Linguists are sometimes confronted with choices concerning language names. For example, one and the same language may be referred to as Persian or Farsi. This short paper discusses some principles that one might use for making decisions when there are variant forms in use, or when one feels that none of the existing names is appropriate. The…

People who grow up speaking Spanish in Texas often learn a colloquial variety of Spanish at home or in their communities and have limited abilities to move between different registers in different social contexts. As heritage language (HL) learners' understanding of the value of different language varieties plays an important role in the…

Data-driven learning (DDL), or corpus-based language learning, involves the learner in an exploratory task to discover appropriate expressions or collocates regarding his writing. However, the problematic units of meaning in each learner's writing are so diverse that conventional corpora often prove futile. The search engine Google with the…

Describes a project whose purpose is to set up a computerized database of bilingual texts to be used by researchers in the field of language interaction (i.e., codeswitching, borrowing, and other outcomes of contact between varieties). Current work includes adaptation of the CHILDES system to take account of the different needs of researchers in…

A 2-year project to develop a dictionary of modern Nepali is described. The Nepali-English dictionary was designed to include high-frequency vocabulary and to treat entries thoroughly, including associated collocations, semantic and/or grammatical restrictions, and other information essential to their use in sentences. Contents include 3,642 main…