Readership: The book will appeal both to specialists in German sociolinguistics and contemporary German society and to non-German-speaking researchers working in related areas. It can also be used by postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students of sociolinguistics, language change, and German society since 1945.
Patrick Stevenson, University of Southampton
"Patrick Stevenson's fascinating and highly readable study...goes beyond most existing linguistic and sociolinguistic research ... The author hopes that his book will appeal to sociolinguistics, historians, sociologists, and political scientists, and indeed it will." - Ingeborg Walther, The German Quarterly
"... provides a well-written and well-argued overview of a substantial body of research on east-west sociolinguistic divergence and re-convergence in post-war Germany, which has so far been published almost exclusively in German." - Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
"Stevenson relies largely upon the research of others but his expert summaries, selections of examples and methodological commentaries make the book an authoritative one." - Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
"This book is ideal for not only the students of socio-linguistics but for everyone who is interested in studying language politics and understanding a linguistic fact as a political act." - Linguist List
1: Introduction Part I 2: Germany and the Questione della Lingua 3: Building and Unbuilding the GDR Part II 4: Conflicting Patterns in the Use and Evaluation of Language 5: The Discursive Construction of Difference 6: Interpretations of east-west encounters 7: Conclusion
