The very idea of 'critical language studies' encourages one to develop a sense of criticality; that is, to interrogate the concepts that one uses, to explore the boundaries of one's professional practice, and to push one's thinking, if necessary, into new directions. This is typically done with the aim of contributing to epistemic as well as…

This study investigated how comfortable and secure heritage Spanish speakers feel about communicating in Spanish in public spaces of San Diego County, as well as the geographic distribution of Spanish use there. The goal was to determine the prevalence of Spanish use in the public sphere. Adult heritage Spanish speakers completed a survey about…

Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into 'night studies', the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the centre of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how the nocturnal linguistic landscape (LL) differs from the diurnal LL by drawing on Singapore's Chinatown as the research site. A total of 1091 LL items…

Social information is cognitively linked to linguistic information, evidenced by bidirectional influences on perceptual processing of speech. Models of sociophonetic cognition theorize that the way linguistic experiences are interpreted and stored in memory is mediated by listener attention, which is guided by ideology. This relationship, however,…

To ensure equitable access to education for emergent multilingual learners, teachers should hold certain beliefs (Lucas et al., 2015) about language, including sociolinguistic consciousness, a value for linguistic diversity, and knowledge of the sociopolitical positioning of language (Lucas, 2011). This study examines possible effects of critical…

Code use, including codeswitching and/or style-shifting, is an important but undertaught aspect of L2 sociolinguistic competence, and an important aspect of L2 learners' translanguaging repertoires. This study examines code use in Arabic--a diglossic language with distinct social uses for the prestige variety (Modern Standard Arabic, MSA) and…

This paper deals with problems stemming from linguistic variation in children's literature in a pluricentric language such as Spanish. Specifically, a paradigmatic case of the tensions will be studied, namely a collection of children's books about the Canary Islands, "Leyendas Canarias" (2012-2021). The sociolinguistic setting is the…

Although W.E.B. Du Bois' impact on race theory is well-known among social scientists; his work is not widely incorporated into the sociolinguistic canon on racial identity through language. Moreover, one pervasive feature in sociolinguistic discourses is the paucity of literature exploring the Afro-Portuguese language. In addressing these…

This article reports on our experience of collecting language data from informants in video-conferencing settings under a research design originally developed with face-to-face interactions in mind. We had set out to investigate whether individual stylistic features persist in different modes of textual production and designed a complex set of…

This study demonstrates that linguistic landscape analysis is a powerful tool for assessing the effectiveness of a university language policy, as it provides "in situ" evidence for discursive patterns shaping language use in public space. It uses the official language policy of a Norwegian institution of higher education (Høgskulen på…

A growing body of work exploring transnational interaction has brought to light the importance of awareness of multilingualism in research contexts, yet little consideration has been given to researchers working in a later learned language (LX) or the process of investigating linguistically diverse communities. This research takes place within a…

Negative yes-no (polar) questions in Colloquial Arabic (CA) are formed by intonation without adding yes-no question particles, in which case, a statement is uttered with a rising intonation, whether this polar question is negative or affirmative. This case is more common in CA than written MSA. Sometimes, the same negative polar question is…

Background: The sociocultural turn redefined learning in terms of shifting identities. In recent years, learning scientists have explored the connections between learning and various types of identities, including disciplinary identity, gender, race, and more. In this article we focus on national identity, to understand how it is constructed and…

Ideologies of language and race are deeply connected in the United States. Language practices associated with racially marginalized communities, such as African American Language (AAL) or Spanglish, are often heavily stigmatized. Such stigma is not grounded in empirical research on language, but rather in "raciolinguistic ideologies"…

The concept of resilience has been employed as an analytical tool in a wide range of scientific disciplines and fields from the natural sciences to social sciences and humanities, but within linguistics it is a relatively new and so far, rarely applied concept. This paper is intended as a contribution to fill this gap through a sociolinguistic…