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…

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…

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…

This paper undertakes a sociolinguistic analysis of slangy expressions in Nigerian Pidgin. The corpus for this study was gotten systematically through participant observation of conversational discourses in everyday contexts amongst Nigerians living in the Warri-Ughelli-Sapele axes of Delta State. These linguistic data were then recorded and…

Pieter Muysken's keynote paper, "Language contact outcomes as a result of bilingual optimization strategies", undertakes an ambitious project to theoretically unify different empirical outcomes of language contact, for instance, SLA, pidgins and Creoles, and code-switching. Muysken has dedicated a life-time to researching, rather…

In this article, I analyze the reasons that have excluded Pijin, the lingua franca of Solomon Islands, South West Pacific, from being used as a medium of instruction, and why this may now become possible. Following a short sociolinguistic sketch, I present the colonial and post-colonial linguistic ideologies that shaped sociolinguistic…

It is generally accepted that second language (L2) acquisition becomes more difficult as one grows older and that success in adult L2 acquisition is highly variable. Nevertheless, humans in language contact situations have to cope with intergroup communication. This article examines the ways society has responded to this challenge. It describes…

This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai'i to shed light on how particular languages and language varieties "style" (Auer 2007; Coupland 2007) Local/Hawaiian and mainland U.S. characters as certain kinds of people. Through an analysis of films featuring "haole" ("white, outsider") male protagonists who…

This dissertation takes a discursive approach to Hawai'i stand-up comedy, which is a highly dramaturgical genre, and it examines the cultural specificity of Hawaii comedy in an explicitly interactional context. This culturally-specific performative genre is a discursive site where comedians and their audiences jointly construct multivocal humor…

In this essay, the author examines the attitudes that people in Hawai'i have about Hawai'i Creole. The author first describes the background of the language and explores educators' views from the 1920s to 1940s about Hawai'i Creole (HC), which was first viewed as the the "Pidgin problem" in Hawai'i. The frustrations expressed by…

In this article, the author explores local culture and local cultural practices in an attempt to understand the forces and influences that have affected the development of a local identity as well as the persistence of Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole) as its language. The author begins with an introductory discussion of themes that emerge in two short…

This article presents an adaptation of a position paper written by Da Pidgin Coup, a group of concerned faculty and students in the Department of Second Language Studies (SLS). In fall 1999, the group became concerned about a statement made by the chairman of the Board of Education implicating Pidgin in the poor results of the students of Hawai'i…

Discusses the role that Europeans played in the process that led to pidginized languages, in particular to the development of Pidgin Sango, the "national language" of the Central African Republic. Contends that the manner in which the Europeans communicated with Central Africans was constrained by culturally conditioned "knowledge." (SED)

Analysis of a specific language change--the loss of the Balkan infinitive--demonstrates the inadequacy of either a language-internal or a language-contact explanation in accounting for the change. A composite explanation, in which the infinitive-loss process is explained through multiple causation, seems more appropriate. Whithin the language,…