The Social Life of Words

How do words come to take on new connotations in everyday usage? The Social Life of Words: A Historical Approach explores how English words take on the social properties of the people who use them. Written in an engaging narrative style, this entertaining text matches up theory with social history and biography to find out which kind of people used what kind of word, where and when, addressing the ways in which class, age, race, region, gender, religion, and other factors influence language.

From familiar words such as popcorn and porridge along with now-forgotten phrases like monkey parade and slap-bang shop, the words analyzed in The Social Life of Words exemplify some of the distinctive ways that meanings and associations can change over time. Detailed yet accessible chapters cover key areas of historical sociolinguistics, including words and social networks, communities of practice, indexicality and enregisterment, prototypes and stereotypes, polysemy, onomasiology, lexical appropriation, and more. The first book to take a focused look at the lexicon as a feature of sociolinguistic analysis, The Social Life of Words presents real-world cases, and demonstrates how readers can apply sociolinguistic theory to their own exploration of words in English and other languages.

Part of Wiley Blackwell’s acclaimed Language in Society series, The Social Life of Words is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and anyone interested in in sociolinguistics, lexical semantics, English lexicology, and the history and development of modern English.