We argue that 'academic language' should not be understood as technical components associated with a 'register', and that instead we must attend to its enregisterment. Enregisterment relies upon language ideologies and models of personhood, requiring attention to social components of 'academic language' beyond lexico-grammar. We draw on…

Attitudes towards language and language education policy (LEP) interact with groups' identities, internal dynamics and intergroup relations. Combining quantitative and qualitative measures, we focused on the Habad community--a Jewish ultra-Orthodox (UO) minority in Israel--exploring its LEP and community attitudes toward languages meaningful to…

The central role played by language in mediating school experience and the prestige accorded to standard language varieties within the field of education provide the broad rationale for this paper. This qualitative study, based on a friendship focus-group design, was conducted in two groups of 12-year-old children from contrasting "ideal…

With Chinese native-speaker data as the baseline, this study investigates the use of the morphosyntactic particle DE by learners of Chinese as a second language. The general patterns are as follows: (a) DE tends to be deleted more in informal speech than in formal settings; (b) higher proficiency and longer residence in China--more interactions…

What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic)…

This paper is concerned with young people's perceptions and reported use of the two language varieties that co-exist in the urban centre of Guangzhou in southern China, Putonghua (P) and Cantonese (C). P is a typical H-variety, promoted by the government and used as a lingua franca throughout China; C is the local L-variety but it also has some…

Three sets of meta-analyses examined gender effects on children's language use. Each set of analyses considered an aspect of speech that is considered to be gender typed: talkativeness, affiliative speech, and assertive speech. Statistically significant average effect sizes were obtained with all three language constructs. On average, girls were…

This paper investigates speech rate in two standard national varieties of Dutch on the basis of 160 15 mins conversations with native speakers who belong to four different regions in the Netherlands and four in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders). Speech rate was quantified as articulation rate and speaking rate, both expressed as the…

Various acoustic measures of speaking rate were calculated for 40 adult speakers of New Zealand English (NZE). These measures were then compared to a group of 40 adult speakers of American English (AE). Results of the analysis identified significantly faster overall speaking rate and articulation rate for the NZE group compared to the AE group. No…

Viewing education as a complex site for endorsing and contesting knowledges and practices we explore its critical roles in feminist language planning. Many types of language planning have relied heavily on education for the implementation and spread of the particular reform agenda largely reliant on discourses of compulsory obligation (e.g.…