This paper discusses metalinguistic discourse and orthographical practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the southern Netherlands ("Flanders"). Whereas a lot is known about Dutch language standardization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what happened after that, especially in the southern territories, is still…

The present study investigates the role of concurrent and retrospective verbal report in exploring the cognitive processes of six pairs of advanced ESL learners engaged on a written discourse completion task eliciting status-unequal requests in English. Qualitative analysis of the concurrent data indicate that (i) social contextual aspects of the…

Hong Kong popular culture played an important role in the construction and consolidation of Hong Kong identity long before the handover to China. In the past few years leading up to the 10th anniversary of the handover, both Hong Kong and China have undergone numerous changes which seem to be changing their relations. Whilst Hong Kong people had…

The monolingualism of New Zealand has often been remarked on, but statutory and demographic changes in recent years suggest a shift away from the dominance of the English language. New Zealand now has two official languages, the indigenous Maori language and New Zealand Sign Language, and census data report a decreasing proportion of monolingual…

This paper examines the status-unequal requests of 89 advanced mixed-L1 learners and 87 British English native speakers elicited by a written discourse completion task. Significant differences were observed in all three dimensions analysed: internal and external modification, and perspective. The data demonstrate learners' overuse of zero marking…

This paper aims to reveal mechanisms of language maintenance and shift in the rural post-colonial multilingual island community of Palau in the Western Pacific, using social networks as an explanatory framework. I explore the usefulness of social networks from three perspectives, investigating whether and how social networks can explain changes in…

The widespread use of cell phones has led to the proliferation of messages sent using the Short Messaging Service (SMS). The 160-character limit on text messages encourages the use of shortenings and other shortcuts in language use. When bilingual speakers use SMS, their access to multiple sources of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other…

This study provides an empirical examination of how American learners of German accomplish the social action of requesting in L2 conversation, demonstrating how L2 learners use their linguistic and interactional resources to orient to preference structure in their talk. The data illustrate the sequential contingencies surrounding requests and…

The paper argues that ethnolinguistic vitality depends on four crucial social psychological factors: perceived strength differential, intergroup distance, utilitarianism and intergroup discordance. The influence of these factors on the vitality of subordinate and dominant groups is outlined. It is proposed that the vitality of both types of groups…

This paper draws on the recently theorised notions of space and scale in sociolinguistics to investigate the complexity and micro-variation of the Chinese language in the context of mass internal migration, and the way in which sociolinguistic processes shed light on the construction of migrant identities. In spite of the enormously rich diversity…

Simultaneous speech and turn-taking patterns vary considerably across cultures. Research on varieties of Spanish has confirmed that frequent, lengthy overlaps within and between turns are common. In this paper it is suggested that when speakers engage in simultaneous talk, they observe Grice's Cooperative Principle by adjusting their utterances so…

This paper attempts to show ways in which two Thai brothers (aged 9 and 13) living temporarily in the United States, employ bilingual code-switching to organize their conversation. Using the sequential analysis developed by Auer (1984, 1995), this paper describes how the two boys employ code-switching to negotiate the language for the interaction…

The aim of the study is to identify and interpret the exact aspects of Greek interlanguage modification which present deviations from native usage. As such, it is an investigation of Greek ESL university students' request modification and a comparison to British English native speakers. More specifically, it concentrates on the mitigating function…

After briefly outlining Bernstein's personal and educational history, the paper goes on to review the scope of his work over the past 30 years, his theoretical contribution and his position among colleagues in the post-WWII era of British sociology. There follows a more detailed examination of the main tenets of his theory, pointing out that…

This article constitutes a re-reading of and an attempt to rehabilitate Basil Bernstein, both of which are important in light of the interpretation of Bernstein as a proponent of the verbal deficit view, and the general discrediting of his work on social class differences in the British educational system, as related to what he later called…