The complex notion of the public/private distinction of social spheres has not been systematically investigated in sociolinguistics; particularly in the case of bidialectal kindergarten age children and how they construct their social lives around this distinction in a public environment such as that of school. No simple continuum can clearly…

This study looks at the discursive construction and negotiation of hybrid identities within binational couples. I analyze conversations produced by Anglophones married to German-speaking Swiss residing in central Switzerland. I employ Bucholtz & Hall's sociocultural linguistic model (2004, 2005, 2010), which views identity as emergent in…

Children of binational couples are often raised in the community of one of the parents and, thus, have limited exposure to the language of the other parent. This study focuses on a British/Moroccan family in the UK, where English is the dominant home language and Moroccan Arabic is the "other" language. Analysis of "live"…

The present study analyses bilingual conversations taking place in binational families living in the UK. The focus is on two Polish/English stepfamilies, where the Polish mothers' concern with preserving and developing their children's linguistic and cultural identity collides with the English partner's limited knowledge of Polish.…

This paper discusses a language ideological debate that took place in Canadian national newspapers following the opening ceremonies for the 2011 Vancouver Olympics. Reports on the insufficient use of French during the opening ceremonies sparked protest from politicians, official commentators, citizens and online newsreaders alike. Previous…

Indigenous children growing up in the remote regions of Australia live in multilingual communities which are often undergoing rapid language shift. In these communities, children are exposed to a range of language input, including the traditional language of the area, a local creole and Standard Australian English. The extent to which the…

In this paper I closely examine spontaneous interactions between members of a tri-generation Italian American family. I argue that members show different language preferences and differing attitudes towards the family's multilingual identity but that they all demonstrate a degree of "engagement" with the heritage language. Phenomena that I…

This paper examines the linguistic and cultural development of three US university students in a one-month study-abroad program in Mexico, as represented in their bilingual journals. Through narrative analysis, the paper explores students' varied evaluations of their study-abroad experiences, as well as how these evaluations seemed to affect their…

In this article, I draw on contemporary theorizing on the concept of face (e.g., Ting-Toomey 1994, 2004; Tracy 2008) and research on Islamic and Arabic cultures and linguistic strategies (e.g., Beeman 1986; Hegland 1998; Wilce 2005; Al Zidjaly 2006) to explore the role that the Internet plays in enabling Muslim Arabs to manage or save their…

This article explores the notion of agency in language learning and use as discursively, historically, and socially mediated. It further explores how agency can be understood as variously enabled and constrained as individuals move from one cultural, linguistic, and/or geographical space to another. These explorations focus on how agency is…

This study explores the pragmatic awareness of instructed L2 learners of Greek (economic migrants) by examining the extent to which these learners display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic and grammatical violations. Methodologically, the study is largely based on the Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei (1998) study on pragmatic…

This paper investigates two naturally occurring business interpreting situations where there are a number of participants. Unlike dialogue interpreting situations where there are only two primary interlocutors, the overall interaction shows more complexity in these multi-party situations. This, in turn, means that the interpreters' functions and…

A handful of recent incidents hints at an ideological struggle over the use of the English word "fag(got)" and the Spanish word "maricon" in public discourse. This article examines the discursive and ideological struggle over the terms through the comparison of two cases in which Spanish/English bilingual Latinos in the U. S. use what might be…

Four years after the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned from Britain to China, a survey was conducted in 2001 to examine the attitudes of students toward Cantonese (the vernacular language), English (the colonizer's and international language), and Putonghua (the new ruler's language) in the early postcolonial era of Hong Kong. Eight years…

Discourse markers play significant roles in any spoken interaction. This research examines the functions of the discourse markers (DMs) well, now and and used as turn-initial interruptive devices in a Malaysian radio discourse. Using Schegloff's (2002) framework of what constitutes an interruption in turn-taking and previous studies on the…