Ample research has explored language attitudes and speaker evaluations, yet it has not attended to direct incidences of language criticism. This article presents evidence demonstrating that a majority of those surveyed in Hawai'i have experienced language criticism. Coded data suggest that criticism takes place during employment, educational,…

In conversations between bilinguals, each of whom is a learner of the other's language, two different local patterns of codeswitching may emerge: compliance and mutual convergence. It is argued that a pattern of compliance is ultimately more accommodating that convergence, contrary to the claims of Speech Accommodation Theory. (20 references)…

Following the study of Gilman and Ford on address terms, an increasing number of studies have been conducted in several sociocultural settings. In line with this trend, the present study attempts to describe and explain address terms among the Akans of postcolonial Ghana. Using observation as the main research tool corroborated by interview and…

With its focus on simplification universals, developmental orders, teachability, and functional-grammatical bases for acquisition, the well-known research on German (L2) language acquisition has contributed much to SLA research in general. At the same time, sociolinguistic investigations focus squarely on the difficult social conditions that…