TheAcquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Lingua Franca Context

This book provides the first examination of sociolinguistic competence and the acquisition of native-like variability in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context and presents data from email exchanges between Swiss speakers (with German, French and Italian mother tongues).

Mercedes Durham is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Cardiff University. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language variation and change, English as a world language, dialects of English and the acquisition of variation.

Mercedes Durham is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Cardiff University. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language variation and change, English as a world language, dialects of English and the acquisition of variation.

Mercedes Durham's important new book contributes to our understanding of sociolinguistic variation in a multilingual context in general and to the role of English as a lingua franca in Switzerland in particular. Through rigorous analysis, the author shows how non-native speakers of English acquire considerable sociolinguistic competence. The findings reported here suggest that our ideas of sociolinguistic competence need to be redefined as English gains wider currency as a global language.

This is a most interesting book and offers lots of new insights into language variation and change, the role of new technologies in the evolution of language use, new speech 'communities' of multilingual speakers and also further explorations of the relationship between SLA and sociolinguistics which add to those already in existence. In addition, there are interesting implications for language teaching and learning.