In "Voices of Modernity," Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs write their grand overview of the birth and maturation of modernity. Bauman and Briggs understand modernity as a discursive construction that opposes traditional and modern developments, ways of being, and modes of understanding. Central in this narrative project of modernity…

In this article, we take up and expand upon a number of issues of linguistic theory raised in Ursula Ritzau's recent article "Learner language and polylanguaging: how language students' ideologies relate to their written language use" published in the "Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism". The present critique is…

I am generally positive about Muysken's (M) approach, and the potential use of unifying various seemingly related phenomena is obvious. The approach could also serve as a tool in determining to what extent these phenomena actually are sides of the same coin (I am somewhat less convinced of this than most contact linguists).

In their keynote contribution, Poplack, Zentz & Dion (henceforth PZD; Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue) propose an interesting "scientific test of convergence" (under section heading: "Introduction") which contains criteria to check whether a particular feature in a given language in contact with another one is…

Monolingual speakers of a national language continue to be the ideal figures on which national identities and senses of community are built. Yet this longstanding equation between nation and language is being contested by other ideologies. Alternatives are emerging from such disparate social locations as the European Union, now advocating for…

Publishing in the Sami languages has always been difficult. The Sami are currently spread across four countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. There are nine different Sami languages, some of them with only a few speakers. The Sami publishing industry is entirely dependent on government funding as it does not have its own funds nor is there…

In this essay, the author examines the attitudes that people in Hawai'i have about Hawai'i Creole. The author first describes the background of the language and explores educators' views from the 1920s to 1940s about Hawai'i Creole (HC), which was first viewed as the the "Pidgin problem" in Hawai'i. The frustrations expressed by…

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalan, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages,…

Scottish education was, until quite recently, the conscious product of liberal tradition, of the belief by influential elites that the nation's educational history was strong, coherent, and progressive, a source of economic flexibility, of modernising ideas, and of liberal opportunity. In recent decades, however, it has become fashionable to decry…

This article presents an adaptation of a position paper written by Da Pidgin Coup, a group of concerned faculty and students in the Department of Second Language Studies (SLS). In fall 1999, the group became concerned about a statement made by the chairman of the Board of Education implicating Pidgin in the poor results of the students of Hawai'i…

Newspeak, the engineered language of George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," is discussed in the context of Orwell's wider views on language and politics and the need for linguistic intervention as part of the struggle against tyranny, and the related or opposed ideas of some of Orwell's contemporaries and Saussure. Orwell worried…

Discusses four types of doublespeak: euphemism, jargon, bureaucratese, and inflated language. Cites examples of the pervasive use of doublespeak in business, politics, and the military. Asserts that to eliminate doublespeak, English teachers should teach respect for language as well as effective use of language. (MM)

A significant number of community service-learning projects in higher education involve the teaching or tutoring of immigrants in English. As in related service-learning scholarship, these projects are commonly informed by perspectives on cultural difference, social justice, and power relations in U.S. society. Yet while faculty pair their…

Reviews two studies of the relationship between gender loading in languages and the perception of gender by speakers of those languages; the two studies reach contradictory conclusions. Examines a number of theoretical and methodological issues in linguistic relativity research and suggests avenues for further research. (SED)

Discusses the claim that attitudes determine the way a foreign language is acquired v the claim that the exact opposite relationship exists. Concludes that the motivational hypothesis does not fully account for the relationship between attitude and success and that foreign language learning causes the formation of positive and negative attitudes.…