In this article two dimensions of handshape complexity are analyzed as potential building blocks of phonological contrast-joint complexity and finger group complexity. We ask whether sign language patterns are elaborations of those seen in the gestures produced by hearing people without speech (pantomime) or a more radical reorganization of them.…

This paper offers a case study on dialect contact in Máíhiki (Tukanoan, Peru), with the goal of illustrating how documentation of variation can contribute to a general language documentation project. I begin by describing the facts of variation in one dialectally diverse Máíhiki-speaking community. I then argue that the outcomes of dialect mixing…

This article examines the perspectives of Puerto Ricans living in the United States in response to a publicity campaign that focuses on the correction of linguistic features that appear in some Puerto Ricans' spoken Spanish. The campaign addresses phonetic, morphological, lexical, and syntactic features, including a specific set of words or…

This article reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the use of second-person singular pronouns in Costa Rica. The study was carried out onsite and involved 132 interviewees from all seven provinces of the country. These subjects reacted to scenarios in which they had to choose their preferred pronoun of use…

This research aims at discovering the gap between Standard Arabic and the current spoken varieties of Arabic due to social, educational, political, colonial, and media factors. The researcher will try to also analyse the causes of the current gap and suggest remedies. Standard Arabic (SA) or FuSha (the Arabic term for "standard Arabic")…

This article discusses how stylization sheds light on the role of authenticity as an increasingly relevant concept in sociolinguistics. Building on research on style, crossing, and mock language use, the article demonstrates how multilingual stylization provides speakers with a wider range of resources for navigating and negotiating borders and…

The article represents structural semantic analysis of the grammatical number of nouns in the Indo-European (English, German), Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew), and Altai (Tatar, Japanese) languages. The category of number comprises numerous phenomena, including some transitive and historical aspects, which complicate and enrich the system of language.…

In line with the other contributions to this issue on teaching pragmatics, this paper provides teachers of German with a two-day lesson plan for integrating authentic spoken language and its associated cultural background into their teaching. Specifically, the paper discusses how "jaja" and its phonetic variants are systematically used…

How does phonological development differ in children exposed to one versus two variants of a single language? If children receive mixed evidence for a phonological contrast (i.e., one language variant in the environment maintains a contrast while another neutralizes it), will they treat this contrast as noncontrastive (i.e., as allophonic)? Or…

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by reduced holistic processing (HP), which depends mainly on writing rather than reading experience. Here we show that, while simplified and traditional Chinese readers demonstrated a similar level of HP when processing characters shared between the simplified and traditional scripts, simplified…

"Changing English" aims to illustrate the diversity of English in the world today and to ask whether, and how, ELT practitioners might accommodate such variation. Focusing on a particular language issue in each article, the series will explore how English varies between places and spaces, over time, and between groups of speakers. and…

In this interview Professor Farzad Sharifian, a pioneer of Cultural Linguistics, gives a concise history of this relatively new field, which he introduces as a multidisciplinary area of research that examines the intricate relationship between language and cultural conceptualizations. Prof. Sharifian asserts this flourishing field of research can…

Purpose: This article aims to describe how exemplar variability can manipulate the word learning environment to maximize within- and cross-language generalization in Spanish--English bilinguals. Furthermore, we examined sources of individual variability that predicted word learning. Method: Nineteen Spanish--English bilingual children participated…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

Emergent bilingual students draw on their linguistic repertoires, moving fluidly between named languages and varieties to meet communicative ends. However, these translanguaging abilities are often not supported in English-dominant school settings. The author proposes six design principles that educators can use to create instructional strategies…