsican, Irish, and Welsh language contexts, but also on the creative acts and activities that are an important part of dealing with these tensions in the four research sites"--