Traces the history and describes the present state of France's regional languages (Alsacien, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish, and Occitan) and analyzes the common problems encountered by speakers of these languages. (Author/CB)

Posits two hypotheses arising from the great immigration to Sweden and the immigrants' use and learning of Swedish: (1) Swedish as used by immigrant children may show certain features, related to a creolization process; and (2) the Swedish language may in future show signs of influence from the varieties used by persons with immigrant background.…

Twelve papers on codeswitching are reviewed briefly in this introduction to a special journal issue. The following topics are covered: borrowing versus codeswitching, codeswitching in a political discourse context, situational uses. (16 references) (LB)

Summarizes contact-linguistic research on the Samis and Finns, the northernmost minorities in Scandinavia. The monolingual view of northern Scandinavian languages in the past is complemented with a multilingual perspective of the interaction between minority and larger languages. Among contact patterns discussed are North Germanic-Sami,…

Traces the history of the presence of black people's languages in Great Britain and also provides a contemporary perspective on current needs to define and articulate these language needs and to contribute toward the theory and development of language teaching, teacher training, and production of teaching material. (Author/CB)

Preliminary results from a large research project on the use of Frisian and Dutch in the official domain in Friesland focuses on language use in contacts between civil servants and customers in service encounters. Language patterns observed include convergence, neutrality, switching, and asymmetry. (CB)

Describes the characteristics of language conflict and examines the areas of emphasis in the literature, including multilingualism and linguistic identity, glottophagia and minority/majority relations, the danger of reliance on language censuses, conflict resolution/avoidance, and the importance of ecolinguistics in conflict description and for…

Detailed analysis of frequencies of the primary auxiliary verb "be" in Scots dramatic texts leads to consideration of the typological relationship said to exist between different varieties of Scots and between them and standard English. (Author/CB)

Discusses changes in language contacts that are evolving in Quebec between the minority Anglophones and the French-speaking majority. Census data analyses and field research studies indicate that the pattern of language usage among Anglophones is altering in favor of French, indicating capabilities for and attitudes toward greater participation…