The process by which Irish-speaking regions became English-speaking regions over a period of centuries is examined. The first part argues that schooling played far less of a role in the shift than some scholars have suggested, because schools were not structured to be particularly effective in teaching the second language (English) to…

The textbook is designed to introduce beginning students of linguistics to the variety of languages of the world. It assumes the reader has mastered the basic principles of linguistics, but seeks background information in the broad range of language phenomena found in the world's languages. Chapters address these topics: classification of…

Presents results of a study of the use of the dative with the genitive prepositions "(an)statt,""trotz,""wahrend" and "wegen" based on two corpora. Notes that a comparison of these two computerized corpora shows that no clear trend exists regarding the increased use of the dative with these prepositions in…

A study compared language patterns in a group of 100 residents of Ottawa and 240 residents of Vancouver, categorized by sex, age (under or over 40), and socioeconomic status. The informants provided tape-recorded interviews of an hour or more in response to similarly-conducted questionnaires designed to elicit tokens for a large number of…

This study examines the comprehensibility of Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian English by listeners whose native languages are Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian English. The subjects, 30 college students, were grouped according to whether they listened to male or female speakers. Results show native speakers are better at…

Although spoken language was the subject of attention among Soviet linguists for a short period in the 1920s, it has not attracted much attention since then. The main concern of Soviet linguists has been the forms of written language. Only at the end of the 1960s did linguists begin to record spontaneous speech on tape and study its forms. The…

Sometimes descriptions of known facts about a language fail to be explanatory in a satisfying way, because they ignore parallelisms in related languages, including chronologically earlier stages of the same language. This article examines several Romance languages and dialects in terms of similarities in morphological evolutionary development.…

This article is one among a series of studies on the acquisition of patterns of linguistic variation observable in the speech of native speakers of Canadian French by French immersion (FI) students. The present study is centered on deletion of the central vowel schwa, a widespread feature of casual spoken French. In this study, FI students are…

This text provides a linguistic analysis of discourse register in English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali, using a multi-dimensional analytical framework and including sociocultural descriptions. Methodology included a description of the text corpora, linguistic features, and computational/statistical techniques used; theoretical issues…

Twenty-four English speakers from various regions of India were tested for the intelligibility of their speech. Recordings of speech in a variety of contexts were evaluated by listeners from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, and Germany. On the basis of the resulting intelligibility scores, factors which tend to hinder…

The issue of language variation is examined from three perspectives: the political view of nonnative varieties as examples of power; the anthropological view of language as an aspect of culture; and the pedagogical view of English as a static entity across cultures. Studies of teacher-training programs and teacher-trainee attitudes are included.…

The volume, which is part of a series providing a full account of the history of the English language, details the history of English from 1776 to 1997. An extensive introduction explains the changing socio-historic setting in which English has developed in response to a continuing background of diversity as it was transplanted to North America…

While all languages use shape to classify unfamiliar objects, some languages as diverse as Mandarin, Thai, Japanese, Mohawk, and American Sign Language lexicalize these and other types of description as noun classifiers. Classification does not develop from a fixed set of features in the object, but is discourse-sensitive and invoked when it would…

Standard measures and techniques are needed to establish resemblances and differences among languages. A determination of the degree to which one lanquage or dialect differs from another requires the examination of language universals. To study what languages have in common, attention has to be given to the physical, psychological, and social…

This paper first explains the diversity of the Arab World, the unifying force of Classical Arabic, and that Modern Standard Arabic, less complicated in structure and less ornate in rhetoric, is sufficiently Different from colloquial dialects to require considerable instruction in schools. For contrastive analysis to be useful as a basis for EFL…