This paper investigates code-switching and script-switching in medieval documents from the Cairo Geniza, written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script), Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. Legal documents regularly show a macaronic style of Judaeo-Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew, while in letters code-switching from Judaeo-Arabic to Hebrew is tied in with…

This paper begins by looking at responses to Bernstein in Germany in the 1970s that criticized his notions of class difference in sociolinguistic codes. As part of a re-examination of Bernstein's ideas, the paper goes on to look at the current communicative situation in German education where urban schools have many second-generation immigrant…

Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

Discusses the birthday notices that appear in the advertising section of the Papua New Guinea "Post Courier." The texts of these notices are analyzed from a sociolinguistic perspective, and their context is considered as a register of the variety of English that has become known as Papua New Guinea English. (Author/OD)

Essays examine development of the English language from Old English to the present, characteristics and use of contemporary varieties, and what the language means to speakers around the world. "English Voices" (Joan Swann) raises issues and questions about variation in English, to be addressed in later chapters. "English Manuscripts: The Emergence…