This article examined the impact of social media on the writing abilities of Nigerian youths in English, which is the language of mass communication in Nigeria. Deploying cultivation theory of the media, this study used quantitative and qualitative methods to unpack the Nigerian youths' opinions on the impact of the use of social media on their…

Paper prepared for a conference on Creole Languages and Education, University of the West Indies, July 24-28, 1972. (DD)

Reviews the debate between Herskovits, Turner, and Johnson on Africanisms in Gullah. Suggests that Whinnom's approach, which considers pidgins and creoles under the rubric of "linguistic hybridization," is a more appropriate model with which to view Gullah, making irrelevant the question of whether it is an African or European language.…

Reports on one aspect of an ongoing study of language contact in the American deaf community. The ultimate goal of the study is a linguistic description of contact signing and a reexamination of claims that it is a pidgin. Patterns of language use are reviewed and the role of demographic information in judgments is examined. (29 references) (GLR)

Anthropological linguists often deal with language systems manifesting nonrandom variability. This article demonstrates that methods developed within the U.S. for the study of language variability are useful in the study of creole languages. This study was conducted on the island of Tobago in the West Indies. (CHK)

Presents evidence for the idea that when morphemes are borrowed from a socially dominant language into a pidgin, and extended in usage as in a creole, the major factor determining the direction of such extension is the linguistic background of the speakers of languages other than the dominant one. (Author/CLK)

This paper is intended as an outline synthesis of what is presently known about the processes of pidginization and creolization. Section 1 deals with the linguistic processes of pidginization under the following headings: (1) the learned expectancies of how to behave in a contact situation, (2) necessity and heightened attention, (3) redundancy,…

An analysis of the polysemic nature of prepositions in pidgins and creoles (PCs) looks at the analytic nature of PCs and the pervasive variability in their grammars, and then focuses on usage of the preposition "fo" in Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin (ANP), likely borrowed from the English "for." It is argued that while this is not the…

Problems in determining the origins of Sumerian, an ancient language, are described, and an alternative approach is examined. Sumerian was spoken in southern Iraq in the third millennium B.C. and later used by Babylonian and Assyrian scribes as a classical language. While early texts in Sumerian are considered a better reflection of the original…

Posits two hypotheses arising from the great immigration to Sweden and the immigrants' use and learning of Swedish: (1) Swedish as used by immigrant children may show certain features, related to a creolization process; and (2) the Swedish language may in future show signs of influence from the varieties used by persons with immigrant background.…

This article discusses the discourse functions of relativization. Relativization is seen as an instance of the application of "bracketing" devices used in the organization of information. Syntactic structure is thus seen as a component of, and derivative from, discourse structure. (CLK)

Linguists of various theoretical backgrounds have likened second language (L2) acquisition to pidginization (Ferguson 1971, Richards 1971, Bickerton 1975a). This paper examines these two processes and suggests areas where a study of the process of second language acquisition in a natural setting might contribute insights to a general theory of…

This article examines several major sociological characteristics of the Caribbean region in a study of pidginization and creolization. Three major conditions which may have affected the ways that Creole languages develop are discussed. They include: (1) the relative proportion of Africans, Europeans, and other groups now present in specific…

An analysis of the status of Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin (ANP) looks at its origins and evolution in Nigerian history, its location in the Nigerian language situation, and its current sociolinguistic status. It is concluded that ANP possesses linguistic structures that have stabilized enough to give the speaker an impression of good and bad grammar.…

Summarizes contact-linguistic research on the Samis and Finns, the northernmost minorities in Scandinavia. The monolingual view of northern Scandinavian languages in the past is complemented with a multilingual perspective of the interaction between minority and larger languages. Among contact patterns discussed are North Germanic-Sami,…