This dissertation examined two phonological and morphological changes in Ghamdi Arabic (GA), focusing on vowel harmony and gender distinctions. By comparing Prochazka's 1988 findings with recent data from 26 participants across two age groups. Participants consisted of 20 younger speakers (10 males and 10 females, ages 20 to 35) and six older…

This study examined the impact of requestee's gender on the choice of request strategies by female speakers of Saudi Colloquial Arabic. A Discourse Completion Test consisting of twelve situations was used to collect data from two groups of participants. The first group consisted of 40 Saudi females directing their requests to female requestees.…

Past research has highlighted some differences in how sarcasm is interpreted by different groups of individuals as well as biases in individuals' expectations regarding who is more likely to use it (e.g., occupation, gender). However, examinations of patterns of sarcasm production have been much less frequent. The current research extends past…

Today's changing sociolinguistic reality of English calls for a shift in paradigm in the field of English language teaching. Therefore, this study aims to examine Moroccan EFL learners' (MEFLLs) attitudes towards World Englishes (WE) and native and non-native English-speaking teachers (NESTs & non-NESTs). Firstly, building on the assumption…

This paper reports on a study that examined patterns of language maintenance and use -- standard Persian as well as dozens of dialects spoken by Jews in provincial towns -- among three generations of Israeli residents of Iranian origin. Issues of identity, acculturation, and the immigration experience were explored through a language prism as well…

Purpose: This study was designed to assess the utility of a tool for automated analysis of rare vocabulary use in the spoken narratives of a group of school-age children from low-income communities. Method: We evaluated personal and fictional narratives from 76 school-age children from low-income communities (M[subscript age] = 9;3…

This paper analyzes metalinguistic comments of two young Hmong Americans in the Minneapolis-St Paul area regarding their identity negotiation using tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005), the notion of brought-along identity (Williams 2008) and Zhang's (2017) sociohistorical perspectives in analyzing linguistic…

This article takes a sociocultural linguistic approach to code switching in investigating discursive functions of shifts between Standard Japanese and a regional dialect (Iwate Dialect) in women's activity-centered, naturally occurring interactions. The paper extends previous scholarship to a consideration of how shifts are used for discursive…

This study examined the use of non-standard English features in 16-year-old students' writing in the UK. Adopting a diachronic approach to the investigation of students' written production, the study sought to identify changes in students' use of non-standard English over the course of a decade, specifically from 2004 to 2014. It involved an…

In the wake of racial violence in urban schools and society, we question, "Can the field of urban education love blackness and Black lives unconditionally and as preconditions to humanity? What does it look like to (re)imagine urban classrooms as sites of love? As educators, how might we utilize a pedagogy of love as an embodied practice that…

This paper examined language anxiety (LA) in Chinese dialects and Putonghua among college students in mainland China and explored the links between their LA in the first language and a range of sociobiographical variables (i.e. gender and geographical background) as well as linguistic variables (i.e. mother tongue, age of onset of acquisition,…

Our study examines the extent to which French immersion students use lax /?/ in the same linguistic context as native speakers of Canadian French. Our results show that the lax variant is vanishingly rare in the speech of immersion students and is used by only a small minority of individuals. This is interpreted as a limitation of French immersion…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the influences of selected social (gender, employment status, educational achievement level) and style variables (race of examiner, interview topic) on the production of African American English (AAE) by adults. Method: Participants were 50 African American men and women, ages 20-30 years. The authors…

The paradigm of forms of address in Modern Spanish is subject to dialectal variation. Many Latin American varieties of Spanish, i.e. Costa Rican, Argentinean, Chilean, among others, display a tripartite system of second person pronouns comprised of "tú," "usted" and "vos." The case of Colombian Spanish is particularly…

On the first day of English composition, students unleash a torrent of reasons why writing scared them as they write their opening day personal autobiographies. Most comments focus on reasons that have little to do with the craft or complexities of great writing. Numerous students bemoan their use of "substandard" English, thinking that their ways…