Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Serbian/Albanian Bilingualism In Kosova: Reversal Or Entrenchment Of The Curse Of Babel?, Sarah Littisha Jansen

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Dynamics of power between multiple languages in one space are indicative of and inform the relationship between the speakers of those languages. In post-conflict Kosova, two ethno-linguistic groups, Kosovar Serbians and Kosovar Albanians, live in a context where language has become politicized and long-standing linguistic, political, and social hierarchies of power have been radically disturbed. This paper describes the myriad of images of the Serbian language in the country, focusing particularly on those that come from the Serbian/Albanian bilingual Kosovar Albanian community. It then discusses how these inform language as a political tool and what the consequences of this are …

Changing Language, Remaining Pygmy, Serge Bahuchet

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

In this article I am illustrating the linguistic diversity of African Pygmy populations in order to better address their anthropological diversity and history. I am also introducing a new method, based on the analysis of specialized vocabulary, to reconstruct the substratum of some languages they speak. I show that Pygmy identity is not based on their languages, which have often been borrowed from neighboring non-Pygmy farmer communities with whom each Pygmy group is linked. Understanding the nature of this partnership, quite variable in history, is essential to address Pygmy languages, identity and history. Finally, I show that only a multidisciplinary …

Effect Of Dialect On Identification And Severity Of Speech Impairment In Indigenous Australian Children, Bethany J. Toohill, Sharynne Mcleod, Jane Mccormack

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

This study investigated the effect of dialectal difference on identification and rating of severity of speech impairment in children from Indigenous Australian backgrounds. The speech of 15 Indigenous Australian children identified by their parents/caregivers and teachers as having ‘difficulty talking and making speech sounds’ was assessed using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology. Fourteen children were identified with speech impairment on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology using Standard Australian English (AusE) as the target pronunciation; whereas 13 were identified using Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) as the target. There was a statistically significant decrease in seven children’s severity …

Invited Editorial: African Pygmies, What's Behind A Name?, Paul Verdu, Giovanni Destro-Bisol

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

No abstract provided.

Being Physically Active: Perceptions Of Recent Mexican Immigrant Women On The Arizona-Mexico Border, Donna Hartweg, Christina Isabelli, Marylyn Mcewen, Rosie Piper

Scholarship

Mexican immigrant women report being physically active prior to arrival in the United States. However, with increased years of U.S. residency, this positive lifestyle behavior diminishes, increasing their risk of obesity and chronic disease. A qualitative descriptive design was used to elicit recent Mexican immigrant women’s perceptions of “being physically active” and to describe how living in the United States has influenced their perceptions of being physically active. Three themes were inductively generated: (a) purposeful exercising, (b) being active, and (c) being active with purposeful exercising. Overall, being physically active was described within the context of daily living well below …

Beefmoves: Dissemination, Diversity, And Dynamics Of English Borrowings In A German Hip Hop Forum, Matt Garley, Julia Hockenmaier

Publications and Research

We investigate how novel English-derived words (anglicisms) are used in a German-language Internet hip hop forum, and what factors contribute to their uptake.

Fundaments Of Morfo-Syntactical Ergativity (Fundamentos De Ergatividad Morfológico-Sintáctica), Eva Núñez-Méndez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The main goal of this research paper is to clarify the concept of ergativity, which has been used as a modern term in recent grammar studies, from a morpholo gicalsyntactical approach. This term, nonexistent in the traditional linguistic studies on romance languages, has been newly applied to values of transitivity where the participant roles in the action may or may not have the agent function. latin and his daughter-languages have a syntactical accusative profile where the subject of the action is also the agent, different in form from the direct object. in latin, the correspondence subject-agent is marked morphologically in …

Choice, Coercion, Capabilities And Conflict: Multilingualism, Human Development And Peacekeeping In A Globalized World, Megan R. Thompson

Honors Projects

The development of English into an international lingua franca is not an inevitable result of globalizing forces. Instead, the “triumph” of the English language and the consequent decline of the world’s linguistic diversity cannot be viewed in isolation of its parallel history of conquest, violence, power and exploitation. Today, the languages privileged by the powerful—not only English, but also other dominant languages or standard varieties of those languages—determine access to social, economic and political mobility. This fact renders any discussion of language “choice” irrelevant—when a choice yields the sacrifice of basic human capabilities on one hand and the denial of …

Acquisition Of The Non-Generic Definite Article By Spanish Learners Of English As A Foreign Language, Christina Isabelli, Rachel Slough

Scholarship

This study explains the acquisition of the non-generic uses of the English definite article the by L2 learners. Chilean university students completed a questionnaire containing deleted obligatory uses of the. in all, four identified categories showed to have different accuracy rates. Of the four categories, the one most similar to the L1 was the least difficult to acquire while the most different resulted as the most difficult. This concurs with other research and can be explained by L1 rules that are transferred to the L2. The other two categories did not show the same acquisition rate as compared to previous …

Observing Census Enumeration Of Non-English Speaking Households In The 2010 Census: Spanish Report, Christina Isabelli, Yuling Pan, Lubkemann Stephen

Scholarship

This study was part of an ethnographic research project in the 2010 Census Assessment and Research Program to observe the 2010 Census Nonresponse Followup interviews with households that speak a language other than English, in areas of the U.S. with heavy concentrations of residents with limited English proficiency. A multilingual research team consisting of seven sub-teams in the seven primary languages (Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese) was commissioned to carry out the research in the 2010 Census.

The objectives of this research were to identify: (1) how language and socio-cultural factors affect the enumeration of non-English-speaking populations …

On Swearwords And Slang, Robert Moore

Faculty Publications

Slang lexemes and swearwords are commonly discussed in conjunction with each other as though they were slightly different versions of the same phenomenon. However, they clearly are not, as a careful consideration of their different prototypical functions reveals. Each of these lexical categories has a central or core function, and in each case this function is linked to the obligatory expression of affect. Different kinds of affect are entailed in the prototypical uses of slang and of swearwords, but in the case of both of these lexical types, this affect is incompatible with the formality and deference of honorifics, or, …

Current Perspectives On Tunisian Sociolinguistics, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Despite its small size (63,170 sq miles) and a rather small population with a stable growth rate,2 Tunisia represents a rich sociolinguistic laboratory with a long history of bilingualism and language contact. The delicate position of Berber, the diglossic situation of Arabic and the increasing efforts for Arabization, the regional and social variation in Tunisian Arabic, the presence of French, and the gradual spread of English, among other closely-related topics, constitute the core themes of research within Tunisian sociolinguistics. Since the publication of R. M. Payne’s Language in Tunisia in 1983, no attempt has been made to reassess the situation …

Talking Masturbation: Men, Women, And Sexuality Through Playful Discourse, Geoffrey Evans-Grimm

Honors Projects

This study seeks to understand the relationship between talking about masturbation and masturbation as an everyday practice in the United States. This essay is arranged in terms of a number of overlapping sections that converge to offer a clearer interpretive context for a discussion of the results of the questionnaire and interview data. The first part of my essay is an attempt to make sense of the cultural history and to situate conceptions about masturbation and attempts to regulate it up to present day. Then, as a gendered talk, it is necessary to engage in a theoretical discussion of gender …

The English Experience: An Examination Of Philippine English Use Among Filipino Immigrants In The United States, Nicholas Macias-Williams

Theses Digitization Project

The present study aims to discover how a variety of world English, like Philippine English, serves Filipino immigrants who use it here in the United States. In order to conduct this investigation, a series of one-on-one interviews with ten Filipino immigrants was conducted. This thesis examines the attitudes of a group of adult Filipino immigrants to the U.S. towards the English language vis-a-vis their Filipino languages, and their experiences using English in the Philippines and the U.S.

Argument Encoding And Pragmatic Marking Of The Transitive Subject In Shiwilu (Kawapanan), Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a nearly extinct Kawapanan language from Peruvian Amazonia. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it investigates the obligatory cross-referencing of arguments in the complex Shiwilu verb. This system is predominantly nominative accusative, with the caveat that main clause object markers coincide with those conveying subject in one type of clause involving nominal predicates, as well as subject and object of dependent clauses. Second, this article provides a first analysis of the enclitic =ler, which may attach to transitive subjects and thus exhibits an ergative-like distribution. Unlike the situation in languages with syntacticized ergative systems, …

Gendering French In Tunisia: Language Ideologies And Nationalism, Keith Walters

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper seeks to describe and account for a common ideology among Tunisians and North Africans more broadly that associates the use of French with women, thereby symbolically associating the use of Arabic with men. In this regard, the use of French can be said to be "gendered" there. In an effort to historicize this phenomenon, I sketch the social history of French in Tunisia, particularly in regards to the access female and male Tunisians would historically have had to it through the institution of schooling. I then consider the different relationships contemporary Tunisian men and women have with French. …

Castilian Transcodic Markers In Internet Catalan : Analysis Of Generic, Regional And Linguistic Factors, Craig Stokes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is a study of Castilian transcodic markers in the Catalan written on the Internet. Thirty Castilian transcodic markers representing five categories were run through the interface of the Corpus d'Ús del Català a la Web (CucWeb) to collect information in order to conduct both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The major research questions to be answered deal with the absolute and relative frequencies of these transcodic markers in the CucWeb and the factors behind the production of these non-standard forms. In addition to the frequency of the Castilian transcodic markers in the CucWeb, the initial study provides qualitative analysis …

Expression Of Possession In Spanish In Contact With English : A Sociolinguistic Study Across Two Generations In The Greater New York Metropolitan Area, Maria Cristina Montoya

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACT

Phonetic Adaptations Of Spanish Loanwords In Triqui, Ruth E. Scipione

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study focuses on the results of increased language contact on Spanish loanword adaptation in Copala Triqui at the segmental and prosodic levels. Data from field notes and publications from the 1960s and 1970s were compared to modern 21st century loanword adaptations in 80+ hours of radio broadcasts and recorded elicitations in personal fieldwork in Mexico, Central California and Albany, NY. The overarching goal is to identify a wide range of possible phonetic adaptations at the segmental and prosodic levels and track the possible effects of increased bilingualism on these adaptations. From there it attempts to hypothesize what phonetic variation …

The Present Past - A Middle Swabian Dialect In The 21st Century, Stefanie Hirscher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dialects throughout the Federal Republic of Germany not only vary greatly among themselves, but also tend to show internal variations with regard to dialect speaker groups, due to the influence of Standard German along with other regional factors. Medium-sized towns seem to be at the center of this dialect-standard continuum, as speakers from both rural and more urban areas come together in these towns. This study sought to investigate the state of the Middle Swabian dialect as spoken in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a medium-sized town in Southwestern Germany. Previous studies of this dialect have focused on rural areas and found only …

Mental Models Of The Nature Of Language In Kunming, China, Ellie Ash

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The focus of this study is laypeople's mental models of the varieties of Chinese language. Chinese contains many varieties, primarily dividable into Putonghua (Standard Mandarin; hereafter PTH) and Fangyan (“topolect” 1). The Fangyan are traditionally considered “dialects of Chinese” by both Chinese and Western sources. Many Western linguists note that the dialects span a linguistic range that compares with the range of the Romance languages, but concede the label “dialects” because they share a written standard and because China is considered to be a single country, and especially because the Chinese themselves consider all the Fangyan to be varieties of …

La Hispanización Y La Identidad Hispana En Filipinas, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Acquisition Of Spanish Gender Agreement In Two Learning Contexts: Study Abroad And At Home., Christina Isabelli

Scholarship

The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The participants received grammaticality judgment tests coded for morphological class of the modified noun as well as attributive and predicative adjectives. Data were also collected on social behavior and language contact in Spanish and English in order to explain data outcome. The findings suggest that no difference exists between …

Communication Strategies In Social Interaction Between Arab And Iranian Postgraduate Students., Elham Shahban

Student Works (2010-2019)

Arab and Iranian students must communicate in English in Malaysia but due to their lack of proficiency they tend to use communication strategies (CS) to overcome problems they encounter while communicating in English. According to Corder (1977) CSs are systematic techniques employed by speakers to facilitate communication during conversations. The aim of this study is to investigate the type and frequency of the CSs high and low proficiency Arab and Iranian postgraduate students with differing linguistic background (Arabic and Persian) use when speaking in English with each other. To achieve the objective of the study 12 Arab and Iranian participants …

Penukaran Kod Di Kalangan Guru-Guru Sains Di Sekolah Tamil., Marimuthu Punniaseelan

Student Works (2010-2019)

This research discusses the code switching phenomena among science teachers in Tamil Schools, especially in SJK (T) Vivekananda, Brickfields Kuala Lumpur. The objective of this research is to analyze and draw possible conclusions on the absorption level of the nature of this type of code switching. The notion of polarity and the factors that influence the execution of this code switching is also defined. The researcher selected six teachers for the present study (2 males and 4 females subjects). This selection also takes into consideration the minimum academic achievement that is Diploma in teaching. Another pre- requirement being teaching experience …

Androcentrism In Modern American English: Reforming "The Oppressor’S Language", Kelsey Lee '10

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Language Choice Of Bidayuh Graduates In Kuching-Samarahan Division., Norazuna Norahim

Student Works (2010-2019)

This dissertation describes the language choice patterns of Bidayuh graduates in an urban setting. It demonstrates the interaction between macro-sociological modifications with changes in language choice patterns of the Bidayuh community, an ethnic minority located in East Malaysia. The motivation for the study is driven by the need to ascertain the direction of the changing language choice patterns of its community members, and the extent to which it is threatening the position of the mother tongue. Despite having a population of approximately 170,000 speakers, the Bidayuh language displays characteristics of a “threatened” language. The proximity of the Bidayuh speech community …

How Esol Teachers Become Aware Of Communicative Peace, Josette Leblanc

MA TESOL Collection

This paper examines the implications that the relationship between teacher language awareness and communicative peace may have on educational programs for teachers of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). The evaluation begins by analyzing proposals set out by the applied peace linguist Francisco Gomes de Matos, who suggests that ESOL teachers should teach communicative peace as an element of communicative competence, and also that education programs should provide training to support this approach. By juxtaposing current literature on structural and linguistic violence with Gomes de Matos' classroom techniques, the hypothesis is made that teachers who would teach communicative peace …

Attempting To Analyse (Language) Awareness: A Foray Into The Realm Of People's Perceptions Of, Attitudes Towards, And Conceptions About Language, Evan Zelezny-Green

MA TESOL Collection

This paper presents the process and results of a written questionnaire administered online to 200 individuals, designed to elicit their perceptions of, conceptions about, and attitudes toward language, The questionnaire was based on similar questionnaires presented orally in small groups to European pupils in the context of Language Awareness curriculum projects. The author presents respondents' answers to each question, grouped according to major patterns and underlying themes in the responses. Finally, possible questions for further research are posed, based on the patterns that emerged in the current study.

Realkeepen: Anglicisms In The German Hip-Hop Community, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.