Language policy is an issue of critical importance in the world today. In this 2003 introduction, Bernard Spolsky explores many debates at the forefront of language policy: ideas of correctness and bad language; bilingualism and multilingualism; language death and efforts to preserve endangered languages; language choice as a human and civil right; and language education policy...(展开全部)

Bernard Spolsky looks at the many debates at the forefront of language policy in this up-to-date introduction. The topics covered include ideas of correctness and bad language; bilingualism and multilingualism; language death and efforts to preserve endangered languages; language choice as a human and civil right; and language education policy. Spolsky develops a theory of mo...(展开全部)

This textbook is enormously enabling. Not only does it comprehensively provide the basic theory and method at the right level, but beginners have the means and the models so that they can get their 'hands dirty' with real data and real problems in doing sociolinguistics." -William Downes, University of East Anglia Including a disparate range of texts from an interview with Mado...(展开全部)

Sociolinguistics is the study of the different ways in which different groups of people use language. This book provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field, making links with related disciplines such as history, politics, and gender studies.

This is the first comprehensive introduction to the theory of mass transportation with its many--and sometimes unexpected--applications. In a novel approach to the subject, the book both surveys the topic and includes a chapter of problems, making it a particularly useful graduate textbook. In 1781, Gaspard Monge defined the problem of "optimal transportation" (or the transferr...(展开全部)

The field of random matrix theory has seen an explosion of activity in recent years, with connections to many areas of mathematics and physics. However, this makes the current state of the field almost too large to survey in a single book. In this graduate text, we focus on one specific sector of the field, namely the spectral distribution of random Wigner matrix ensembles (suc...(展开全部)