This article offers a descriptive account of seven interjections, "eish", "yho", "tjo", "sho", "hayi", "hau", and "mxm", which are adopted from different local South African languages into South African English. It investigates the frequencies, orthography, syntactic position,…

This paper investigates performative manifestations of sincerity across Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In particular, it locates adverbial sincerity markers used to qualify performative speech act verbs in late medieval letters (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), at a point when Middle English was rapidly replacing Anglo-Norman as the…

Through the analysis of materials such as online articles, blogs, and radio broadcasts, this paper investigates linguistic purism toward Russian and English loanwords in the understudied context of post-Soviet Armenia. Our analysis finds that public commentators categorize potential loanwords as "borrowings" ([foreign characters…

In original and dubbed film dialogue, direct questions are a means to depict interpersonal relationships on screen. In particular, pragmatic questions (i.e. non-questioning, rhetorical interrogatives) are frequently employed to mark alignment among interactants, in the form of affiliative and disaffiliative interrogatives, respectively expressing…

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…

This article focuses on linguistic and cultural representation in AVT as a medium of intercultural literacy. It has two objectives: it puts to the test increasingly accepted assumptions about AVT modalities' distinctive meaning potential and expressive capacity, with a case study of communicative practices in their representation, via AVT, in…

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…

A mixed-language phenomenon such as language shift has been acknowledged to constitute one of the hallmarks of the manuscripts in which the members of the City of London livery companies recorded their financial transactions during the late medieval period. Despite these texts having been studied by scholars in very diverse disciplines,…

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…

The aim of this article is to illustrate the fluid nature of family language policy (FLP) and how the realities of any one FLP are re-negotiated by caregivers and children in tandem. In particular, the paper will focus on the affective dimensions of FLP and will demonstrate how the same reality--in this case, a grandmother's use of a child-centred…

In the multilingual history of England, the period following the Norman Conquest in 1066 is a particularly intriguing phase, but its code-switching patterns have so far received little attention. The present article describes and analyses the multilingual practices evinced in London, British Library, MS Stowe 34, containing one instructional prose…

This article serves as an introduction to a collection of four articles on multilingual practices in speech and writing, exploring both contemporary and historical sources. It not only introduces the articles but also discusses the scope and definitions of code-switching, attitudes towards multilingual interaction and, most pertinently, the…

This paper advocates a new perspective on languages. It begins by demonstrating that, the occasional disavowals of sociolinguists notwithstanding, the lens through which we in the 21st century, both specialists and laypeople, view languages is predominantly biological. It then suggests that this biological metaphor is conceptually unhelpful and…

Hollywood movies have been a prime site for the representation of intercultural and multilingual encounters for decades. As such, they are not only of interest to everyday cinemagoers or home viewers, but have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, including socio-linguistics. A main focus of much previous work,…

The study analyses teenagers' e-mail requests during academic cyber-consultation, exploring how the performance of request modifiers is influenced by participants' perceptions of the degree of imposition of the speech act and social distance with the recipient. A total of 295 e-mail requests, 145 produced by British English speakers (BES) and 150…