The effect of domain prestige and interlocutors' bilingualism on loanword adaptations

There is great variability in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted, such that segments show cross‐word and cross‐situational variation in adaptation. Previous research proposed that word frequency, speakers' level of bilingualism and neighborhoods' level of bilingualism can explain such variability. We test for the effect of these factors and propose two additional factors: interlocutors' level of bilingualism and the prestige of the donor language in the loanword's domain. Analyzing elicited productions of loanwords from Spanish into Mexicano in a village where Spanish and Mexicano enjoy prestige in complementary domains, we show that interlocutors' bilingualism and prestige influence the rate of sound adaptation. Additionally, we find that speakers accommodate to their interlocutors, regardless of the interlocutors' level of bilingualism. As retention of foreign sounds can lead to sound change, these results show that social factors can influence changes in a language's sound system.     

Koud Zyé: A glimpse into linguistic enregisterment on Kréyòl television in Guadeloupe1

This paper examines Koud Zyé, a Kréyòl‐language segment that was incorporated into the local nightly news in Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France located in the Caribbean. I argue that the variety of Kréyòl chosen for use in Koud Zyé illustrates a moment in a process of enregisterment. I demonstrate that the variety of Kréyòl used in Koud Zyé consciously draws on elements of basilectal creole and presents many similarities to a written variety developed by language planners for use in schools and in writing, thus distinguishing it from the Frenchified Kréyòl commonly heard in everyday conversation. I suggest that the ideological position that the writers of Koud Zyé hold toward Kréyòl influenced their choice of language on the program and, furthermore, that the program helped to concretize beliefs about and knowledge of the studied variety of Kréyòl that has been introduced into Guadeloupean schools by activists. Travay‐lasa ka dékatiyéKoud Zyé, on pati a jounal télévizé lokal ki fèt an lang kréyòl, an Gwadloup, ki sé on dépawtèman a Lafwans ka touvé‐y an Karayib‐la. Dapré mwen, modèl a Kréyòl‐la yo chwazi pou Koud Zyé, ka montré on moman adan évolisyon a ‘enregistrement’ a lang‐la (kivédi ki manyè on moun ka palé on lang ka fin pa rantré adan on larèl). An ka montré istil a lang‐la ki adan Koud Zyé, ni détwa éléman a gwo kréyòl‐la yo sèvi èvè‐y volontèwman, ka sanm on jan a kréyòl maké. Modèl lasa, sé tala yonndé mètamannyòk ka prévwa pou lang kréyòl‐la envanté, pou sèvi an lékòl‐la, é ki pa ka sanm tala moun ka palé touléjou. An ka pansé pozisyon idéolojik a sé moun‐la ki fèémisyon‐la, ni on enflians asi chwa a yo. An plis di sa, pwogram lasa rédé mèt déwò sa moun ka pansé asi kréyòl‐la, é fè yo pran konésans a modèl kréyòl sé militan‐la mété an lékòl‐la. [Kréyòl]     

Normalizing bilingualism:The effects of the Catalonian linguistic normalization policy one generation after1

This study examines the evolution of language attitudes of linguistically diverse adolescents in urban Catalonia a generation after the instauration of Linguistic Normalization, official language policies favoring Catalan. Woolard (1984, 1989) and Woolard and Gahng's (1990) classic Catalan/Spanish matched guise studies are used as a baseline. Current data come from a modified and expanded replication of those original studies. Findings show: (1) differences in attitudes between youths of Spanish and Catalan background have softened; (2) disparities in Status and Solidarity have evened out; (3) language choice can be highly gendered; and (4) bilingual proficiency is now valued by and for both communities. The support for bilingualism and the easing of divisions are understood as signs of increased ‘linguistic cosmopolitanism,’ a stance that looks beyond parochial own‐group communities and favors bridging linguistic boundaries. The significance is that minority languages can be valued when they take on such symbolic roles.     

Two Generations, Two Strategies: The Fate of Bare English–origin Nouns in Ukrainian

The status of lone nouns of one language in discourse of another is often ambiguous, since they typically provide few indications of their language membership. Making use of the facts of linguistic variability in each of Ukrainian and English, we examine the quantitative conditioning of such forms in bilingual performance data. Results yield a synchronic portrait of the integrated loanword, even when it bears no surface indication of that integration, is neither recurrent nor widespread, and has no history of attestation or other status in the language. Distinguishing the languages involved in the contact situation (Canada) as produced by the first generation (G₁) or the second generation (G₂), further reveals that G₁ speakers incorporate borrowed items – nonce or established – into recipient language discourse by applying to them the fine details of their native language constraints on linguistic variability. In contrast, G₂ speakers' treatment of English-origin nouns coincides neither with their own treatment of Ukrainian nouns nor with G₁ speakers' treatment of Ukrainian or English–origin nouns.     

Syllable-final /s/ as an index of language,gender, and ethnicity in a contact variety of Mexican Spanish

This study of syllable-final /s/ reduction in a 55-speaker corpus of Spanish in Juchitán, México, a contact variety, uses both language contact and social processes to explain its results. Contact with the indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language leads to decreased rates of syllable-final /s/ retention, creating a locally salient n+1-order index between “Zapotecness” and /s/ reduction that influences the indexical field for syllable-final /s/ reduction. Zapotec identity is associated with tradition and femininity. Therefore, in this new indexical field, syllable-final /s/ reduction comes to directly index Zapotec language dominance and indirectly index both femininity and tradition. This leads feminine and elderly speakers to reduce /s/ more frequently than “less feminine” and young speakers, even though the opposite pattern is usually found in other varieties. The results show, therefore, that language contact can influence the indexical field typically linked to socially meaningful variation and thereby cause unexpected patterns of variation to emerge.     

Sociophonetic variation in a long‐term language contact situation: /l/‐darkening in Welsh‐English bilingual speech

This study investigates /l/‐darkening in the Welsh and English speech of bilinguals in North Wales. Although it is claimed that /l/ is dark in all syllable positions in northern varieties of both languages, there have been no quantitative investigations of this feature which consider cross‐linguistic phonetic differences, the differing nature of language contact between North East and North West Wales, and differences in the way both languages are acquired by speakers. The dataset of 32 Welsh‐English bilinguals, aged 16–18, was stratified by speaker sex, home language, and area. Tokens of /l/ in word‐initial onset and word‐final coda positions were analysed acoustically. The results show cross‐linguistic differences in onset position and that such differences were found to be greater in the speech of female speakers. Differences were also found between the two areas. These results are discussed with reference to the influence of extra‐linguistic factors on speech production and the possible social meaning associated with dark /l/.     

Orderly mixing and accommodation in South African codeswitching

'Mixed Language,' a characteristic pattern of language use among African township residents in South Africa, may well include words or full constituents from several languages. However, from both a structural and a social perspective, such speech has a systematic nature. In reference to grammatical structure, within any CP (projection of COMP) showing codeswitching, only one language (the Matrix Language) provides the grammatical frame in the data studied. Also, while speakers from different educational levels engage in codeswitching with similar frequencies, the types of codeswitched constitutents they prefer are different. In reference to the social use of language, we argue that specific patterns of codeswitching indicate how language is both an index of identity and a tool of communication in South Africa. In the codeswitching patterns they use, speakers exhibit strong loyalty to their own first languages. Yet, because they recognize that codeswitching facilitates communication with members of other ethnic groups, they use a number of codeswitching strategies as a means of accommodating to their addressees and simultaneously as a means of projecting multiple identities for themselves.     

A materialist take on minoritization,emancipation, and language revitalization: Occitan sociolinguistics since the 1970s

This paper introduces and discusses Occitan sociolinguistics as it evolved from the 1970s onward as a theory of language contact as conflict. It was developed in conjunction with its Catalan counterpart and as a reaction to Joshua Fishman's allocational model of diglossia, and came as a response to conditions of swift social and linguistic change in Southern France after the Second World War. This model, proposed mainly at first by Robèrt Lafont in Montpelhièr, is strongly materialist in that it focuses on the material conditions of language production and replaces the language movement among other social struggles. This paper first explores the roots of the contemporary Occitan movement and its links with the birth of Occitan sociolinguistics. It then analyzes key concepts in Occitan sociolinguistics such as diglossic ideology as essential to understand processes of minoritization, linguistic alienation, and social domination. Finally, it looks at how this approach conceptualizes language revitalization not as a linguistic issue but as a social one and suggests that Occitan sociolinguistics provides an alternative to models of language loss and revival rooted in cultural and identity politics.     

Post‐socialist language ideologies in action: Linking interview context and language ideology through stance

Changes associated with the post‐socialist period in Albania have complicated the legacy of language ideologies grounded in Ottoman‐era and socialist‐era politics. In this article, I analyze two metalinguistic interviews with young adults in the Albanian capital of Tirana in order to investigate the status of standardizing and anti‐standardizing language ideologies while also raising a methodological question regarding interview context and researcher role as persistent issues in sociolinguistic research. As acts of evaluation, language ideologies can be linked to interactional positionings and alignments via stance, which is significant for understanding aspects of identity and context in the interview. I argue that this framework provides a better understanding of interview dynamics than previous style shifting approaches, as any explanation of differences in interview interactions must simultaneously consider macro‐level influences of ideology and micro‐level interactional developments.     

Language,Identity and Empowerment

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between language and identity and language and power. Language is viewed as an important vehicle through which empowerment can occur in society and through which social workers can contribute to the empowerment of dual language individuals and communities. Language suppression is viewed through the framework of bilinguaphobia, a term coined by Faltis and Coulter in 2004. Because of the long and unique history of Spanish in Southwestern communities, the authors suggest that true empowerment must overcome the prevalent discourse of fear of bilingualism. This article suggests that the present status and identity of Latinos in the Southwestern United States would be enhanced and affirmed by the healthy co-existence of two tongues and two cultural frameworks and that social workers should recognize and advocate for the power of bilingual discourses.     

The impact of socioeconomic status and population size on the use of the Tatar language at home

Based on econometric methods, we found that Tatar children from families with better material conditions and those who live in bigger cities are more likely to use the Russian language at home. Although Tatar seems to be well protected, thanks to local language policies after perestroika, we found some warning signs for the reformulation of public policies for the maintenance and development of minority languages in Russia.     

Code eclecticism: Linguistic variation and code alternation in the chat language of Flemish teenagers1

This paper deals with written chat language produced by West‐Flemish teenagers. By analyzing some exemplary data in a quantitative and a qualitative way, it is demonstrated that the chatspeak of the adolescents reflects the wide range of varieties which belong to the verbal repertoire of the youngest generation. The teenagers generally create a ‘regional style’ but do not aim at rendering local dialect speech faithfully. The medium appears to offer the teenagers an opportunity to appropriate (written) Dutch and transform it into a multilayered heterogeneous variety by combining several varieties of Dutch in a very eclectic way. Finally, it is argued that the findings question the polarized view of Dutch in Flanders that has been prominent in the public debate both amongst linguists and non‐linguists in the past decades. Dit artikel doet verslag van onderzoek naar de geschreven chattaal van West‐Vlaamse tieners. Kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve data‐analyses tonen dat de ‘chatspeak’ van de adolescenten een afspiegeling biedt van het hele scala aan variëteiten die tot het linguïstische repertoire van de jongste generatie behoren. De tieners creëren een soort ‘regionale stijl’, maar zij beogen geen accurate weergave van (hun) dialect. Het chatmedium biedt hen de mogelijkheid om zich het (geschreven) Nederlands toe te eigenen en het te transformeren in een gelaagde en heterogene variëteit door een heel eclectische combinatie van verschillende variëteiten. Vanuit deze bevindingen worden er vragen gesteld bij de gepolariseerde visie die de jongste decennia het publieke debat rond het Nederlands in Vlaanderen gedomineerd heeft.     

A comparison of heritage language ideologies in interaction

In Canada, the notion of a heritage language ideology is often conceived of as a natural by‐product of official multiculturalism. By contrast, Germany has long struggled with its status as a multilingual and multicultural country. By comparing two corpora of interviews with immigrants to each of these two countries (Canadians of German heritage and Germans of Vietnamese heritage), this paper aims to explore to what extent these different language ideologies are reconstructed in the interviews. It will be argued that the interviewees construct different sociolinguistic spaces and take up different positions within them in terms of centre and periphery. Our analysis shows that the German‐Canadian interviewees construct public sociolinguistic spaces in which they position themselves as German even when they do not have an active knowledge of their heritage language. By contrast, despite the monolingual habitus in Germany, the German‐Vietnamese respondents endorse a heritage language ideology; the space they claim for speaking Vietnamese, however, is restricted to private or family conversations.     

Staking the claims of identity: Purism,linguistics and the media in post‐1990 Germany1

The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post‐war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio‐political discourses as well as in long‐term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the socio‐political changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio‐political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded.     

Early language socialization and language shift: Kazakh as Baby Talk

This paper draws attention to the key role of a caregiver's bilingual language practices in the process of language shift. It argues that certain multilingual practices actually discourage children's multilingualism and devalue the language at the same time as they provide preverbal children with direct input. The analysis is based on data collected in Russophone urban families of ethnic Kazakhs. Drawing from work on registers and footing, the paper demonstrates that in these families the Kazakh language, while quantitatively prevailing in caregiver's speech, systematically co‐occurs with Baby Talk – a specific register directed to infants and toddlers in their preverbal stage. The metapragmatic typification of talking Kazakh to non‐agentive objects‐of‐minding, and talking Russian to autonomous social agents, suggests that language practices envision expert members of the local community as Russian speaking. This ideology sustains the ongoing language shift to Russian despite families’ aspiration to raise Kazakh‐Russian bilingual children.     

Assessment of study abroad outcomes in Chinese as a second language: gains in cross-cultural adaptability,language contact and proficiency

Participants were 109 American college students studying Chinese in a study-abroad programme in Beijing. Following Kelley and Meyer, intercultural competence was defined as cross-cultural adaptability involving four dimensions (emotional resilience, flexibility/openness, perceptual acuity and personal autonomy) and was measured with a survey. A language contact questionnaire was used to document the amount of time spent on social activities. Language proficiency was measured with a standardised Chinese test. Results revealed that intercultural competence and language contact combined explained 37.7% of the proficiency gains. Language contact had direct effects on proficiency, but intercultural competence had indirect effects, mediated by language contact.     

Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora1

Fishman's Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) emphasizes the family in maintaining the heritage languages of immigrant communities. This study uses interview data from Sri Lankan Tamil communities in the U.S.A., U.K., and Canada to explain how families account for the rapid loss of Tamil in the diaspora. It shows how the positive valuation of English since British colonization, the need to make up for past deprivations because of caste, religious, and gender inequality, the pressure for migrants to join the social mainstream, and the need to resolve intergenerational tensions influence the family to forego language maintenance goals. The findings encourage us to situate the family in macro‐social institutions, power, and history in order to understand the prospects for language maintenance. The article provides an inside view of the Sri Lankan Tamil migrant families to explain how they resolve the tensions of valuing cultural identity and yet disregarding heritage language proficiency.     

Hungarian verbal puzzles and the intensity of language contact

Grammaticality judgments of bilingual Hungarians in Slovakia and Ukraine vs. Yugoslavia show that overt objects are much more acceptable in the northern Slavic countries than in Yugoslavia. Two conflicting hypotheses have been advanced to explain this difference. The structural hypothesis claims that Serbian cliticization is responsible, while the socio-historical hypothesis claims that the difference in grammaticality judgments is due to a difference in the duration of Hungarian–Slavic language contact north of and south of present-day Hungary. Data from a seven-country survey (N = 846) show that there is a split between judgments in the northern vs. southern Slavic countries across a wide range of linguistic variables, which discredits the structural explanation for the object pro-drop variable, at least as the sole cause of change. Moreover, statistical analyses of 24 variables provide substantial empirical verification of Thomason and Kaufman's 'two crucial parameters of intensity of contact in a borrowing situation': time and level of bilingualism. It is shown that the 250 years of contact between Hungarian and Serbian has resulted in much smaller contact effects than the thousand-year-old contact of Hungarian with the northern Slavic languages. Bilingual Hungarians who constitute a local minority in the settlements where they live systematically favor the contact-induced variants of variables vis-a`-vis those who constitute a local majority.     

Language attitudes as predictors of morphosyntactic variation: Evidence from Catalan speakers in southern France

This article explores the potential role of attitudes as motivating factors in language variation and change. This study represents an important departure from existing scholarship through its consideration of quantitative measures of language attitudes as factors in multivariate analyses of linguistic data. Four morphosyntactic variables in Northern Catalan (an obsolescent variety spoken in France) will be examined in order to determine which factors significantly correlate with use of local or supralocal variants. Linear regression modelling reveals firm correlations for two of the variables, wherein positive evaluations of Catalan varieties on the status dimension (cf. Carranza & Ryan, 1975; Woolard, 1989, inter alia) align with supralocal variant use. We will see that attitudes can be helpful in uncovering motivations for language variation, but that qualitative ideological data are indispensable in the interpretation of findings.     

The semiotics of language ideologies in Singapore1

As an ethnically and linguistically diverse society, Singapore has had to grapple with the problem of how to manage this diversity across a range of contexts, thus making it a particularly interesting case study for language ideologies. This paper examines three particular cases taken from the history of Singapore's language policy. In the first situation, the policy remains largely unchanged, varying only in its lexical and textual realizations; in the second, performances in the service of a set of ideologies give rise to potentially serious problems; and in the third, the material consequences of implementing the ideologies lead to changes in the ideologies themselves. By drawing on recent theoretical developments in the study of language ideologies, this paper shows how attention to the sitedness of language ideologies can help provide greater specification and appreciation of the interactional processes by which the ideologies are instantiated.