This study focuses on the analysis of variation at the phonological level, specifically the variable realization of palatalization of dental stops before the high vowel /i/ and vowel nasalization in the speech of bilingual speakers of Uruguayan Portuguese (UP) in the city of Rivera, Uruguay. The data were collected in participant-observation and…

This dissertation is a sociophonetic analysis of the English spoken by Hmong Americans living in the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The Twin Cities has the largest urban population of Hmong Americans in the United States. Through studies of production and perception of vowels involved in sound changes, I…

This study examines the acquisition of target-like patterns of variation by 22 American learners of French during study abroad (SA) in France and correlates such acquisition with the creation of dense, multiplex, exchange-based social networks (Milroy 1980) with native speakers (NSs) during the SA period. In this longitudinal study, naturalistic…

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of "ways of speaking" in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a way of speaking is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the…

This longitudinal study focuses on the language production of two siblings, aged 6 and 9 at the beginning of the data collection period, who have been brought up in a bilingual family in New York. The parents of the two girls are native speakers of German and Spanish, respectively, and English for them is the language of education and the larger…

A great deal of scholarly research has addressed the issue of dialect mapping in the United States. These studies, usually based on phonetic or lexical items, aim to present an overall picture of the dialect landscape. But what is often missing in these types of projects is an attention to the borders of a dialect region and to what kinds of…

In recent times, recess has become threatened by the press for more academic instruction time and by fears of violent behavior. A dramatic indicator of this trend is seen in the increasing number of schools and school districts which have done away with or significantly reduced recess time (BBC news, 2007; Coughlan, 2007; Jarrett, 2002; Pressler,…

This dissertation is focused on analyzing phonological contact between Slavic and non-Slavic languages in southeastern and northeastern Europe, with the particular goal of describing how the social context of language contact interacts with linguistic factors to shape the outcome of contact-induced change. On the basis of case studies drawn from…

This dissertation examines a project to unify sign languages across twenty-two Arab countries. Proponents of the project, mainly pan-Arab governmental bodies with the support of members of the staff at the Al Jazeera satellite network, have framed the project as a human rights effort to advance the welfare of deaf Arab people. They have urged its…

In Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), the gentive (G) and dative/locative (DL) cases exhibit adjectival long-form allomorphy (ALFA). The genitive -"og" -"oga" and the DL -"om" -"ome" -"omu" stand in free variation, inasmuch as when one form is substituted for another the truth value of an utterance…

While there is consensus that conceptual change is surprisingly difficult, many competing theories of conceptual change co-exist in the literature. This dissertation argues that this discord is partly the result of an inadequate account of the unwritten rules of human social interaction that underlie the field's preferred…

This qualitative research study examines how Latino/a bilingual students use their linguistic resources in their homeroom classroom and in the science laboratory during science instruction. This study was conducted in a school district located in the southwestern part of the United States. The school was chosen based on the criterion that the…

In our current era of increased globalization, constraints on language variation in postcolonial English varieties are multifaceted. Local and global language ideologies collide and multiple sources of influence converge in present-day patterns of linguistic variation in emerging English varieties. While research into the structure and…

There has been increasing attention on the educational power of video games in recent years (Gee, 2003, 2005; Prensky 2001, 2006; Thorne, 2008; Purushotma, 2005). This study aims to investigate World of Warcraft as a venue for second language socialization, specifically in the area of pragmatics. In order to explore the potential for second…

This study discusses the banlieue language in an innovative and multi-fronted manner. It seeks to challenge many theories in research on banlieue language, especially stereotypes regarding its speaker base. By expanding current research may be expanded to include more sociolinguistic factors than ever before, we can begin to see that banlieue…