Describes a series of evaluations of gender pairs of New Zealand English, Australian English, American English, and received-pronunciation-type-English English voices by over 400 students in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. Twenty-two personality and demographic traits were evaluated by Likert-scale questionnaires. Results are…

This article first presents an overview of some trends behind the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a second language. A study is then presented that aims to test the validity of these trends in a quantitative study of a range of socio- and morpho-phonetic variables in French, including liaison, /l/ deletion, and subject-verb agreement…

This brochure discusses, in lay terms, how computers process language and why they may have difficulty in processing English. The brochure points out that English is a more difficult language to process than most people think, and that the brain is far more complex than the computer in its ability to decipher meaning. The examples of the word…

This paper explores how one facet of the process by which ideology about linguistic variation originates and circulates. It analyzes an archive consisting of newspaper articles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about Pittsburgh speech, the earliest of which is from 1910. The articles began appearing regularly during the 1950s-60s. First, the paper…

Following Roman Jakobson, this article attempts to outline the affinity between linguistic change induced by language contact and conflict, and the poetic function of language. This phenomenon can be observed by studying the discourses of trilingual speakers in the Aosta Valley in Northern Italy. The problematic position of French is reflected and…

The relationship between Eastern and Western languages is explored. Possible origins and the spread of language over the Eurasian land mass are discussed. (CW)

Northern Andean Spanish (NAS) possesses a complex system of structures used in impositive speech. NAS speakers choose from several grammatical possibilities when asking their interlocutor to act. This article summarizes the grammatical possibilities and explains how the different forms are used to indicate different levels of politeness. (15…

Deals with the construct of educated native speaker (ENS) speech, which constitutes the implicit target norm in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Proficiency Guidelines. It is argued that, in classroom foreign language instruction, such a target is too restrictive, and as an alternative, a multitarget model of language…

This article explains the use of the origins of American English and the dictionary to teach multiculturalism to elementary school students. It suggests classroom activities that help students explore the cultural roots behind words and appreciate the ways words have been created. Esperanto and the development of an international language are also…

Describes a new research project on York English, a variety in northeast England. Conducted a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature that recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide--"was/were" variation in the past tense paradigm. (Author/ER)

Clement M. Doke's 1929-1930 research on Zimbabwean languages has played a key role in shaping the tribalised and politicised linguistic terrain that characterises modern Zimbabwe. Doke, professor of linguistics at the University of Witwaters-rand, was commissioned in 1929 by the government of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) to research…

After an introduction to the Italian linguistic situation, highlighting the remarkable number of language varieties present in Italy today, the paper goes on to review briefly the history of micronationalism in Italy, and to propose a classification of language planning based on the distinction between macro- and micronationalism. There follows a…

The speech perception system must be flexible in responding to the variability in speech sounds caused by differences among speakers and by language change over the lifespan of the listener. Indeed, listeners use lexical knowledge to retune perception of novel speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In that study, Dutch listeners made…

This paper proposes an International Corpus of Creative English (ICCE) as a worldwide corpus particularly suitable for implementation in countries which have tertiary institutions with well-defined populations of students possessing similar cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds. The ICCE is contextualized as a world Englishes corpus with…

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students' vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may,…