Studies on Brunei Malay have made inconsistent findings: while some have asserted that this variety is thriving and is in no way endangered, others have found that its use is now waning. As the dynamics of family speech can inform what is happening linguistically at the community level, this study seeks to investigate the family language policies…

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

Irish is a rapidly changing minority language spoken as the main community language in some areas of the officially Irish-speaking "Gaeltacht" regions in Ireland. We analyse narratives from 17 parent-child dyads, living in one such area. All children, aged 3-6;4, had high exposure to the local variety of Irish. The input quality was…

In many immigrant families, children often learn the language and culture of the host society quicker than adult immigrants. Consequently, children serve as language brokers, translating and interpreting face-to-face communication. The aim of this paper is to present a study based on 19 qualitative in depth interviews with young adults reporting…

This paper compares the sociolinguistic trajectory of a 'latent' speaker mother to that of a 'new' speaker mother. Drawing on Shandler (TDR 48(1):19-43, 2004), it introduces the term 'post-vernacular FLP' as a means to conceptualise the latent speaker mother's emblematic use of Gaelic with her child as a 'seed' from which language revitalisation…

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…

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the role of family micro-Language Policies (LP's) in the context of the Moroccan Diaspora in urban and semi-urban areas in Spain by examining and contrasting different cases of language transmission within transnational migrant families of Moroccan origin. The paper answers the following questions: How are…

This article explores the language of bimodal bilinguals (i.e., hearing children of Deaf parents who are exposed to sign language at home and to spoken language in the surrounding community). In similar bilingual contexts involving pairs of spoken languages, the language used at home, which differs from that of the community, is referred to as the…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

Purpose: This study examined the utility of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) recording system for investigating the language input to bilingual infants. Method: Twenty-one French-English bilingual families with a 10-month-old infant participated in this study. Using the LENA recording system, each family contributed 3 full days of…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

This paper seeks to examine the emerging sociolinguistic trends in Nigeria with the view to ascertaining the use of English as a first language among its speakers particular in Calabar, Nigeria. The study adopts Vygotsky's (1978) Social Interactionist Theory. The theory is relevant because it accounts for the intentional and changing linguistic…

Eight children aged 4;1-8;1 and their primary caregivers participated in a study designed to evaluate their use of the onset cluster /str-/ in both read and conversational speech. The cluster is currently undergoing a reported sound change in many varieties of English, with the initial /s/ being retracted to [?]. The study compared the initial…

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…