Purpose: A common way of eliciting speech from individuals is by using passages of written language that are intended to be read aloud. Read passages afford the opportunity for increased control over the phonetic properties of elicited speech, of which phonetic balance is an often-noted example. No comprehensive analysis of the phonetic balance of…

All Arabic-speaking children grow up in diglossia. They use a spoken Arabic vernacular (SpA) for everyday speech but Standard Arabic (StA) for reading/writing. The current study reports a pilot diglossia-centred intervention among Palestinian-Arabic-speaking kindergarteners (N = 290; mean age 64.52 months). The study examines the effectiveness of…

Free listing tasks are a common data collection method used by cultural anthropologists, language historians and linguists (Nolan, 2002; Ryan et al., 2000; Weller & Romney, 1988; Wolfram & Schillings-Estes, 1998). These tasks are interviews in which a researcher asks groups of respondents to list words or expressions that come to mind for…

The Khotons, in the west of Mongolia, were originally Turkic people who spoke the Khoton language, until the 19th century, which is currently considered extinct. This study aimed to prove that the Khoton language belonged to the Turkic languages; and to standardize the Swadesh inventory in relation to the Khoton words. The Swadesh inventory of…

Conversation clubs are excellent resources for practicing a new language. They bring together individuals with diverse perspectives and backgrounds to engage in enriching language activities and discussions that promote intercultural consciousness and intercultural skills. While previous studies have emphasized the importance of conversation…

The contribution of linguistic skills to reading has been reported in different languages; however, this contribution varies according to the specific features of each language. Arabic is characterized by diglossia, i.e. the existence of two distinct varieties: Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA). This study examined the extent to which…

Revolutionary technological advancements have introduced the integration of Conversational AI into a multitude of different settings. This widespread implementation has raised questions about the impact of AI on learning, its benefits are and its potential costs. This study aims to explore the perspectives of parents, investigating their…

The present study takes a variationist perspective to explore the varietal repertoires of adult learners of German as a second language (L2), that is, their variable use of standard German, Austro-Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Forty L2 learners completed a virtual reality task involving interactions with dialect-speaking and…

The concept of Theme is regarded as a functional linguistic element that exists in many languages. The main aim of this study is to explore the functions of Theme in Arabic, applying the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework adopted by Downing (1991). Methodologically, several related real examples have been selected from the written discourse…

Registers are culturally recognized varieties of language that are associated with situations of use (Biber, Egbert, & Keller, 2020). Variation in frequencies of linguistic forms across registers is thought to be functional for the situations they are associated with; that is, certain language features are more common in one register than…

The paper describes Saudi English morphosyntactic and lexical features that are widely practiced among educated Saudis, who completed at least nine years of English language study. The occurrence of the morphosyntactic features is argued to be affected by the speakers' contact to the native English. Those who are in direct contact with Standard…

Using critical discourse analysis, I critically examined the National Communication Association's (NCA) standards for public speaking competency to determine what type of ideal speaker the standards would produce. Highlighting NCA's emphasis on "suitable" and "appropriate" forms of communication and the use of Standard American…

Purpose: Ideologies are like rocks onto which individuals and institutions anchor their thoughts about what it means to be an "ideal language user" and what "standardized languaging" is. These deeply ingrained beliefs, influenced by colonial legacies and sociopolitical contexts, invisibly enforce a hierarchical order between…

The current study examines the language Greek Cypriot men report they use on Grindr, a mobile dating application for gay, bisexual, or curious men in relation to masculinity. Given the diglossic context of Cyprus, semi-structured interviews with 19 Greek Cypriot MSM Grindr users were carried out in an attempt to identify their linguistic choices…

An anonymous survey was given to n = 73 students in an asynchronous online statistical literacy course at a mid-sized Hispanic Serving Institution. Informed by teaching experience, literature on lexical ambiguity, and everyday usage of statistics words and phrases, the first author designed the survey to yield insight into how students view…