This article examined the impact of social media on the writing abilities of Nigerian youths in English, which is the language of mass communication in Nigeria. Deploying cultivation theory of the media, this study used quantitative and qualitative methods to unpack the Nigerian youths' opinions on the impact of the use of social media on their…

Reviews the debate between Herskovits, Turner, and Johnson on Africanisms in Gullah. Suggests that Whinnom's approach, which considers pidgins and creoles under the rubric of "linguistic hybridization," is a more appropriate model with which to view Gullah, making irrelevant the question of whether it is an African or European language.…

Reports on one aspect of an ongoing study of language contact in the American deaf community. The ultimate goal of the study is a linguistic description of contact signing and a reexamination of claims that it is a pidgin. Patterns of language use are reviewed and the role of demographic information in judgments is examined. (29 references) (GLR)

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.…

An analysis of the status of Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin (ANP) looks at its origins and evolution in Nigerian history, its location in the Nigerian language situation, and its current sociolinguistic status. It is concluded that ANP possesses linguistic structures that have stabilized enough to give the speaker an impression of good and bad grammar.…

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,…

A "system" comprising the learner-speaker, the specific linguistic system itself, and the interactions with native speakers is posited to explain the dynamics of the acquisition of French as a second language. Through self-regulation, this system devises solutions which pertain to that common area in language at the crossroads of…

Argues that the adequacy of pidgins and creoles as expressive instruments requires systematic empirical research. This research would be based on two sound approaches: a macro-survey of language resources and a micro-analysis of language samples. (CB)

Discussion of the linguistic character of electronic mail (e-mail) looks at technology's role in shaping spoken and written usage, the growth of e-mail as a new communication genre, and formal linguistic properties of e-mail. Proposes a model of e-mail as a creolizing linguistic modality, analogous to pidginization and creolization processes well…