British Sign Language has a number of regional variations. This article examines the role of residential schools in the development of sign variants. Citing data collected during interviews with members of the Lancaster and Morecambe Deaf community (who of necessity attended schools elsewhere), it explores the peer-to-peer transmission of sign…

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from…

The author analyses tendencies presented in recently launched EU reports claiming that newly published data reveal a need to rethink approaches to individual and social multilingualism. In the first part of the article approaches to individual as well as to societal multilingualism are discussed from a historical perspective. In the second part…

Since the 1980s the field of language teaching and learning has emphasised the interplay between language, culture and identity and promotes both communicative and intercultural competencies. This mirrors a general trend in the social sciences after the so-called "cultural turn" which brought about a concentration on culture, identity…

The framework of linguistic register and case study research on Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) learning statistics informed the construction of a quantitative instrument, the Communication, Language, And Statistics Survey (CLASS). CLASS aims to assess whether ELLs and non-ELLs approach the learning of statistics differently with…

The situation once described by Hoffmann (1985), in which children grow up exposed to three languages from an early age, is a reality for an increasing number of families. In Europe--as elsewhere--greater mobility is leading to greater numbers of mixed-language couples (Piller 2002), and, by extension, multilingual families. For such families,…

This study explores how a group of learners of English as a second language (ESL) criticize in everyday situations compared to the native speaker (NS) with a view to expanding the range of speech acts under inquiry in the interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) literature. Data were collected from five NSs of New Zealand English and five intermediate…

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, such…

Although much research has gone into the sociolinguistics of the linguistic landscape (space for and language of public signs) in the "peripheral," non-native contexts of English Language use and users, none has been specifically devoted to a Nigerian context. This dissertation is intended to fill this wide gap. Focusing on the Ibadan…

The two decades from 1950 to 1970 were a crucial period of educational reorganization in Malaysia that stemmed from the decolonization after the Second World War. This educational reorganization sought to address the perennial issue of nation building via educational language policy. The development of Chinese education was under severe threat as…

Lexicographers, teachers and interpreters of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) are challenged by the degree of lexical variation that exists in this young language. For instance, most numerals between one and twenty have two or more variants in common use (McKee, McKee, and Major 2008), a situation that contrasts with most established spoken…

Jurgen Meisel argues that "grammatical variation...can be described...in terms of parametric variation", and--crucially for his arguments in this paper--that "parameter settings do not change across the lifespan". To this extent he adopts the standard generative view, but he then departs from what he calls "the literature on historical…

Linguistic antisexism is different from the institutional feminization of language. It involves practices of double gender marking which work to avoid the gender dichotomy. Working on a French written corpus, this paper will examine the forms of double gender marking, looking at typographic, morphosyntactical and rhetorical levels; then, it will…

This paper examines the divergences between what educational policy calls for in South African schools with regard to language and learning and what takes place in schools. It argues that South African constitutional and education policy statements employ an idea of languages as bound entities and systems, and combine this understanding of…

Past scholarly work has examined commercial greeting cards as an important cultural practice. The growing presence in the USA of bilingual greeting cards offers a site for understanding public uses of contact varieties of language. This paper analyses the reactions of 30 college educated US-raised bilingual Latinos to 17 intrasententially…