This paper reports on how a prominent American football player, Joe Burrow, from the state of Ohio adopts the Cajun English spelling system used in Louisiana, a southern state in the U.S., in a symbolic and innovative way during his short stay there when he relocated to Louisiana from Ohio for the final two years of his college career. In previous…

This paper addresses the role of bottom-up prescriptive pressures in language policy debates and their interplay with institution-driven, top-down influences. I approach this issue through an analysis of social media data concerning debates surrounding recent orthographic reform in France. Building on Heyd's (Lang Soc 43: 489-514, 2014) discussion…

This study is one of the pioneers in investigating and analyzing the orthographical conventions/norms of the outer circle Asian Englishes using one of the largest databases of English corpus, the Global Web-based English (GloWbE). This study extends the analysis of the current orthographical norms of the new varieties to their colonial parents.…

By combining features of matched guise tests with sociolinguistic interviewing and oral performance, this study investigates the social meanings carried by non-standard orthographies. Participant evaluations of the personas showed that people connected orthography to social identities. Specifically, results found people uncritically and…

It has been said that the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an international border and a flag. But that is not entirely true. Canada has a border, a flag, and two major languages, somewhat in the fashion of Belgium. Unlike Belgium, where they call the local varieties of French and Dutch "Walloon" and…

This issue contains proceedings of a colloquium on linguistics at the University of Neuchatel: (1) "Propositions epistemologiques pour une etude du bilinguisme (Epistemological Propositions for a Study of Bilingualism)," by B. Py; (2) "Comment on di ca? Prolegomenes a une etude de la composante semantique du langage des migrants (How Do You Say…

Relates the English language spelling system to sound and examines whether spellers make use of the information available in that relationship when spelling words. Describes how certain phonological features of a dialect spoken along the northeast coast of Newfoundland influence spelling errors among fourth graders. (SB)