Nikolas Coupland

English in Wales Nikolas Coupland

This sociolinguistic perspective on Wales takes account of both principal languages, in contemporary life and in history. It traces the conflicts and mutual influences of the two languages in shaping the sociolinguistic character of Wales and traces the way in which it has simultaneously come to function, for many Welsh people, as a vehicle for cultural continuity, the means to an Anglo-Welsh identity. It brings together original descriptive and interpretive studies by eminent researchers from a varity of academic disciplines concerned with English in Wales - sociolinguistics, dialectology, geolinguistics, cultural history and social psychology. In a detailed study of Gwent the complex political cultural processes involved in the Anglicization of Wales are highlighted and in a series of community dialect sketches the extent of diversity within varieties of Welsh English is shown.