Students will have to use language all their lives, whether they are signing off on stock investments, guiding airplanes to land, or writing the next great novel. Language is the stuff of communication, and English happens to be the most commonly used language in the world. However, Canadian schools do not adequately prepare young people to use…

This article challenges the categorisation of English into national forms, arguing that this obscures differences in usage within a nation and ignores genres and registers that exist around the world. Further, I suggest that in addition to examining the spread of English around the world, scholars should study the ubiquity of various discourses…

The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish ("Juan conoce a Maria" "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage…

A functional theory of semantics that accounts for idioms, rigid expressions, and language variability and indeterminacy is explored. The theory is based on the distinction between language as a natural, social phenomenon and linguistic systems as the constructions of linguists, and avoids the usual tendency of theory to assume that language is a…

Dialect leveling in German-speaking Switzerland is different from dialect leveling in Germany. In contrast to lexical changes, phonological and morphological changes do not follow an evolutionary direction. Research from Basel, Switzerland shows different varieties of the urban repertoire, which are all considered "Baseldeutsch" by their…

Recent research has shown that Brazilian Portuguese is undergoing a change regarding the null subject parameter, evolving from a null subject to a non-null subject language. This paper presents the results of a short term, real time study of speakers of Brazilian Portuguese with low and mid levels of formal education. The study was based on…

Provides data showing that "know" in colloquial Singapore has distributional and collocational properties that distinguish it from "you know," even though their discourse-pragmatic functions are similar. Differences between "you know" and "know" indicate that the latter has become a member of a linguistic…

Reports that thousands of the world's languages face extinction and that linguists are racing to preserve at least some of them. (MM)

Explores the distribution of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speakers in Memphis, Tennessee. Presents evidence of extensive glide weakening in the African-American community in Memphis and compares it to the degree and contexts of glide weakening in the European-American community. (Author/VWL)

Presents results of a longitudinal study of Murcian Spanish carried out following a real-time approach with a retrospective trend design in order to detect and measure the apparent increasing diffusion of standard Castilian features from Northern peninsular Spanish. (Author/VWL)

Defines and traces the history of diglossia, and offers an extensive bibliography on the subject. The need for an overall integration of research within the socioevolutionary context of diglossia is highlighted. (32 references) (LT)

Discusses the relationship of Canadian and Australian English to that of British and American English. Variation and similarities in spelling, punctuation, pronuciation, and vocabulary are discussed. (Contains 19 references.) (JL)

Challenges the belief that the intonation of yes/no questions in American English is different from that of standard British English. Reports on a study that shows that American speakers of English do not distinguish between the high-rising and low-rising intonation, and argues that the supposed difference in intonation between the two varieties…

Aims to find the extent to which subject clitic "nous" and 4th person verbs in French are used in a corpus of informal spoken language and to identify factors that may account for the productive use of nous +4p verb. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on technical sub-languages to reveal sociological functions of language that transcend mere transfer of substantive information. Finds one sociological feature, the shibboleth, acting widely throughout technical fields. (PA)