Bilingual speech requires that the language of utterances be selected prior to articulation. Past research has debated whether the language of speaking can be determined in advance of speech planning and, if not, the level at which it is eventually selected. We argue that the reason that it has been difficult to come to an agreement about language…

The author outlines the phenomenology of the two main contrasting views on the subject of African culture: liberal and radical. Topics covered include (1) culture and perception; (2) language and culture; (3) culture, education, and identity; (4) culture and motivation; and (5) social and economic structure. (CH)

Throughout the 20th century, international communication has shifted from a plural use of several languages to a clear pre-eminence of English, especially in the field of science. This paper focuses on international periodical publications where more than 75 percent of the articles in the social sciences and humanities and well over 90 percent in…

This essay attempts to answer some of the basic assumptions made about English as a global language. It is argued that such assumptions, especially those concerning political and economic power, are not sufficient in themselves to explain why English has acquired such global importance. Rather, what has greatly contributed to the possibility for…

This study explores Spanish language maintenance in Southbridge, Massachusetts, a suburban town with a vibrant Puerto Rican community. The investigation focuses on the extent to which Southbridge Puerto Ricans use Spanish and English at home, and their attitudes toward Spanish language maintenance. Survey data, especially the impact of factors…

Hebrew as a second language is not only taught to Israeli Palestinians, but also to adult immigrants and their young children. However, in the case of immigrants the purpose is to replace their immigrant language with Hebrew, while among Israeli Palestinians it is acknowledged as additive. Hebrew is a compulsory language for Israeli Palestinian…

In this article we explore some of the ways that language ideologies--shared beliefs about language forms and practices embedded in social conflicts over power--mediated the language choices of 4 girls in peer activities. These activities took place in the Spanish and English first-grade classrooms of a dual-language program that enrolled children…

Five basic questions are posited that pertain equally to "fully alive,""partly alive," and "barely alive" languages. These three types of languages may be seen as existing along a continuum, differing in the degrees to which they can be linked to the dynamics of reward processes and institutional spill-overs that…

Presents a database of the world's languages categorized in terms of their number of mother tongue speakers and their distribution. The database was created by going through the book, "Ethnologue: Languages of the World," page-by-page, analyzing individual language entries, collating them, and cross-checking them between countries. The…

The purpose of this study was to design a model for "first language" dominance over "second language" performance and the interference of one language over the other. Two sets of equivalence relations showing a common element (i.e., the reference) were established under different contextual conditions. One set ("first language") was over trained…

Purpose: The effect of semantic naming treatment on crosslinguistic generalization was investigated in 3 participants with English-Spanish bilingual aphasia. Method: A single-subject experimental designed was used. Participants received semantic treatment to improve naming of English or Spanish items, while generalization was tested to untrained…

Reversing language shift has proven to be difficult for many reasons. Although much of the literature has focused on educational practices, little research has attended to the visual presentation of language used in educational texts aimed at reversing shift. In this article, we compare language materials developed for two different language…

Studies in Spanish heritage language writing have recently uncovered two opposing tendencies: "backwards biliteracy" where writing conforms to rhetorical traditions in the dominant language and "forward biliteracy" where writing breaks away from canonical rhetorical traditions and where writers carve out their own, transcultural paths of…

This paper describes multiple Estonian-Russian language contacts in Estonia. For synchronic microsociolinguistic research it is usual to concentrate on the impact of a sociolinguistically dominant language A on an immigrant/minority language B. In the Soviet setting, the dominant language was usually Russian (despite Russians being a minority).…

Claims that the mother tongue function in foreign language learning over a background of two or more languages is transferable to any one of the background languages and that this transfer is predictable by a set of principles. Presents applications of the principles to multilingual settings of Nigeria and Cameroon. (SED)