This important contribution to the sociolinguistics of Asian languages breaks new ground in the study of language standards and standardization in two key ways: in its focus on Asia, with particular attention paid to China and its neighbours, and in the attention paid to multilingual contexts. The chapters address various kinds of (sometimes hidden) multilingualism and examine the interactions between multilingualism and language standardization, offering a corrective to earlier work on standardization, which has tended to assume a monolingual nation state and monolingual individuals. Taken together, the chapters in this book thus add to our understanding of the ways in which multilingualism is implicated in language standardization, as well as the impact of language standards on multilingualism.



The introduction, Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 are free to download as open access publications under a CC BY NC licence. You can access them here:

Introduction: https://zenodo.org/record/5749388#.YaiwuNDP3cs

Chapter 6: https://zenodo.org/record/5749522#.Yaiw-9DP3cs

Chapter 8: https://zenodo.org/record/5749586#.Yai0RNDP3cs

Nicola McLelland is Professor in German and History of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her research interests include language standardization, multilingualism, the history of language learning and teaching, and the history of linguistics.

Hui Zhao is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, Chinese sociolinguistics, multilingualism and language variation.