This paper reexamines the debate over the emergence of Black South African English (BSAE) as a variety of English that is institutionalized with distinct properties. It focuses on the tense logic in Bantu languages and discourse markers that chiefly account for uniquely BSAE features. Through an indepth analysis of these linguistic properties, the…

Learning a second dialect entails learning new schemas, and in some cases learning a whole new set of language schemas as well as cultural schemas. Most Australian Aboriginal children live in a bicultural and bidialectal context. They are exposed, to a greater or lesser extent, to the discourse of Australian English and internalise some of its…

The large-scale ongoing migration of Anglophone Caribbean natives to North America, particularly to New York City, in the last two decades, has brought an influx of Caribbean English (CE)-speaking students into US and Canadian schools and colleges. This article discusses the extent to which such students, who publicly identify themselves as native…

English language business-related documents around the world contain purposeful spelling differences that reflect two standards, American English and British English. Given the importance of culturally acceptable spelling, the need to be aware of and sensitive to cultural differences, and strong reactions to variation in spelling, it is important…

This article discusses, from an African perspective, the two dimensions associable with the question of the globalisation of communication: the promotion of the learning of some international languages (the quantitative dimension) and the teaching and learning of communication skills (the qualitative dimension). It suggests that the time is ripe…

Language instruction in secondary education is dominated by standard language ideology--a view of language that sanctions one ("standard") variety at the expense of other ("nonstandard") ones. While it is clear that students need access to privileged rhetorical forms, it is similarly clear that most current pedagogies do not facilitate such access…

This article examines ethnographic data that show Belgian adolescents of Moroccan descent stylizing Standard Dutch. Analysis addresses the importance of this variety in Belgian-Flemish society and in the school these boys attended, and shows how in interviews with Moroccan boys the hegemonic status of this variety is generally accepted. In…

Previous research has established that old or given information is often deaccented. The assumption is that unimportant information ought to be weakened and attenuated in speech. Consequently, given information is often deaccented and new information is usually accented in most varieties of English. However, some nonnative varieties, such as…

The programs WordSmith and VocabProfile were used to research lexical differences between essays written in English by Spanish undergraduates and a set of essays independently judged as being of TWE grade 6 standard. The results indicated that writing by this group of students was generally characterised by low lexical variation, a preponderance…

A study investigated the evolution of the use of "devil" (or as it is often spelled to represent the vernacular, divil) as part of a negation "Divil a one" (= "not a one") in Irish and Hiberno-English and traces the influence of language contact in this history. While it is found that multiple causes resulted in the…

Claiming that understanding the social context in which words are formed is necessary to appreciate the richness and vitality of language, this book presents an informal, discursive examination of how and why American speech came to be the way it is, and in particular where the words came from. The book follows a roughly chronological format from…

The study examines origins of the usage patterns of "be" forms (conjugated and invariant forms of the copula) in Black English as they developed over a period of about 30 years. The corpus studied consists of selected interviews from a collection of recordings about Hoodoo, conjuration, witchcraft, and rootwork made by a white priest with almost…

Problems in the translation of Judeo-Spanish texts go beyond the problems normally associated with translation. Aside from near-native control of two languages, the translator must have knowledge of vocabulary that is not completely Spanish and an understanding of the unique orthographic history of the Judeo-Spanish dialect. There are Spanish…

This paper provides examples of a variety of phonological, orthographical, and morphological changes in current popular French are noted. They include: dropping of silent vowels in spelling, particularly in advertising and product names; changes in the pronunciation of vowels due to manipulation for product names; combinations of otherwise…

Students of English around the world are commonly taught according to one of two models, "British" English, and "American" English. Indeed, there is a persistent popular myth (present in many linguistics and second-language texts) that a single "Midwestern" variety of American English exists. The usage of the term…