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,…

Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Northern Mexico of great typological, theoretical, and historical significance. This paper presents an overview and background of the Choguita Rarámuri language description and documentation project and provides a guide to the documentary collection emerging from this project. This…

In our current era of increased globalization, constraints on language variation in postcolonial English varieties are multifaceted. Local and global language ideologies collide and multiple sources of influence converge in present-day patterns of linguistic variation in emerging English varieties. While research into the structure and…

Reexamines the history and contemporary structure of Caribbean English creole continua, with illustrations from the varied sociolinguistic situations in Belize, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. Argues that continua existed there from the earliest period of contact and supports a coexistent systems approach to the contemporary structure of these…

The field methods for data collection in a research project on linguistic change and variation in the Philadelphia speech community, their origins and use, are described. Five working principles of the project are detailed: (1) there are no single style speakers; (2) styles can be ranged along a single dimension, according to the attention paid to…

A study compared language patterns in a group of 100 residents of Ottawa and 240 residents of Vancouver, categorized by sex, age (under or over 40), and socioeconomic status. The informants provided tape-recorded interviews of an hour or more in response to similarly-conducted questionnaires designed to elicit tokens for a large number of…

In the transmission of a language from one generation to another, the specific role of the family is not clear. There is evidence that in cities parents have less influence on a child's vernacular than playmates do; in rural areas, members of the nuclear family might be the major source of language change and stability, if the people with whom…