Language documentation efforts are most often concerned with the adult language and usually do not include the language used by and with children. Essential parts of the natural linguistic behaviour of communities thus remain undocumented, and a growing body of literature explores what language documentation, language maintenance, and language…

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…

Currently, a growing number of teaching approaches focus on aspects of variation in language (e.g. English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), World Englishes, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), genre theories, etc.); however, each of these approaches tends to focus on particular (specific) aspects of language variation and do not fully account for the…

This paper presents a discussion about the terms of address used mainly in Libyan Arabic, and how they are similar and/or different from the terms used in other Arabic societies. In addition, the current paper describes how the use of such terms is determined by various social factors and perceptions, and how it is emphasized that these titles…

Linguists use the concept of "diglossia" to describe any sociolinguistic situation where a low-prestige dialect coexists with a high-prestige one and these dialects are used in different social spheres. Recent observations on Reunion Island have challenged this view because people mix French and Creole extensively in the same utterance…

This paper discusses the complex and competing language ideologies that Korean educational migrant families in Singapore hold about the normativity and legitimacy of English language varieties. During their educational migration in Singapore, Korean families show ambivalent attitudes toward the local variety of English in Singapore, Singlish.…

The dissertation study aims to contribute mainly to the field of loanword phonology in general and particularly to Indonesian and its phonology that are rarely studied to date. The study investigates what consonantal and syllabic repair strategies are employed by Indonesian in adapting Arabic and Dutch loanwords, whether these adaptation…

There is a long linguistic tradition in which language change is explained in terms of first language acquisition. In this tradition, children are considered to be the agents of language change, or at least the agents of changes in the underlying grammar. Since the early 1980s, this has been formulated in the (generative) terminology in terms of…

This paper is primarily concerned with Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of school failure. The first section describes some earlier work relevant to his theories. In the second section, Bernstein's sociolinguistic codes thesis is described, and an attempt is made to show that it suffers from the merging of two logically distinct strands…

This study investigated the linguistic characteristics of speech addressed to the child and the features of the verbal environment critical for learning language. The study focused on the prosodic and paralinguistic features of adult speech to the young child. Adult speech directed to children was compared to other kinds of systematic speech…

The nature of research on speech communication in asymmetrical interactions, such as those between a speech therapist and patient, is discussed and some general approaches to therapy are noted. The situation of the aphasic is then considered, in which intervention is particularly difficult due to the lack of some important aspects of interpersonal…

A collection of papers addresses a variety of issues regarding the nature and structure of sign language, gesture, and gesture systems. Articles include: "Theoretical Issues Relating Language, Gesture, and Space: An Overview" (Karen Emmorey, Judy S. Reilly); "Real, Surrogate, and Token Space: Grammatical Consequences in ASL American…