Quebec rap lyrics stand out on the world Hip-Hop scene by virtue of the ease and rapidity with which performers in this multilingual, multiethnic youth community codeswitch, frequently among three or more languages or language varieties (usually over a French and/or English base) in the same song. We construct a framework for understanding…

Language ecology, a term developed by Haugen (2001), describes the relationship between languages and the environment in which they exist; that is, how they grow, change, interact and adapt in a Darwinian-like quest for survival. Of the 6000 or so languages in existence today, some are spoken by vast numbers of people, but others are used by very…

The aim of this paper is to reflect on bilingual performance and specifically language alternation in informal contexts. In this reflection I have focused on the language choice of bilingual speakers when they are not restricted by the social factors of formal settings to adopt one code or the other. I have adopted Poplack's framework in…

Jamaican Creole-speaking college students find it difficult to switch to standard English for school-related tasks. At the composition level, many Jamaican students still experience problems with higher order concerns such as a organization, unity, and coherence. With regard to lower order concerns, three types of writing miscues are prevalent:…

Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

Examples of cross cultural misunderstandings are examined in this paper to show how cultural (contextual) meaning must be regarded as an integral feature of the overall semantic meaning of an utterance. The examples, taken from the Filipino dialect Tagalog, illustrate how ignorance of the cultural assumptions and attitudes associated with an…

The aim of this study is threefold: (1) to explore differential/nondifferential code allocations for Spanish and English according to different domains of social interaction among Mexican-American college students; (2) to determine what linguistic and demographic variables are associated with differential usage patterns; (3) to relate the findings…

Preliminary results from a large research project on the use of Frisian and Dutch in the official domain in Friesland focuses on language use in contacts between civil servants and customers in service encounters. Language patterns observed include convergence, neutrality, switching, and asymmetry. (CB)

Presents a study of foreigner talk (FT) in a minority language (Welsh) in a bilingual community and describes some of the most prominent features of Welsh FT. FT is defined as a simple form of a language used by native speakers to communicate with non-proficient speakers of the language. (SED)

Spanish-English code switching in the context of Miami health care services is examined, focusing on the transactional role relationships that require Spanish language use. Examples are taken from printed sources and oral language. Semantic shift, vocabulary adaptation, syntactic code switching, and Spanish acquisition by non-Hispanics are…

In a follow-up project, this study examined how and when six university language teachers actually used English and the target language in the classroom. Results suggest that switches to English may be made to help maintain classroom order, to create solidarity or empathy, to cover lack of experience or strategies, or to rephrase or modify their…

Examines the way Italian-Canadian youth negotiate their identities through their language practices. Views identity as multiple and shifting and shows how eight Italian-Canadian youths in Toronto lean on different aspects of their identities through their daily linguistic and cultural practices across and within multiple worlds. (Author/VWL)

This paper investigates the verbal construction of emotions in a bilingual/bicultural setting, the target languages and cultures being American English and Cypriot Greek. To examine whether bilingual speakers express different emotions in their respective languages, a study was carried out with 10 bilingual/bicultural professionals. A scenario was…

This article explores the long-standing problem of ascribing meaning to individual acts of codeswitching. Drawing on ethnographic data from bilingual classrooms in Corsica, I situate the analysis of codeswitching within the more general question of the interpretation of speaker stance, which is defined as speakers' positioning with regard to both…

This paper attempts to integrate the results of the ethnographic and attitudinal components of a broader study into a specifically sociolinguistic analysis. While a variety of opinions can be found in the literature on code-switching, the contention here is that code-switching is a norm in specific speech situations that exist in stable bilingual…