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,…

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,…

This paper evaluates Voki, a digital platform for creating speaking avatars, in the context of Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT). It firstly outlines the benefits of using animated characters in online tools to personalize language lessons and engage students. As a web-based application, Voki offers various customization options, including…

Computational models of child language development can help us understand the cognitive underpinnings of the language learning process, which occurs along several linguistic levels at once (e.g., prosodic and phonological). However, in light of the replication crisis, modelers face the challenge of selecting representative and consolidated infant…

A wide range of Arabic language variation in form, code choice and orthographic script was wielded by Lebanese political protestors in their graffiti and political placards in Beirut in 2015. That summer, civil protests spilled out into the streets to critique the government inaction over waste management and overall corruption. I will focus on…

This paper looks into the dilemma of what counts as a grammatical 'learner error' in ELT on the basis of recent results from English variationist research and English as a lingua franca research. Examples from these studies show that features often perceived as 'errors' for EFL speakers also occur in ESL production--where they are called…

This paper analyzes the status of the Andalusian variety within Spanish language pluricentricity. It offers an example of the rise of new systems of normative stratification in the traditional 'linguistic peripheries' and of how the different linguistic agents deal with the vindication of social and linguistic identities. This fact makes us treat…

Standard language cultures are characterised by beliefs in idealised standard forms of the language in question. In this paper, these beliefs are connected to the concepts of referee design and speech community, through analysis of how Swedish adolescents reflect upon and self-assess their language proficiencies. The data consist of interviews…

In 1924 Jabbar Baghcheban created a manual system that employed the phonetic characteristics of spoken Persian and Perso-Arabic orthography for use in the education of deaf students (Ibrahimi 2007). This article is a first exploration of variation and change in this system as it has evolved into the Iranian manual alphabet. Data on the…

In Pountain (2017), I argued that the indispensable foundation of an academic discipline of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) must consist of (a) acquisition of and competence in the standard form of a foreign language, (b) awareness of its linguistic structure and varieties, and (c) critical study of cultural manifestations which depend on that…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

This article discusses how stylization sheds light on the role of authenticity as an increasingly relevant concept in sociolinguistics. Building on research on style, crossing, and mock language use, the article demonstrates how multilingual stylization provides speakers with a wider range of resources for navigating and negotiating borders and…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

While the concept of standardization is well-established in linguistics, destandardization is a more recent addition to linguistic terminology. Drawing on historiographic and ethnographic data from isiXhosa, one of South Africa's indigenous languages, this paper reflects on both of these concepts. Standardization is discussed as a modernist grand…

Gestures, i.e. the symbolic movements that speakers perform while they speak, form a closely interconnected system with speech, where gestures serve both addressee-directed ("communicative") and speaker-directed ("internal") functions. This article aims (1) to show that a combined analysis of gesture and speech offers new ways to address…