The work of Carol Berkenkotter and others who have expanded the realm of personal narrative studies over the past several decades would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of those who first brought the study of narrative to nonliterary discourses. By revisiting what personal narratives were to these pioneers-working outward from…

Despite Estonia being ranked among the highest performing nations in the world-wide testing of students, these encouraging results are somewhat overshadowed by the challenge to overcome the divided school system with different languages of learning that impacts crucially on students' social, academic and professional paths. The study examines…

Background: Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students' racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students' experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools.…

This study investigates the sociolinguistic situation of Myanmarese (Burmese), Rohingya-speaking refugees in Saudi Arabia, specifically on the participants' attitudes regarding their mother tongue and the country's official language, Arabic. The paper draws on data from a questionnaire and focus group discussions with 65 Saudi-born Rohingya…

312 Singaporean children aged 4, 7, and 10 years from four different home language backgrounds--English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil--were tested for their recognition of animals and non-animals. The Malay-speaking group of children was the notable group that showed a different developmental pattern from the other three groups. They performed…

With the present study I investigated the sources of score variance and dependability in a local oral English proficiency test for potential international teaching assistants (ITAs) across four first language (L1) groups, and suggested alternative test designs. Using generalizability theory, I examined the relative importance of L1s (i.e., Indian,…

In a highly global world, migrant communities navigate multiple cultural and linguistic contexts. To understand these cross-cultural ties and bridge the fields of linguistics and transnationalism, the present study provides detailed linguistic analysis of the interrelation between heritage language use and symbolic transnationalism among the…

Breton (Brittany, France) and Lower Sorbian (Brandenburg, Germany) are two of the many endangered minority languages currently undergoing revitalization. In their cases, given that intergenerational transmission in a family setting has mostly ceased, language revitalization takes the form of educational initiatives, such as the immersion program…

The purpose of this study was to explore different interpretations made through the dialogic interplay of a classroom ethnographic researcher (contextual researcher) and a research analyst (peripheral researcher) as we collaborated on interpretations of data from an elementary school classroom. Using sociolinguistic discourse technique, we…

The article considers communicative competence as a sum of several competences such as linguistic, paralinguistic, linguistic-sociocultural, substantial competences, etc. Linguistic sociocultural competence is specifically featured. The article describes linguistic cultural, psychosocial and cultural expertise and skills. The criteria of learning…

Italy is characterized by a considerable amount of language variation. Only a few spoken vernaculars enjoy institutional support and are officially recognized as minority languages. Among these, Friulian is one of the largest in terms of number of speakers. In the past decade, the assessment of Friulian language vitality has yielded discordant…

Language maintenance research generally argues that providing endangered varieties with a standard impacts positively their vitality by e.g. increasing positive attitudes. This paper investigates whether different degrees of linguistic proximity between vernacular varieties and the standard may lead to different speakers' attitudes towards the…

This article critically examines the discourses concerning historical and transnational linguistic and cultural diversity in the semiotic landscape of a new teacher education building in Norway. In 2020, this building, housing the Department of Education, opened at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, in the city of Tromsø. Designing,…

Applying an approach termed "citizen sociolinguistics" offers a unique opportunity to capture a large corpus of naturally occurring language data, especially fleeting interactions. Drawing on citizen science innovations in the natural sciences, citizen sociolinguistics recruits and trains scientists to complete data-related tasks such as…

Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled 'Dialect, language and nation' (Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and…