In my research I examine the linguistic practices of Moroccans in Spain, many of whom speak Moroccan Arabic as well as Modern Standard Arabic, Tamazight, French, English and Spanish at varying levels of proficiency. As part of my research, I conducted a 10-month linguistic ethnography. I was able to rely on my native English and near-native…

In rural Valdres, Norway, the traditional regional dialect, called Valdresmål, has become an important resource for popular style and local development projects. Stigmatized through much of the twentieth century for its association with poor, rural, "backward" farmers and culture, Valdresmål has been thoroughly revalorized, with…

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…

Descriptions of regional pragmatic variation in French are lacking to date the focus has been on a limited range of speech acts, including apologies, requests, compliments and responses to compliments. The present paper, a systematic analysis of invitation refusals across regional varieties of French, is designed to add to the research on…

This paper addresses the issue of the emergence of new standards of English in the postcolonial world by means of a language attitude study conducted in the Caribbean island of Trinidad that involved rating the accents of newscasters. Accents represented in the clips played to respondents comprised various local as well as non-local ones. The…