Sociolinguists have recently employed the notion of spatiotemporal scales to explain the changing social status of linguistic codes across social and geopolitical domains. Scales enable us to address the portability of semiotic resources in migration with great insight. In addition, unlike romanticized orientations to globalization and…

Review of transcripts of supposedly invariant opinion surveys reveals, rather than suppressing their individual linguistic styles, interviewers make changes in scripted introduction and add unscripted answer-acknowledgments and commentary throughout interviews. Although this is a response to U.S. value of individuality in discourse, it conflicts…

A study of syntactic variation in Spanish spoken by native speakers in the United States examined patterns of variation in different areas of the country. High school students in larger Hispanic communities throughout the country were surveyed concerning their own and their parents' demographic characteristics and their Spanish speaking,…

This study analyzed the accent perceptions of a group of 37 English language learners and 10 American undergraduate students. Each subject listened to a one-minute passage read by four speakers with different accents of English: General American, British English, Chinese English, and Mexican English. Participants then attempted to identify the…