This study is a sociolinguistic exploration into the survival of a transnational language in the United States - a multilingual and multicultural environment. Using an adapted General Ethnicity Questionnaire, it interrogates the social dimensions of heritage language use and the diverse linguistic experiences of 120 first-generation Yorùbá-English…

In 2005, Klaus P. Schneider published a fascinating article with the title "'No problem, you're welcome, anytime': Responding to thanks in Ireland, England, and the U.S.A." Adopting the then emerging and now established framework of variational pragmatics, Schneider's pioneering paper presents the results of a study on differences…

In this paper I closely examine spontaneous interactions between members of a tri-generation Italian American family. I argue that members show different language preferences and differing attitudes towards the family's multilingual identity but that they all demonstrate a degree of "engagement" with the heritage language. Phenomena that…

"No Child Left Behind" is federal education legislation consisting of implementation programs intended to reconcile the goals of insuring equality while promoting competition in public education in the United States. Immigrant students whose primary languages are not English are included in the mandate of "NCLB," categorized as…

Maternity care in Ireland has been described as a "testament to the strength and influence of the medical profession" (Mc Kee 1986: 192). A review of maternity and gynaecology services in the Dublin area in 2004 revealed that "no participant...thought that the maternity services were women centred at the time" (Women's Health…

Migration-based language pluralism and globalized identity conflicts pose challenges for educational research and linguistic anthropology, in particular, how we think about education and social inequality. This article proposes new conceptual tools, drawn from linguistic anthropology as well as world systems theory, for analyzing the role of…

Background/Context: Although progress has been made since members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed the Students' Right to Their Own Language resolution (1974), there still remains a demand to examine youth perceptions of language. Such examinations can help teachers and researchers improve curricular choices, honor…

This essay examines a Brooklyn College-based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC's 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday…

Analysis of the cultural content of Spanish textbooks used in New York secondary schools revealed that the majority of Spanish-speaking countries and Spanish-speaking groups within the United States were underrepresented. Photographs and references tended to depict the middle and upper classes, and few references were made to poverty,…

Examines code mixing and borrowing across two generations of New York Puerto Ricans, and explores the possibility of existence of a lifecycle of language use in the community. (26 references) (Author/OD)

Strategies for deciding which language to use when forms part of the sociolinguistic competence of speakers who can speak more than one language. Language choices are shaped by a number of factors, including linguistic proficiency of both speaker and interlocutor, the ingroup or outgroup status of each, and the setting in which an exchange takes…