Idiomatics--the scientific study of idiomatic language and figurative language--is a pervasive theme in global literature, yet its precise terminology often lacks clear definition. This article addresses this challenge directly by delving into the etymology, significance, and universality of idiomatics. It emphasizes the pivotal role of idiomatics…

Recent scholarship has called for deeper communications and collaborations between writing studies and language studies because such interdisciplinary connections can facilitate the growth of both fields. While research has explored the potential exchanges between writing studies and language-related fields (such as applied linguistics, second…

In this article, I claim that, while placing his theory of language, language planning, and standardization within a conceptual and historical framework inspired by Modernity, the emergence of the nation-state and liberal democracy, Haugen carefully mapped sociolinguistic phenomena onto their political treatment. And it was this careful and honest…

Language documentation is increasingly seen as a collaborative process, engaging community members as active participants. Collaborative research produces better documentation that is valuable for both the academic community and the speakers. However, in many communities, speakers and language advocates lack the skills necessary to fully engage in…

International Sign (IS) and American Sign Language (ASL) have both been used as lingua francas within international deaf contexts. Perspectives on the uses of IS and ASL as lingua francas in such contexts are connected to discourses pertaining to the form, function, status, value, languageness, and global reach of IS and ASL. While there are some…

Exploring the Yiddish language of my father, grandmother, her grandmother, and beyond, this autobiographical article frames language as an ever-changing space where identities are negotiated, formed, and contested. Placing the history of Yiddish alongside my own familial relationship to the language, I explore how the stories of individual lives…

In recent years, the rapid growth and unprecedented dominance of the English language has transformed the world's linguistic ecology and promoted anxiety and debates about its future. The language has developed into a leading international lingua franca used by millions of speakers in different linguistic and cultural contexts worldwide. This…

The 1948 war created a new situation in Palestine. Palestinians became dispersed across political borders that had not existed before, and these borders continued to change in different ways into the 21st century. In many respects, these political borders have had notable linguistic effects, introducing bilingualism and multilingualism for some…

The literary museum tradition in Norway is dominated by a historical-biographical and site-specific approach to museum education. The Centre for Norwegian Language and Litterature, with its three museum departements, has choosen a different approach. By narrowing literature to patterns, ideas, and emotions and addressing current cultural…

This article concerns Northern Catalonia, the part of the Catalan-speaking area that today is in France. A Catalan-speaking region until the first half of the twentieth century, the effects of Frenchification -- the acceptance of the French political and economic project in the contemporary era -- and the multiple demographic changes of the…

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)…

Any discussion of transdisciplinary applied linguistics needs to engage with three central questions. First, while "inter"disciplinarity may allow for disciplines to stay in place and engage with each other, "trans"disciplinarity implies a space beyond or above disciplines. As a result, we have to consider whether applied…

Xinjiang has witnessed constant state attempts to reinforce the status of Mandarin Chinese as 'the Common Language' and to make local Turkic languages -- mainly Uyghur and Kazak -- more 'suitable' to the modern world. Official efforts to transform the linguistic landscape of Xinjiang have engaged in a complex interplay with Turkic speakers' own…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Latgalian is a Baltic regional language originating in the region of Latgale (Latgalian: Latgola) in Eastern Latvia. It is mostly spoken in Latgale, but also in families and small communities of people…

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…