Typological Linguistics and Linguistic Diversity Commons^™

Language, Life, And Indigenous Knowledge: Cultural Contexts In Advanced Kaqchikel Maya Language Education Approaches To Indigenous Language Revitalization In Kik'aslemal Ri Kaqchikela': An Advanced Kaqchikel Maya Language Textbook, José Israel Herrera

Journal of Maya Heritage

Abstract. This article examines the relationship between Indigenous language revitalization and the continuity of socially embedded systems of knowledge through the case of advanced Kaqchikel Maya language education. Drawing upon scholarship on Indigenous pedagogies, linguistic anthropology, and Indigenous epistemologies, the article explores how culturally grounded approaches to language learning contribute not only to the development of linguistic competence but also to the reproduction of memories, values, and intellectual traditions. Particular attention is devoted to Kik'aslemal ri Kaqchikela': An Advanced Kaqchikel Maya Language Textbook, whose thematic organization and collaborative development illustrate broader processes of knowledge production and cultural continuity. Rather than …

Russian Linguistic Policy In The Post-Soviet World, Payton G. Deichler

The Dialogue

This paper examines the role of the Russian language as an instrument of soft power in the post-Soviet space, arguing that its geopolitical influence extends beyond demographic prevalence to the institutional frameworks through which it is promoted and mediated. Rather than functioning solely as a neutral medium of communication, Russian operates as an infrastructural component of influence that shapes access to media ecosystems, educational systems, and professional mobility across former Soviet republics. Drawing on the concept of a “Monopoly of Interpretation,” this study proposes that the centralized, state-linked promotion of Russian enables the consolidation of political narratives within shared linguistic …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Amazigh Lexical Substrate In Tunisian Derja: An Outcome Of Linguistic Contact On Youtube And Facebook, Soubeika Bahri

Journal of Amazigh Studies

Despite the extensive discussion of the structural and lexical impact of Tamazight on North African spoken varieties in Morocco, Algeria, and Libya (Berkai 4-14; Souag 2018, 192-200; Faizi 29-39; Bensoukas and Boudlal 179-21; Zellou 1-13), little is known about the linguistic contact outcome between the Tunisian spoken variety (henceforth, Ettounsi or Tunisian Derja) and Tamazight. In this article, we present and analyze Amazigh linguistic substrate examples in the lexicon of Ettounsi. Contact-induced change (Lafkioui 51-93; Thomason 339-46; Heine and Kuteva, 529-72) and language contact on YouTube (Garley, 77-106), along with the method of computer-mediated discourse (Androutsopoulos, 419-438), offer …

Enjeux De Contacts De Langues Et D’Oralitures Dans Les Noms D’Ogresse Dans La Kabylie Des Babors, Massinissa Garaoun

Journal of Amazigh Studies

La Kabylie des Babors est une région montagneuse littorale située au nord-est de l’Algérie. Trois langues amazighes y sont pratiquées : la tabǧawit (ou kabyle oriental), la taɛemmuct (ou chaoui des Amouchas) et la tasaḥlit. L’une des figures majeures du conte amazigh et nord-africain est l’ogresse (Farès). Celle-ci est décrite comme une créature féminine, vivant seule ou en famille, isolée des Hommes et pouvant se nourrir de ces derniers. À partir d’un corpus de contes recueillis auprès de femmes originaires de différentes confédérations des Babors depuis 2017, j’ai rassemblé les dénominations ainsi que les principales caractéristiques attribuées aux ogres …

Principal Agency 50 Years After The Lau Decision: Building And Sustaining Bilingual Education Programs For Asian Languages, Kevin M. Wong, Zhongfeng Tian

Education Division Scholarship

This study examined how three champion principals of Asian language dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs—Cantonese, Korean, and Mandarin—in California have navigated the oscillating language-in-education policies after the Lau decision. We explored principals' various roles through a lens of agency in a social justice leadership framework, specifically considering the opportunities and challenges for agentive leadership from three different phases: foregrounding and engaging, planning and implementing, and evaluating and sustaining. Findings demonstrate that the success of DLBE programs goes beyond the overarching language policies that supposedly enable bilingual education; rather it hinges on the bottom-up commitment, collaboration and resilience of principals, …

Two Multilingual Regions In Southwestern Amazonia, Hein Van Der Voort

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Southwestern Amazonia is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the Americas. It is possible that traditional Indigenous small-scale multilingualism used to exist in two neighboring regions in what is now Rondônia, on the Brazilian side of the Guaporé River. Permanent contact with representatives of Western society from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards led to great demographic, social, cultural, and economic upheaval among the Indigenous societies in the Rio Branco-Colorado and the Apediá-Corumbiara river basins. Early ethnographic reports suggest that these societies were characterized by traditional small-scale multilingualism. In this article, I summarize the evidence for this …

Memetic Epidemiology: A Mathematical Model For Tracking The Spread Of Linguistic Features Across Western Europe, Benjamin Shavitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a powerful new method for demonstrating the role of contact in potential cases of linguistic contact spread, Memetic Epidemiology, that can facilitate extensive future research. This dissertation introduces and demonstrates the use of this method on examples from Western and Central Europe.

Part I begins by providing theoretical background for Memetic Epidemiology using understandings, including Memetics, and Evolutionary Phonology and its extensions. Part I proceeds to lay out the objective of Memetic Epidemiology: to provide a new means of demonstrating that contact influenced the rise of linguistic features in certain languages during …

Rhyming Tactics In Korean Hip-Hop With Two Approaches Of English And Korean Syllable Structures, Gihyun Gal

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Rhyming Tactics in Korean Hip-Hop with Two Approaches of English and Korean Syllable Structures

Today, Korean Hip-Hop (KHH) has been slowly moving beyond a localized pop culture through the internet and media. This study finds that rhyming patterns in KHH are much more complex than prior research suggests. Especially, this study focuses on an evolution of Korean Hip-Hop through the time such as since 1989 to 2015. Park (2016) discusses how Korean rappers think about using rhyming tactics as "[m]over, the concept of rhyming was not conceptualized as belonging to the Korean language by most of rappers. Even if rappers …

Translanguaging In The Mtb-Mle Classroom: A Case Of An Island School With Multilingual Learners, Marvin C. Casalan

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Several studies on the development of translanguaging as a linguistic resource in a multilingual classroom have been done. The findings of the research imply that using translanguaging in English language teaching and learning is a useful method, especially in a classroom where English is taught as a second or foreign language. The primary goal of this research, on the other hand, is to look into the languages presented in an MTB-MLE as a subject and investigate the linguistic hybridity of the mother tongue used in the classroom as a language exercise, and find out the teacher’s perspectives on teaching a …

Resurrecting Gaelic: Modernity And Heritage Language Revival In Scotland In A Comparative Perspective, Sean Coady

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Many people from across the world have little or no connection to their heritage languages. Whether this loss is caused by conquest, colonialization, or simply lack of parent-child transmission, many believe that they are missing an integral part of their cultural identity and want to reclaim the languages of their forebearers. There is wide debate about how, why, and if this linguistic reclamation and revitalization should happen because, in the face of modernity and language evolution, the best solutions are not always clear. What constitutes successful language revitalization in the modern world, and why does it happen? Gaelic in Scotland …

Creating A Theoretical Framework To Underpin Discourse Assessment And Intervention In Aphasia, Lucy Dipper, Jane Marshall, Mary Boyle, Deborah Hersh, Nicola Botting, Madeline Cruice

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that …

“So, Literally,…Basically,...It’S Like…”: A Study Into The Generational And Sociological Impact Of American Language Culture, Richard Moreno

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Language is unique to the human species. It serves to communicate thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. Within the context of this capstone I outline the theory that language is much more than this. Words can also serve to bond or reject, based on the level of acceptance within social groups towards the speaker. In seeking to discover what effects specific language utterances have on social interaction and the processes involved in developing cohesiveness collective identity in these groups, I found that they do have a definite impact and this is based mainly within generational parameters. Using a mixed method approach of …

Peaze Up! Adaptation, Innovation, And Variation In German Hip Hop Discourse, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

In this study, I investigate the stylistic use of various forms of the hip hop leave-taking peace in a 12.5-million-word corpus (2000-2011) of German-language Internet hip hop discussions. The English orthography is compared with a number of hybrid variants including, e.g., , , and . I analyze the distribution of these variants over time by comparison to use of the form in an American hip hop forum. I complement these results with a qualitative analysis of peace and its variants as situated in discourse, drawing a connection between linguistic features, discursive use, and corpus distribution. The discourse of German hip …

Chinese Slang, Robert L. Moore

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Design Research: Typography Within The Israeli Linguistic Landscape, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

A linguistic landscape signifies language used within a physical or virtual public space, in which communication is presented in typographic form, portraying a message to an audience. Within the state of Israel, the linguistic landscape presents a unique situation in which it is common to view municipal and commercial multilingual signs that are designed using Hebrew, English, and Arabic letterforms. By studying the diverse linguistic landscape within Israeli urban environments, the article offers perspectives on the use of multilingual visual language, based on discussions with five Israeli designers in the summer of 2015.

Bilingual Typography: Study Of The Linguistic Landscape Of Jeddah, Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Abstract: With the rise of globalization and the spread of Western culture across the globe, the use of English as an “international” language is often represented in bilingual and multilingual typographic signage. Throughout the Middle East North Africa and the Gulf region, the integration of Arabic and Latin letterforms is commonly viewed within the signage of storefronts, street signs, advertising billboards, and informational materials. This paper explores the use of bilingual/multilingual typography within the linguistic landscape of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

English In South Asia And Pedagogical Implications, Brittany R. Ehret

Senior Honors Theses

English at present maintains a significant role as a second or foreign language in the region of South Asia as well as globally. In a discussion of this topic, it is important to explore a brief history of the expansion of English and its origins in South Asia. It is also essential to provide a background of South Asian English and its unique linguistic characteristics as well as its use in different contexts of South Asia. The perspectives of linguists and educators who are native to the region of South Asia should be included as much as possible in this …

Seen And Not Heard: The Relationship Of Orthography, Morphology, And Phonology In Loanword Adaptation In The German Hip Hop Community Online, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

In this study, a particular development in language behavior, the use of the -ed suffix from English in both participle and non-participle contexts, is investigated in the domain of the German hip hop community. This morphological-orthographic feature is analyzed from a linguistic and distributional standpoint in a 12.5 million word corpus of German hip hop discussion, revealing its patterns of use over a decade in both contexts within this community, along with supplemental examples from YouTube videos. This corpus analysis is paired with a case study of a discourse event between two forum participants negotiating the use of this form, …

La Sociolinguistique Postcoloniale En Amérique Hispanophone Et En Afrique Francophone : Un Drame Linguistique En Deux Actes, Eva Valenti

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the sociolinguistic situations in postcolonial Latin America and francophone North Africa (the Maghreb) through a comparative lens. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Spain and France’s differing colonial agendas and language ideologies affected the relationships between colonizer and colonized, and, by extension, the role that Spanish and French play(ed) in these regions after decolonization. Finally, it explores how Spain and France’s contemporary discourses frame colonial participation in the two languages’ development, and the psychological effects these ideologies have had on the formerly colonized.

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 …

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 …

Language, Racism, And Ethnicity, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

While ethnic prejudices can be expressed in and through language, they are not, however, intrinsically linguistic in nature. They are, instead, supralinguistic concepts that become disguised as linguistic ones and imported into the theater of language. The pathways that facilitate this importation have been made by the repeated interconnections between the concept of language and the concept of race. In other words, language in the service of racism and ethnocentrism cannot occur without conceptualizing language and race in similar ways. Accordingly, the identification of language with race is not possible without the genetic misprisions that create the myth of race …

The History Of The Evolution Of Shorthand, Selma O. Preuss

Bachelors’ Theses

One manifestation of man's superiority over the rest of the animal kingdom consists in the power of communicating thought by means of speech. At first when all mankind dwelt together, a spoken language was sufficient to meet the demands. When, however, the human race began to disperse over the earth, another means of communication was found necessary. Consequently, the art of writing was introduced, crude at first, but gaining in ease, grace, and speed through the ages, until it reached the acme of its perfection. To the literary art the whole commonwealth of other arts must bow down am resign …