This paper deals with current questions in revitalizing the regional language Latgalian, one of the varieties native to Latgale, a region located in the eastern part of Latvia. It first provides an overview of domains where Latgalian is used and highlights recent changes in these. Based on linguistic landscape data as well as interviews with…

"Nativeness" has been recognised for two decades now as a problematic concept within applied linguistics, yet other areas of language analysis have been slow to question it, with some continuing to treat it as a primordial fact of nature. This paper briefly examines the history of the "native speaker" and the shifts in thinking…

This study focuses on the interface between bidialectism and bilingualism and provides empirical support for the call for language educators to be trained in issues relating to linguistic variation. Drawing on the sociolinguistic setting of Cyprus, the study investigates the linguistic behaviour of bidialectal teachers in the English…

From 1890-1914, Argentina received a large influx of Italian immigrants who wanted to "hacer la América," or live the American dream of economic prosperity. With Italian immigrants representing nearly half of all immigrants entering Argentina, the government strived to create a new sense of Argentine pride and nationalism. The objective…

The Pacific Coast Athabaskan (PCA) languages are part of the Athabaskan language family, one of the most geographically widespread in North America. Over a millennium ago Athabaskan-speaking groups migrated into northwestern California and southwestern Oregon from a northern point of origin several hundred miles away, but even after several…

The present study is concerned with language contact between Creole English and Spanish spoken by bilingual West Indians who live in Panama City, Panama. The goal of this study is to examine the speech patterns of monolinguals of Creole English and Spanish and Spanish-Creole English bilinguals in the local communities of this region, by employing…

It has been argued for many years that a new standard of Mandarin is developing within Taiwan, distinct from the official form based on the Beijing pronunciation, as well as the nonstandard vernacular, Taiwan-guoyu. The parameters by which this new standard, Taiwanese Mandarin, may be recognized, however, and the extent to which it exists in…

There is little dispute that formulaic sequences form an important part of the lexicon, but to date there has been no principled way to prioritize the inclusion of such items in pedagogic materials, such as ESL/EFL textbooks or tests of vocabulary knowledge. While wordlists have been used for decades, they have only provided information about…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

The present study examined the influence of Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) on Standard English word spelling through a plural formation task of four words ("man", "tooth", "dress" and "child") among 168 Singaporean bilingual children with Chinese background. It was found that "dropping the…

This essay explores some of the areas in which language teaching and intercultural education overlap. We position language teaching as embedded within sociocultural practices and shaped by attitudes toward bilingualism and native vs. nonnative speaker status. Specifically, we question language practices that exclude or downplay the benefits of…

This article looks at how mother-tongue English speakers and those who do not have English as a mother tongue discuss the complex questions that swirl around the "global" hegemony of English when given an opportunity to discuss these "directly" with one another. The article does so via an analysis of a series of online…

Newfoundland English has long been considered autonomous within the North American context. Sociolinguistic studies conducted over the past three decades, however, typically suggest cross-generational change in phonetic feature use, motivated by greater alignment with mainland Canadian English norms. The present study uses data spanning the past…

Using the 2 theoretical lenses of representation (Barthes, 1977) and ownership of language (Higgins, 2003), this article offers a critical analysis of representations of Russian speakers in 9 widely used Russian language textbooks aimed at university-level learners. Particular attention is paid to representations of Russian speakers other than…

Much second language acquisition research in recent decades has assumed that a learner's main purpose for learning a second language (L2) is to develop communicative competence. Consequently, many studies have focused on investigating ways in which teachers and/or the learning environment may support the development of such competence. In…