Language is not fixed and uniform, but occurs in many variants, social, occupational, etc. These correspond to various roles in society. The learner must be prepared to assume such roles, and must try to achieve practical mastery of the corresponding language variant. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

A study of integration of English lexicon into the Spanish spoken in New Mexico considers formal English, formal Spanish and the informal mixture spoken by local Chicanos. (CK)

A study of 1970 U.S. Census language data made to determine Mexican American language loyalty points out that the census data are valuable only if the sociological variables involved are known. (CK)

Several studies are reviewed in which response measures seem to lend insight into the nature of language attitudes, considering "language attitude" in the sense of an internal mediating state of the perceiver. (RM)

The teaching of standard Italian to speakers of Italian dialects both in Italy and in North America is discussed, specifically through a specialized pedagogical program within the framework of a sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspective, and based on a structural analysis of linguistic systems in contact. Italian programs in Toronto are…

The typical pattern of Chinese word formation is to have native material adapt to changed circumstances. The Chinese language neither borrows nor lends words, but it does occasionally borrow concepts. The larger cultural pattern in which this occurs is that the Chinese culture borrows, if necessary, but ensures that the act of borrowing does not…

The unusually elaborate system of nicknaming in the Romanian village of Bigar, wih a population of 340, is influenced by the region's history. Every villager has a legal name consisting of a given or first name and a family name, both conforming to Romanian orthography. The villagers may also use the corresponding Czech forms in informal contexts…

The emergence of a subfield of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, whose goal is to discover the principles by which a hearer or reader understands a text or can construct a model based on the text, given the sentence-level competence to parse the text's sentences and assign logical forms to them, is discussed in the context of a court case in…

An examination of the social psychological basis of style shifting suggests that, contrary to Labovian theory, many style shifts are not a function of shifts in attention to speech and that there are other more explanatory ways of analyzing style shifts. Some reasons for this view are: (1) attention to speech is sometimes negatively correlated…

In the context of linguistic theories of politeness, it is possible to consider the concept of a continuum of politeness that includes degrees of speaker egocentricity. It is proposed that directives in Brazilian Portuguese follow a hierarchy of politeness forms based on a theory of pragmatic markedness: that the more marked for politeness a…

'LAPSE' is an organising acronym for the kinds of courses that should be included in any teacher education programme in English for speakers of other languages. The letters stand for Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Sociolinguistics, English (and Education). (Author)

Discusses abbreviations in contemporary French words from a sociolinguistic point of view, taking into account the morphological and syntactical consequences. (AM)

This bibliography on cross-cultural, Spanish/English linguistic borrowing consists of 185 items, virtually all of which are annotated. The bibliography is preceded by a discussion of the linguistic communities and the classification of borrowings. (KM)