Address Practice As Social Action ― European Perspectives

How we address one another – whether we use first names, or titles and surnames, for example – says a great deal about who we are, our social relationships and which groups in society we belong to. This edited volume examines address choices in a range of everyday interactions – from radio interviews and service encounters to commercials and internet forums – taking place in Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Italian and the two national varieties of Swedish, Finland Swedish and Sweden Swedish. By comparing local, national and cross-border address practices, this volume uncovers both commonalities and differences in the way social meaning is expressed and shaped through address. The chapters also highlight the importance of investigating the daily encounters that make up the social fabric of our lives. This book will be of great interest to researchers of intercultural and cross-cultural communication, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and pragmatics.

Catrin Norrby is Professor of Scandinavian Languages at Stockholm University, Sweden, and Principal Fellow, School of Languages and Linguistics, at The University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published extensively in sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and second language acquisition. She is co-author of Language and Human Relations: Styles of Address in Contemporary Language (2009).

Camilla Wide is Professor of Scandinavian Languages at the University of Turku, Finland. She has published extensively in interactional linguistics, grammar, language variation and sociolinguistics. She is the co-editor of several volumes on grammar, interaction and variation.