South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a…

This book investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data, the author explores how input from teachers and classmates shapes students' language acquisition. The book…

Based in case studies conducted in the US, Europe, and Latin America, this book explores the feasibility and benefits of trilingual/multilingual education in the United States. Currently, there are few programs in the country of this nature, as educators tend to conclude that English-language learners would be overwhelmed by study in additional…

This volume offers a wealth of new information about the forms of several speech acts and their social distribution in Vietnamese as L1 and L2, complemented by a chapter on address forms and listener responses. As the first of its kind, the book makes a valuable contribution to the research literature on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language…

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like…

"Reading in Asian Languages" is rich with information about how literacy works in the non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) used by hundreds of millions of people and refutes the common Western belief that such systems are hard to learn or to use. The contributors share a comprehensive view of reading as construction…

All languages encode aspects of culture and every culture has its own specificities to be proud of and to be transmitted. The papers in this book explore aspects of this relationship between language and culture, considering issues related to the processes of internationalization and localization of the English language. The volume is divided into…

This book presents a collection of papers resulting from a gathering of a mixed group of translators and language researchers to investigate multilingual translation with a view to seeking consensus and identifying priorities for moving forward. There are 14 papers in 3 parts. Part 1, "Overviews of Languages and Cultures in Contact,"…

Intended to help teachers of English, language arts, and other subjects interpret "English Only" language issues for students, parents, and school communities, this book addresses various aspects of the controversy. Articles, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) "The Roots of Language Protectionism" (Harvey A.…

A collection of articles on the kinds of variation in English that one finds within the language of one group or one person includes: "The English Language as Rule-Governed Behavior" (Timothy Shopen); "The English Language as Use-Governed Behavior" (Joseph M. Williams); "Styles" (Ann D. Zwicky); "The Organization…

Current research in linguistic typology shows some syntactic processes, such as rightward dislocation of modifiers, to be characteristic of certain types of languages, and that a language of that type without such processes is "unnatural" and likely to develop them. For instance, almost all languages with order Verb-Object (VO) have dislocation…

This collection of 22 papers offers a detailed record of the development of the field and its modern extension. Part 1, "The Dutch Contribution: 'Little Arrows'," includes: (1) "Informant Classification of Dialects" (W.G. Rensink); (2) "Dialects" (Jo C. Daan); and (3) "The Netherlands-German National Border as a…

This workbook for students provides an accessible introduction to a range of ways of analyzing language in context. The workbook can be used in a number of ways, for example, as a student reference text to briefly review a particular kind of language analysis or as a course textbook to introduce students to a variety of approaches to language data…

This book looks at the essential dynamics of language contact and linguistic assimilation from a current sociolinguistic perspective by focusing on the English of second generation Puerto Rican teen-agers in New York City. General sociolinguistic principles are extrapolated from the author's detailed investigation of several linguistic variables…

Essays on the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) include: an introduction to the evolution of AAVE within the African American diaspora (Shana Poplack); "Rephrasing the Copula: Contraction and Zero in Early African American English" (James A. Walker); "Reconstructing the Source of Early African American English…