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 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 present study, situated in the area of variational pragmatics, contrasts tag question (TQ) use in Ireland and Great Britain using spoken data from the Irish and British components of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Analysis is on the formal and functional level and also investigates form-functional relationships. Findings reveal…

In 2005, Klaus P. Schneider published a fascinating article with the title "'No problem, you're welcome, anytime': Responding to thanks in Ireland, England, and the U.S.A." Adopting the then emerging and now established framework of variational pragmatics, Schneider's pioneering paper presents the results of a study on differences…

This study examines the manifestations of purity and authenticity in 47 Basque bilinguals' reactions to code-switching. The respondents listened to two speech extracts with code-switching, filled in a short questionnaire and talked about the extracts in small groups. These conversations were then recorded. The respondents' beliefs can be…

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…