In a Dialogue section of the "Journal of Sociolinguistics" (vol. 26, no. 1), author pairs introduce a number of themes and debates in sign language sociolinguistics, explore why these are debates; how the debates are situated within sociolinguistics as a whole; and how spoken language sociolinguistics does or does not have similar…

Chinese is a highly complex language with internal variation unprecedented in most other languages. Yet, that does not mean Chinese is unique in the sense that it cannot be compared to other languages and new concepts need to be introduced for the description of it. This paper is dedicated to the question of how to apply the notion of…

Cyberbullying is the use of digital communication tools and spaces to inflict physical, mental, or emotional distress. This serious form of aggression is frequently targeted at, but not limited to, vulnerable populations. A common problem when creating machine learning models to identify cyberbullying is the availability of accurately annotated,…

This paper attempts to examine in a descriptive way the pioneering model of "World Englishes" proposed by Kachru in the mid-1980s that allocates the presence of English into three concentric circles: The "Inner" Circle, the "Outer" Circle, and the "Expanding" Circle. The Inner Circle presents the countries…

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in "increments" among students of conversational interaction. This article first outlines "incrementing" as an analytical problem (i.e., as turn constructional unit [TCU] extensions) by tracing its origins back to Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's (1974) famous turn-taking article. Then, the article…

The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of…

Identifying English language learners (ELLs) with learning disabilities has become very important in education settings so that appropriate educational services can be provided to this group of students. Linguistic diversity may increase the measurement error and reduce the reliability of assessments. This article discusses the issues with…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

This issue of "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" is about convergence, a type of language change that is contact-induced and results in greater similarity between two languages that are in contact with each other. In Backus (forthcoming), I have attempted an overview of contact-induced language change, focusing on causal factors, on mechanisms…

After an introduction to the Italian linguistic situation, highlighting the remarkable number of language varieties present in Italy today, the paper goes on to review briefly the history of micronationalism in Italy, and to propose a classification of language planning based on the distinction between macro- and micronationalism. There follows a…

The speech perception system must be flexible in responding to the variability in speech sounds caused by differences among speakers and by language change over the lifespan of the listener. Indeed, listeners use lexical knowledge to retune perception of novel speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In that study, Dutch listeners made…

Suggests the use of principal components analysis as an alternative solution to the problem of grouping speakers by sociological characteristics prior to quantitative analysis. An example is presented of its application to vowel variation data collected as part of a sociolinguistic survey of English in Sydney, Australia. (Author/CB)

This report provides data on standard and non-standard African language varieties occurring in urban areas of South Africa, drawn from nine smaller reports. It illustrates the language use patterns in black urban communities and describes the language varieties spoken in them. It was found that the impact of non-standard varieties on the use of…

While all languages use shape to classify unfamiliar objects, some languages as diverse as Mandarin, Thai, Japanese, Mohawk, and American Sign Language lexicalize these and other types of description as noun classifiers. Classification does not develop from a fixed set of features in the object, but is discourse-sensitive and invoked when it would…

A discussion of the situation of Idoma, a Nigerian language, begins with different accounts of the language's origin, referring to both local legend and cosmology. It then proceeds to a review of modern linguists' efforts, since 1927, to classify the language. A statistical overview contains information on the number of speakers of Idoma as a…