Ethiopian Sign Language (EthSL) is one of the underresearched languages of Ethiopia although it is used by more than a million members of the Deaf community. Not much is known about the language, particularly its use and current status. In addition, its users within the Deaf community have begun addressing the issues of equality, participation,…

The geographical proximity and socioeconomic dependence on the United States brought about a deep-rooted anglicization of the Cuban Spanish lexis and social strata, especially throughout the Neocolonial period (1902-1959). This study is based on the revision of a renowned newspaper of that time, "Diario de la Marina," and the…

The aim of this study is to explore (non)morphological processes that native speakers of Jordanian Urban Arabic and Jordanian Rural Arabic use to expand their own lexicon. Three Jordanian female respondents were interviewed to collect data. The data consist of transcriptions of recorded tokens, which were categorised into groups according to the…

There are many purposes for using language which determine how the writer or speaker chooses words, syntactic expressions and figurative language. This is as a result of the fact that language has a very powerful effect over people, their actions and thoughts. This is seen in the use of language in various discourse types which include…

This is a sociolinguistic study that tries to investigate the peculiarity of the Bedouin dialect regardless of the place where it is used. Some variants that are used in their dialect are used wherever they are from. Two sounds in particular were chosen to carry out this study. These are the /?/ variant of the (Q) variable, and the /ts/ variant of…

This dissertation explores dialect diversification in the long-distance New World Plautdietsch speech community. Plautdietsch dialects are traditionally classified as belonging to one of two types: either Chortitza or Molotschna. The traditional dialect classification has recently come under scrutiny because speakers rarely use features exclusive…

Arabic speaking countries live in diglossic communities. This is where two or more varieties of a language are used by the same speech community. This paper examines students' attitude towards Arabic language varieties. It focuses mainly on Egyptian students' attitude towards the fu??a on one hand and the Egyptian Arabic (EA) variety on the other.…

This article examines the diversity of sign language varieties used in Lima, Peru. The majority of the analysis is based on lexicostatistics, using data collected in 2014 to compare nine signers and to determine foreign influences. This technique is used to better understand the linguistic situation without the need for a large corpus of data. Two…

Little is known about the nature of fingerspelling during sign language interpretation. In this small-scale, exploratory study, we examined the fingerspelling of interpreters working in five different sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), and Italian…

The article discusses the importance of sociohistorical context which is the foundation of variation studies in sociolinguistics. The studies on variation in spoken and signed languages are reviewed with the discussion of geographical and social aspects which are treated as external factors in the formation and maintenance of dialects and those…

In this paper we examine the use of Guarani affixes and clitics in colloquial Paraguayan Spanish. We depart from the traditional view of these as "borrowings," and instead explore the idea that these phenomena can be integrated within Muysken's (2000, 2013, 2014) typology of code-mixing. We claim that most of these uses may stem from a…

The article illustrates a sociolinguistics of language vitality that accounts for "minority" and unofficial languages across multiple localities in dispersed communities of multilingual speakers of Zambia where only seven out of seventy-three indigenous languages have been designated official and "zoned" for use in specified…

German is a language with multiple standard and non-standard varieties (Fagan, 2009). Yet L2 textbooks still favor one standard form, offering little information about other varieties of the language. In particular, Austrian and Swiss Standard German are underrepresented, and even when present, the language is often in a mixture of dialect and…

The study of short-"a" (e.g., the vowel in words such as "bat," "bad," "bang," "ban") in New York City English (NYCE) has a long history, and with many different descriptions of this complex system (e.g., Babbitt 1896; Trager 1930; Labov 1966/2006; Cohen 1970; Labov 2007). It is complex due to the…

Yoo's (2014) article raises a number of questions concerning local teachers' status and the ownership of English in the Expanding Circle. In this article, I address five issues that I see as most important relating to the ownership of English and empowering local teachers in the Expanding Circle. I provide up-to-date evidence of World…