Examines the future spread of English around the globe and the challenges of maintaining common standards and mutual intelligibility among different varieties of English. Discusses changes in Kachru's three circles of English speakers, and features of English as a global language. (Author/VWL)

Examines the range and depth of English in India and argues that these Kachruvian notions go a long way towards explaining how the language is used, exploited, extended, and recreated in the sub-continent. Data, both written and spoken, are presented, and it is suggested that in-depth analyses of such data are a prerequisite to any real…

Examined an aspect of modality in the Spanish spoken in the Houston, Texas community. Demonstrates that semantic-pragmatic variation and change are taking place and affecting the forms of "deber (de) and "tener que" in their deontic and epistemic modes. Interviewed Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Spanish. Analyses show an…

Examines how linguistic standard globalization in a call centre affects the value of bilingualism and the linguistic varieties of a francophone minority population. Bilingualism grants access to a job in the information and service sector, but since the emergence of linguistic standardization in this sector only a certain selection of individuals…

Examines the different agencies of language planning of the Island of Jersey and the progress that has been made, comparing the corpus and status planning undertaken in this context with that which occurs in countries where more support is forthcoming from the state. Suggests that high prestige domains do not necessarily hold the key to successful…

Describes a series of evaluations of gender pairs of New Zealand English, Australian English, American English, and received-pronunciation-type-English English voices by over 400 students in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. Twenty-two personality and demographic traits were evaluated by Likert-scale questionnaires. Results are…

Examines the text of a popular radio series in natal, South Africa in the 1940s, "Applesammy and Naidoo," with a view to adding to the historical data base on Indian South African English. A comparison is made between direct speech of the Indian characters in the series and tape recordings of pre-basilectal speakers. Data suggest the…

Investigates the perception and application of the norm in South African English with specific reference to Black South African English. Hypothesizes that South African English is in the hibernation and expansion phase. Three sets of data are presented and analyzed. (Author/VWL)

Investigates stress placement in one variety of Black South African English (BSAE), namely Tswana English. A corpus of 333 polysyllabic words was analyzed in detail to determine the properties of the Tswana English stress system; properties were interpreted by means of optimality theory. Concludes that stress is stored lexically in function words,…

Two accounts of the variable use of inflection in adult second language (L2) acquisition are examined: The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) and the Impaired Representation Hypothesis (IRH). These hypotheses make different predictions for adult L2 acquisition. Spontaneous production data from two adult learners of French and two adult…

Presents evidence that /u/-fronting, a sound change observable in California Anglo speakers is found in the majority Mexican-American community as well, among Chicano speakers of English. Results of the study underscore the need to analyze variation within the context of those social categories that are of particular significance to the specific…

Examined accentuation patterns that appear in Japanese adaptation of French words. Argues that these patterns reflect the default accentuation of Japanese grammar; they correspond to accent patterns found in some marginal sectors of Japanese vocabulary where the accent is predictable. (Author/VWL)

This study uses the technique of electropalatography to investigate lingualpalatal contact patterns during the production of the consonants /t, k, s, x, n, l, / by four Greek speakers with profound hearing impairment and with differences in the intelligibility of their speech. The study provides a detailed description of their tongue-palate…

Images of tongue/palate contact for the nasal phoneme /n/ were created using the electropalatograph (EPG). Seven typical Australian adults with no history of hearing or communication difficulty produced syllables containing /n/ paired with five vowels. The majority of productions were symmetrical had contact with the alveolar ridge, and lateral…

Colloquial Singapore English is an outer circle variety that exhibits contact induced linguistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, the authors address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the…