Tikal, notably conservative in culture among its peer polities, maintains that tendency in the case of monumental texts. In this dissertation I draw on a corpus of Late Classic monuments (ca. AD 600-900) to argue, through analysis of morphological forms, that scribal tradition at Tikal was not only conservative but intentionally so. Literacy…

This article focuses on cultured identity construction via linguistic stylization among young domestic and external Chinese migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, China and the Netherlands, this study contends that self-defined "Hanfu" fans stylize the classical "Wenyan" register to invoke and align with a…

This article investigates how a contemporary urban vernacular (CUV) called Ortensvenska is used for social positioning at a prestigious inner-city Stockholm school. Previous studies have indicated that CUV is often a feature of those on the societal margins, but little research has focused on prestigious spaces where high-achieving students…

The situation once described by Hoffmann (1985), in which children grow up exposed to three languages from an early age, is a reality for an increasing number of families. In Europe--as elsewhere--greater mobility is leading to greater numbers of mixed-language couples (Piller 2002), and, by extension, multilingual families. For such families,…

Newfoundland English has long been considered autonomous within the North American context. Sociolinguistic studies conducted over the past three decades, however, typically suggest cross-generational change in phonetic feature use, motivated by greater alignment with mainland Canadian English norms. The present study uses data spanning the past…

Choice of language style depends on personality, society and culture, or in another view, on personal needs, immediate situation and background situation. Some of the literature on this subject is reviewed. Available from Instituut voor Toegepaste Linguistiek, Vesaliusstraat 2, B. 3000 Leuven, Belgium. (TL)

African Wolof society is divided into a number of ranked status groups or castes, the largest of which is the high-ranking noble caste. Wolof conceive of two styles of speaking, the restrained or noble-like and the elaborated or "griot"-like, and the two styles are connected by the presence or absence of "kerse," honor and self-control. The…