Pidgins, narrowly defined, are auxiliary languages reserved for communication with linguistic outgroups. Although implicitly recognized as a class of languages by many linguists, there has been little systematic typological investigation of pidgins. This dissertation presents the first large-scale typological study of morphology and functional…

Children who speak non-standardized language varieties are at risk for both over- and under-referral to speech-language and special education services (e.g., Morgan et al., 2016; Pearson et al., 2014). Extensive research with bidialectal (Craig, 2016; Kohn et al., 2021) and bilingual (Goldstein, 2022; Paradis et al., 2021) children has shown the…

Bilingualism in Jamaica is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Jamaican Creole (JC) from birth and having standardized English (sE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from Jamaica to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence…

This paper examines the sociolinguistic configuration of the Nigerian Army as indexed in the workout songs they used during jogging exercises in Calabar, South-eastern Nigeria. Data for the study were generated by means of participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The findings, drawing insights from Discourse community theory and…

This case study is based on research conducted within the plurilingual context of Vanuatu, formerly a condominium colony of Britain and France. A surfeit of heritage languages exists within this context, alongside the European languages of English and French and the national language of Bislama, an English-lexifier pidgin. With the existence of…

Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it -- removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use…

This sequential explanatory mixed-methods study provides a radical transformative framing of the power language dynamic in K-6 classrooms in the U.S. The quantitative phase of the study determined the relationship between teachers' self-efficacy and the use of linguistically responsive techniques in the classroom. The study's qualitative phase…

The presence of Africans in China has been phenomenal since the late 1990s. In recent years, there has been a dramatic uptick in people from Africa coming to the major cities of China such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Yiwu, Shanghai, and Beijing. They are in the process of building linguistic, cultural, and economic bridges between their source…