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…

What almost all accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the written form of a language as "a significant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language" (Haugen in Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966a; Haugen, in: Bright (ed)…

In the beginning, humans had a tongue ("gjuhën," "Shqip"). Then, they could or couldn't let go of the tongue ("len…gjuhën," Shqip). Albanian natural tongue (Shqip) implies the use of the tongue in the mouth for articulating ("shqiptoj," Shqip) words. The eternity of Shqip (Speech) is in its words that are…

In rural Valdres, Norway, the traditional regional dialect, called Valdresmål, has become an important resource for popular style and local development projects. Stigmatized through much of the twentieth century for its association with poor, rural, "backward" farmers and culture, Valdresmål has been thoroughly revalorized, with…

This article serves as an introduction to a collection of four articles on multilingual practices in speech and writing, exploring both contemporary and historical sources. It not only introduces the articles but also discusses the scope and definitions of code-switching, attitudes towards multilingual interaction and, most pertinently, the…

This article aims at the feature analysis of four expository essays (Text A/B/C/D) written by secondary school students with a focus on the differences between spoken and written language. Texts C and D are better written compared with the other two (Texts A&B) which are considered more spoken in language using. The language features are…

Increased immigration in Europe and worldwide has led to more pre- and primary school students being educated through the medium of a second language, and there is considerable research, much of it coming from Australia, to suggest that in order to cope with this situation, children will need to begin to acquire, from their earliest years in…

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…

Identifies the major issues that need to be confronted in resolving the controversy over the historical roots of African American Vernacular English. and discusses their implications for reconstruction. (Author/VWL)

Describes the use of English in literature written by nonnative speakers. These "new-English" authors present new elements and structures within a matrix of internationally "standard" English. Various pragmatic dimensions of creativity in selected works by such authors are described. (Author/LMO)

French Creoles are spoken in many different parts of the world, including the Indian Ocean, United States, Caribbean, and South America. These Kweyol speech communities are described, in the Kweyol Project, which examines Kweyol language issues and the establishment of a Kweyol Literacy Scheme. (Contains 15 references.) (LB)

A study analyzed how freshman composition students handled an assignment that forced them to perform an act of sophisticated literacy which was a variation between spontaneity (present) and repetition (past) with a focus on how novice writers borrow language, whether through quotation or misquotation. The assignment involved two masterpieces of…

Notes that few phonemes exhibit greater variance in the membership of phonemes that make up an equivalency class than the phoneme represented by /r/. Points out that the relationship between the auditory features of the speech signal and phonetic classification provides insight into a language's encoding and decoding system. (23 references)…

Focuses on factors governing the choice of relative markers in restrictive relative clauses with relativized subjects from the 16th century to the present, using spoken and written data and including non-standard and regional varieties. The study addresses claims by Romaine (1982) that the "wh"-strategy has not affected spoken English,…

Presents a bibliographic survey of works describing the variations in contemporary French seen in regional, social, and stylistic associations. Also takes a critical look at the necessity for this variation from a sociolinguistic viewpoint and examines the potential limits of these varieties in the language. (216 references) (Author/CK)