Acknowledgements

Walter Benjamin once wrote, ‘Important thoughts must be put to sleep for a long time.’ This book has been dormant for a long period. It emerges from discussion with colleagues, conference and symposium presentations. I would like to thank my colleagues and students at Edinburgh University, International Christian University, the University of Oxford and Waseda University. They are too numerous to name and each person is remembered and valued by me. I thank them for their collegiality and scholarly support over the years, especially colleagues in the Japan Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences, Tokyo Academic Forum on Immigrant Languages (TAFIL) as well as Linguapax Asia. I would like to thank Timothy Vance, Junko Hibiya and my students Ms Rei Sugiura, Kumi Sato and Ms Mai Phuong Nguyen for help with correction and the bibliography. In their present form, some papers are adapted from earlier versions published in scholarly journals, specifically: ‘Metroethnicity, language, and the principle of cool’ in International Journal of Sociology of Language, 175/176, 83–102 (2005) and ‘Fūfu Bessei: Marriage and change – Name policy in Japan’ in the Journal of the Japanese Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences, 8(3), 25–32. (2008).‘Language difficulty and difficult languages’ in Contemporary issues in eanguage Education, in A. Lerner (Ed.) (pp. 155–169). Akita International Press. ‘Nicknames, identity and social management’, Educational Studies, 53, 189–169 (2008).