Collected naturalistic data from six children age 8-9 talking with their relatives and friends. Focuses on directives and requests used by the children and their interlocutors in informal conversations. (Author/VWL)

Based on the results of three variationist studies on personal pronouns used in Montreal French, shows how real-time data can shed light on apparent time interpretation and increase understanding of morphosyntactic changes. Longitudinal data for a 24-year period from three corpora of spoken French are used to discuss cases of variation.…

People's attitude towards using the Pidgin language from Hawaii is described. The way in which Pidgin is changing is analyzed with the help of Pidgin linguistics students from University Hawaii.

World English (WE) belongs to everybody who speaks it, but it is nobody's mother tongue. Although today ever more people accept the idea that there is such a thing as WE, very few of them seem to have realized that the full implications of admitting it are much more far reaching than they had hitherto imagined. It may be that some of these…

It has been said that the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an international border and a flag. But that is not entirely true. Canada has a border, a flag, and two major languages, somewhat in the fashion of Belgium. Unlike Belgium, where they call the local varieties of French and Dutch "Walloon" and…

Some key issues in the study of intonation in language varieties are presented and discussed with reference to recent research on the intonation of New Zealand English. The particular issues that are highlighted include the determination of the intonational phonological categories of a language variety, and the attribution of varietal differences…

Language attitude studies have tended to assume that informants who listen to and evaluate speech stimuli are able to identify with consistent accuracy the varieties of English in question. However, misidentification could reduce the validity of any results obtained, particularly when it involves the evaluations of non-native English-speaking…

Singapore is unique in that it has not only embraced English as one of its official languages, but has made the language of its colonizers the "de facto" working language of the nation and the sole medium of instruction in all its schools, while assigning its other three official languages, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, an L2 status in the…

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the variation underlying subject-verb agreement in the spoken French interlanguage of Irish classroom and study abroad learners. Results outline the range of factors constraining that variation, such as the learners' level of informal contact with the language, as well as linguistic factors such as…

It is unfortunate that Wee's commendable effort (2005) to explore the theoretical underpinning of Linguistic Human Rights (LHRs) so as to explore different variants of English in Singapore empirically is marred by a substantial number of misrepresentations of what is stated in our work. We will exemplify this briefly, and otherwise refer the…

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or…

This pilot project investigates second language (L2) learners' attitudes towards three varieties of English: American (AmE), British (BrE) and Australian (AuE). A 69-word passage spoken by a female speaker of each variety was used. Participants were 30 Chinese students pursuing Masters or Doctoral degrees in the United States, who listened to each…

Learning new languages potentially gives people vital skills to build more successful relationships, and understanding the social influences at work today may help us to know which type of language education is most beneficial. This article explores three social influences--globalisation, localisation and glocalisation--from the perspective of…

An analysis of pronouns in Zapotec languages looks at their behavior across the language family, noting where the languages are alike or different. Seven regional Zapotec variations are used for illustration, including: Isthmus; Yatzachi; Yalalag; Texmelucan; Atepec; Guelavia; and Xanaguia. A major conclusion is that the traditional division of…

Pidginization and creolization are addressed from a language acquisition perspective. The 18 collected papers are organized around four areas of inquiry: (1) simplification in input to pidginization and second language acquisition, (2) simplification in interlanguage, (3) creolization and language acquisition, and (4) decreolization and language…