In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets "enregistered" as the "language" for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

This paper deals with problems stemming from linguistic variation in children's literature in a pluricentric language such as Spanish. Specifically, a paradigmatic case of the tensions will be studied, namely a collection of children's books about the Canary Islands, "Leyendas Canarias" (2012-2021). The sociolinguistic setting is the…

Based on data from numerous languages, such as English, Frisian, and Danish, Merchant (2001) proposes the "preposition stranding generalization" (PSG), which states that only languages that allow preposition stranding under wh-movement also allow preposition stranding under sluicing. The availability of this generalization has been the…

This paper seeks to intellectually stimulate researchers who are interested in the history of grammar and the long-standing debate about prescriptivism. Contrary to popular belief, there are scholars who still put forward arguments about the significant role played by prescriptive grammar in the development of Modern Standard English. Such…

In this article, we analyze how linguistic terms have been borrowed and reinterpreted across disciplines. Specifically, we describe how terminology associated with Applied Linguistics (AL) changed meaning as it entered the new disciplinary context of Writing Studies (WS), often resulting in confusion and turbulence between the two fields. As in…

For many Spanish speakers, Spanglish is perceived as a bastardized form of Spanish that does not count as "real" Spanish. This view rests on the assumption that there is a "real" Spanish, which operates by a set of grammatical, lexical and morphological rules such that when bilingual speakers mix into these rules elements that…

On a 2022 fieldtrip to Ecuador, we encountered a large community of Media Lengua speakers in the province of Cotopaxi where the language was thought to be dormant. This is the same region where Pieter Muysken had first documented this 'mixed language' in the 1970s. However, subsequent fieldwork thereabout by several linguists had failed to turn up…

As language technologies have become more sophisticated and prevalent, there have been increasing concerns about bias in natural language processing (NLP). Such work often focuses on the effects of bias instead of sources. In contrast, this paper discusses how normative language assumptions and ideologies influence a range of automated language…

The development of a considerable body of literature on British Sign Language (BSL) now permits analyzing and describing the sociolinguistic history of the language. An impressive amount of sociolinguistic information on BSL pertaining to the United Kingdom (UK) provides rich material for such analysis, but, until now, very little BSL research has…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

English language learners should become successful intercultural speakers and global citizens promoting qualities that go beyond national boundaries. Supposed to be globally appropriate, global course books from Global North publishing houses reproduce coloniality and are neither neutral nor free of nationalism. Local(ised) teaching materials…

Study of language, like any other discipline, has naturally been developing ever since its inception. But it assumed an accelerated pace from the early twentieth century onwards with two or more paradigm-shifting outlooks, among which the 'socio-contextual surge onto the consideration of language functioning' led to the emergence of an approach…

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However,…

In this article Renata Love Jones and Patrick Proctor introduce the notion of pursuing language to engage in critical dialogue about the nature and focus of language and literacy education in multilingual and multicultural contexts. A persistent threat in language and literacy education is standardization that constrains how language and literacy…