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…

This chapter offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy practices from a postcolonial perspective. Situated in ongoing endeavors in a variety of local contexts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, where the author was raised and schooled, this chapter calls attention to some key educational sites through which these policy-related…

The term "glocal" has been used to describe phenomena that simultaneously blend both global and local elements (see Featherstone, Lash, & Robertson, 1995, p. 101). Nowhere is this more evident than in the existence of 3arabizi, itself a blended language composed of English and Vernacular Arabic, written in Latin letters but using…

TESL in Ontario, Canada, seems to be on an inauspicious path by having set up non-tariff protectionist measures in an apparent attempt to keep out a multinational TESL workforce, effectively going against the spirit of globalization. This paper highlights some of the differences between South Korean TEFL and TESL in Ontario; for the most part…

The purpose of this study is to measure the comprehensibility of the Expanding Circle nations' citizens, namely Burmese, Cambodians, Indonesians, Laotians, Thais and Vietnamese towards the Outer Circle Englishes, namely Bruneian English, Malaysian English. Philippine English and Singaporean English. Ten universities in the Expanding Circle that…

In conversations between immigrants and officials, problems of understanding are often noticeable. About 280 recordings realised at the Argentine Aliens' Department and at several public authorities in Germany show that knowledge divergences regarding linguistic, cultural and institutional knowledge result in (sometimes grave) difficulties of…

In this study, participants learning an endangered language variety shared their experiences, thoughts, and feelings about the often complex and diverse language-learning process. I used phenomenological interviews in order to learn more about these English or Spanish language speakers' journey with the Nahuatl language. From first encounter to…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an acquired neurologic disorder in which an individual suddenly and unintentionally speaks with an accent which is perceived as being different from his/her usual accent. This study presents an acoustic-phonetic description of two Quebec French-speaking cases. The first speaker presents a perceived accent shift to…

The study reported in this article investigates the development of sociolinguistic competence among second-year (US university-level) L2 learners of French who were given systematic instruction on sociolinguistic variation as part of their normal coursework. We focus on the variable use of the negative morpheme "ne" in verbal negation. Drawing…

This paper discusses the use of multidimensional analysis (MA) of learner language to promote the awareness of linguistic concepts such as register and variation. Our research explores the introduction of learner register awareness by using MA of learner language in the field of university Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). In this context, a group…

The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of…

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…

When films rich in cinematic discourse are translated, "character equivalence", the extent to which translated dialogue distorts identities in the original film, may pose a special challenge for the screen translator. This article discusses this issue in the context of "Talk to me" (Lemmons 2007), a film which showcases…

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic "wh"-clefts such as "what our brains do is complicated information processing" in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the…