This article analyses the styles of English produced by an adult migrant who started to speak the language later in life, and it approaches them from the perspective of quantitative style-shifting and discursive stylization. After defining style and the procedures needed to justify the term "L2," the study describes the focal informant's…

Adult students of Catalan are worthy of study because they reveal complexities underlying taken-for-granted assumptions about Catalan speakers and Castilian speakers. Far from fitting into neat bundles aligning language of origin, social class, and national orientation, the students in this study exemplify the breakdown of boundaries traditionally…

With contributions from leading scholars all around the world, this volume underlines the ever-pressing need for new language in education policies to include all learners' voices in the multilingual classroom and to empower teachers to develop responsive and transformative pedagogies. Using testimonies, narratives and examples from different…

This essay suggests a companion term to "literacy sponsors" that better mirrors the practice and protection of traditional literacies evident in the cases of two Dakelh elders. "Literacy steward" introduces a theoretical means to describe community members whose rhetorical decisions depend on traditions that are alternative to…

This paper presents key insights from the analysis of a language debate in Cyprus, triggered when a number of individuals and groups refused to endorse the standardisation of the orthography of place names and the argumentation through which it was supported. The paper is based on a collection of newspaper texts and related documents and is…

Studies of sound changes in sociolinguistics have shown a consistent trend that women tend to be linguistically innovative and lead most of the major sound changes. Additionally, women have been shown to use more standard variants than men in stable sociolinguistic variables, giving rise to the "gender paradox" where women are both…

Since 1980, the number of people in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has increased by 140% (United States Census Bureau, 2010). Therefore a greater percentage of students now are multilingual. Throughout the world, multilingualism is considered the norm and monolingualism is the exception (Auer & Wei, 2008). In…

Concerns regarding the nomenclature of university administration in Australia and the UK have featured in the higher education literature for over a decade. In response, a significant nomenclature shift is occurring, with Australian universities replacing the term "General Staff" to describe all administrative and technical staff, in…

Research has shown that language change is driven on one hand by forces internal to language itself such as grammar-internal systematic pressure, and on the other hand by social motives such as social identity. Language contact presents new features, but why is it that some of them are incorporated as variation and evolving into language change,…

Poplack, Zentz and Dion (PZD; Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue) examine the often unquestioned assumption that the existence of preposition stranding (PS) in Canadian French is linked to the presence of a contact situation with English in the North American context. Although this issue has been the topic of previous research from a…

In this article, four second language writing specialists address the following significant questions related to foreign language (FL) writing instruction: (1) How is FL writing different from English as a second language writing? (2) How does the sociolin-guistic role of a given FL influence how writing is employed in the overall curriculum for…

Situated within the recent new wave of second language acquisition studies investigating the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, this article draws on a longitudinal database of advanced French interlanguage to explore a number of issues that have not yet been extensively investigated. They concern the issue of individual variation in the…

This article will reflect on the risks of a careless application of "safe-talk", a fruitful analytical concept that has been widely used in classroom discourse studies to link chorus-like repetition sequences with certain institutional and social processes related to either post-colonialism or migration. The discussion will draw on a…

This piece is an academic reflection on personal experiences of the education system through the critical lens of anti-oppressive and multicultural education. The author divides the page into academic discourse and personal experience, reflecting the boundaries between anecdotal evidence and academic discourse. Suggestions and observations are…

This study examined abstracts for a British Association for Applied Linguistics conference and a Sociolinguistics Symposium, to define the genre of conference abstracts in terms of vague language, specifically universal general nouns (e.g. people) and research general nouns (e.g. results), and to discover if the language used reflected the level…