Investigated two historically isolated communities in the United States--Smith Island, Maryland and the Lumbee Native American community in Robeson County, North Carolina. Demonstrates that contrary to assumption, isolated communities may be linguistically innovative and heterogeneous. Explanations for this are found to be both cognitive and…

Discusses the need for a forum to discuss public issues related to language. Introduces three papers that focus on current language issues. (Author/VWL)

Presents a study showing that New Zealanders have very different attitudes to variants that sociolinguists have lumped together in the past suggests that globalization with localization is an important principle for variationists to take into account. (Author/VWL)

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…

Instructors and trainers are increasingly using online education and technology-mediated learning (TML) to supplement or replace traditional approaches to classroom teaching. Because mandatory involvement requirements may not intrinsically motivate learners to achieve high quality learning, social factors with commitment, such as identification…

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion…

While students generally recognize that racism exists on an individual level, the instructor's challenge is to both elucidate patterns of discrimination and to expose their corollary: unearned and unrecognized systemic privilege of the dominant group. Unaware that their sense of entitlement advantages them at the expense of people of color, some…

In "The English Only Restaurant," Martinez Palau presents a number of Latino characters who, seduced by the economic promises of assimilation, attempt to suppress their linguistic and cultural identities in order to run a business the "American way." As befits a sociopolitical satire, the play on the one hand consciously…

While "internationalization" has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different…

The Diola-Fogny of Senegal, West Africa, socially intuit with the meta-linguistic terms "big" and "thin" the tense/lax vowel contrast that is basic to their phonology. The two terms are primarily used to identify speech variation among individuals and groups. (Author/RM)

Compares Chicano English and Anglo English speech in both linguistic and social terms. (CK)

A study examined what trained phoneticians do when they are presented with a transcription task to carry out without any knowledge of the dialect they are listening to and without any explicit phonological theory as a point of departure. The "best" tokens of three categories of potential assimilation (full, partial, and zero alveolar)…

Examines current sociolinguistic theories concerning nonstandard English in an effort to help teachers of standard English to understand the problems facing their students and to apply their new knowledge in the classroom. (PM)

Demonstrates the interplay of a cognitive system, the Basque numerative system, and a behavioral one, counting sheep. The significant features of the Basque numerative system are analyzed; then it is shown how use of these features facilitates the counting of sheep on open ranges by Basque sheep farmers in California. (Author/RM)