John Benjamins, a family-owned business founded in the 1970s in The Netherlands, is firmly rooted in every imaginable subfield of Linguistics and Language Studies. In the past decades, the publisher has built a significant list of titles as well as electronic reference works.
Founded by John and Claire Benjamins, today's management is in the hands of second generation CEO Seline Benjamins. Currently, they produce 80-100 new titles a year.
John Benjamins Highlights
Pluricentricity and Pluriareality
This edited collection engages with the contentious debate surrounding standard varieties and their distribution. For the past three decades, these arguments have coalesced around two camps: pluricentricity (the idea that standard varieties are intimately associated with nation states, with more powerful national standard varieties affecting the less powerful), and pluriareality (the idea that standard varieties are not limited by national borders and, instead, overlap significantly across dialect boundaries).
With chapters focused on English, German, and Dutch, this book offers fresh perspectives on these theoretical constructs, drawing on data from a variety of standards, and a range of methodological approaches to their analysis. Researchers at all levels interested in standard language variation will find these discussions valuable, especially due to the volume’s integrative approach to pluricentricity and pluriareality, which seeks to demonstrate that these models heavily overlap rather than being in strict opposition.
Our People’s Language
This book pioneers the study of Lánnang-uè, deeply embedded in Manila’s Lannang community’s culture. It approaches Lánnang-uè not just as a language but as a vibrant social practice, highlighting its variability and complex social meanings (e.g., identity-marking). Over six years and with more than 150 participants, the monograph integrates contemporary, community-focused, and critical sociolinguistic frameworks to explore and document linguistic variation as well as change signaling attrition, challenging reductive academic views. Employing diverse methodologies—surveys, elicitation, interviews, computational modeling, and ethnography— the work offers a nuanced depiction of Lánnang-uè’s diversity.
A decolonial stance is advocated, emphasizing the complex practices that define the language and its speakers’ identity. It critiques the idea of a uniform linguistic standard, presenting Lánnang-uè as shaped by local, diverse, and inclusive practices, urging a reevaluation of language ownership and authenticity. This monograph is crucial for scholars in sociolinguistics, language variation, and contact linguistics, informing language revitalization efforts and enriching global discussions on linguistic diversity and discrimination.
Intonation in Language Contact
The intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels, but its effect on the prosody of these languages has received little attention to date. Based on semi-spontaneous and read speech data from 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intonation of Spanish and Catalan as spoken in Girona, with a focus on the speakers’ bilingualism.
These contact varieties share numerous intonational properties, with differences mainly in the frequency of specific tunes in certain contexts. However, they also exhibit significant variation, often linked to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall, the intonation of these contact varieties results from substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan. The book is particularly relevant to scholars researching prosody, language contact, variation, and multilingualism.
John Benjamins Copyright Year Collections
