The chapter explores complex ascriptions of linguistic prestige in Belize’s multilingual and postcolonial context. The observations made challenge traditional binary models of overt and covert prestige. English, the former colonizer’s language, holds formal prestige linked to its global status, economic utility, and educational norms. However, this prestige coexists with linguistic insecurity, as many Belizeans combine local and exogenous norms. Conversely, Kriol carries polycentric prestige rooted in national identity, creativity, and resistance to colonial hegemony. It indexes reputation rather than respectability, aligning with Afro-European traditions and anti-standard ideologies. Despite its rise in public and formal domains, Kriol remains ideologically linked to informality, creativity, and resistance. The chapter also highlights the emic construction of ‘code-switching’, valued as the ability to distinguish English from Kriol, reflecting education and social status. This linguistic liquidity – marked by overlapping functions, fluid boundaries, and contradictory discourses – reflects the complex interaction of different forms of prestige in Belize.

This chapter explains why countries obtain nuclear latency. It introduces the drivers and constraints of latency. It conducts a statistical analysis to determine which variables are correlated with nuclear latency onset, and then analyzes twenty-two cases to identify the main motives for getting latency.

Chapter 2 analyzes how both patent companies used the duopoly to intensify consumer demand through the complementary strategies of engineered scarcity and manufactured prestige. In addition to limiting the number of theatres operating in London, the patentees designated two-thirds of the auditorium for those wealthy enough to spend discretionary income on vastly increased ticket prices. In their pursuit of prestige, the companies also imported various French repertory practices, such as later curtain times and long runs, that did not map well onto the traditional six-day-a-week English performance calendar. Additionally, the early Restoration practice of mounting a pre-1660 repertory, owing to the lack of new playwrights, became an ingrained habit. The resulting repetition within the dramatic repertory failed to realize the box office magic sought by management: premieres of new plays were few and revivals of old plays many, to the consternation of spectators and playwrights alike. To flourish, the Restoration companies needed to offer a varied dramatic repertory that was both affordable and accessible to a large swath of Londoners.

Status hierarchy likely exists in all human societies, whether pronounced or more subtle, and even in more egalitarian societies where resources are widely shared and overt status-seeking is actively policed. This chapter reviews models of the evolution of status hierarchy, including models from behavioral ecology as well as from evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution. A central concern of these disparate models is the adaptive problem of why any individual should adopt a subordinate status if higher status tends to increase fitness. Solutions to this problem involve the benefits to individuals from avoiding costs of repeated competition over resources or from deferring to prestigious others. Hierarchy can facilitate coordination and collective action that, in humans, enables both the massive scale of our societies and unparalleled levels of exploitation. These explanations are summarized in detail while addressing related questions, including: Do women and men differ in status-seeking? What contributes to variation in status hierarchy across species and across human societies? The goals of this chapter are to highlight consilience and provoke new directions within the evolutionary literature on status hierarchy.

This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the following question: can scientific prizes affect the trajectory of discovery? Prizes, not to be confused with grants, work well in a couple of ways. Firstly, there is often an economic incentive to winning them. Sometimes the funds can be used in a personal capacity, other times the prize money is earmarked for future research. The other benefit is the prestige they bring. This prestige can increase the likelihood that their future papers and research will be highly cited, particularly immediately after publishing new research - much like the added hype that a famous artist or musician might be able to generate prior to the unveiling of new work. Prizes also seem to celebrate existing pursuits and create positive exposure, resulting in an influx of scientists from other fields. But how effective are prizes in steering research in new directions? Prizes seem to amplify achievements, probably reward those pursuing riskier hypotheses, and often identify scientific areas likely to grow in the future, but their ability to shift the trajectory is less likely. The reasons for this are elaborated upon in the rest of the chapter.

This study compares the evaluation of speech with the pragmatic marker you know to speech without any pragmatic markers. The comparison is based on a set of perception surveys, in which participants listened to manipulated audio stimuli and rated them on a series of scales. Results suggest that the classic prestige, solidarity, and dynamism model is not suitable for the pragmatic marker you know. The social salience of you know is relatively weak and guises with you know are rated as less formal, less trustworthy, less precise, less experienced, less fluent, and less determined than guises without pragmatic markers. This study shows that the evaluation of you know is multidimensional and that the social meanings of you know arise out of its most immediate pragmatic and interactional context.

The chapter focuses on gender-differentiated patterns. It begins with a review of Labov’s principles regarding gender differentiation and proceeds to rectify misconceptions about the interpretation of Arabic data. It contains ample examples from a variety of regions and dialects that illustrate different patterns of gender-based variation.

In this chapter we investigate the role of socio-psychological motivations in accounts of grammatical change. Laboratory and corpus evidence is presented to substantiate the impact of dynamic prestige meanings (associated with non-posh media cool) on the diffusion of the object pronoun hun 'them' as a subject in Netherlandic Dutch. In a speaker evaluation experiment, 185 listener-judges rated speech stimuli with standard and non-standard pronouns on pictures which were the best instantiations, according to a preceding norming task, of the evaluation dimensions old prestige (superiority), new prestige (dynamism), and disapproval. While subject-hun was found to be significantly less superior than the standard pronoun, it was perceived to be no less dynamic. The impact of this dynamic prestige meaning was further investigated on the basis of a dataset of tweets. Regression analysis demonstrated that the preference for hun could be adequately predicted on the basis of production proxies of hun’s social meaning. Taken together, all the available data suggest that the social meaning of hun is a pivotal determinant of its diffusion, viz. its use as a consciously deployed 'stylizer', but also the internal conditioning of its non-conscious use as a pronoun alternative.

This chapter discusses the definition of heritage language and the sociolinguistic conditions on the language development of the speakers that are identified as belonging in such a community, by providing a comparison of different diagnostics and the contribution of those for our understanding of heritage language speakers particularly. It focuses more generally on language contact and the creation of heritage language conditions in southeastern Europe and more specifically gives a detailed description on historical facts characterizing particular populations in the case of Cyprus and the endangered, heritage Arabic variety of Sanna spoken on the island. This context is particularly interesting in that it provides very similar criteria for describing two rather different linguistic situations, diglossia and heritage languages. The chapter also provides a brief discussion on the grammar properties that characterize heritage languages by drawing data from speakers of Sanna. It contributes to the discussion of different social, cultural, and linguistic circumstances that may characterize a heritage language community.

Language is by no means only, or even mainly, for communication. But communication is obviously one of its functions. It is also a very complex phenomenon, and in this chapter we examine interesting examples and analyses of the complexities of human communication.

Chapter 4 describes in detail the three disastrous Serbian campaigns, emphasizing the challenges posed by the terrain, weather and underestimation of the Serbian enemy. General Potiorek’s fatal strategies are shown, as well as the overall effect of the Habsburg defeats in the Balkans and with its ally Germany. The lack of effective training and false blaming of Czech soldiers for the initial defeat is emphasized.

This chapter analyses language contact between English and Spanish in the United States in terms of de Swaan’s (2002) World Language System, which explains – among other things – why US Spanish, a variety that is regarded as low-prestige on the US national level and among many Hispanophone traditionalists, has nevertheless become influential and attractive throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Inspired by Appadurai’s (1996) model of cultural globalisation, the concept of languagescapes is introduced to account for the dynamics of Spanish-English language mixing across a wide range of spoken and written domains. Spanish-English code-switching has already been studied extensively in conversational data. Where the chapter breaks new ground is in exploring the specific features of code-switching performances in literature and in computer-mediated communication, which have to be seen both in the context of sociolinguistic community norms in the United States and against the background of a global linguistic ecology in which both Spanish and English occupy very important positions.

Histories of dissolving high/low culture divides inform Katalin Orbán’s discussion of contemporary graphic fiction, as she posits the critical and popular emergence of long-form, verbal-visual works that push narrative conventions in new directions, such as spatial-temporal experiments (e.g., by Chris Ware and Richard McGuire), the use of visual metaphors and other conventionally linguistic literary devices, and genre blurring distinctive to the drawn medium.