Manuscripts are known to transmit cultural heritage across generations along with thoughts, knowledge, customs, and people's behaviors. The current study aimed to examine the influence of Arabic manuscripts on the Malay and the Acehnese tradition with the spread of Islam. For this purpose, an Acehnese manuscript, "Kitab Tauhid" (KT), was…

All languages change over time. English has undergone continuous change throughout its three major periods: Old English (roughly from 450 to 1100 AD), Middle English (from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English (from 1500 to the present). Sound is one of the most easily influenced parts of language to be subject to different changes. Sound change is…

Errors are a reflection of competence level of language users. Therefore, with the purpose of understanding the competence level of teachers of English, the present study analyzed errors produced by twenty three non-native English speaking teachers pursuing a Bachelor of Education degree in Sri Lanka. Employing qualitative content analysis method,…

Hardly any work has been done on the features of Philippine English in the clausal level from spoken discourses from a professional group. This paper compares the cases of inverted subject-auxiliary in embedded questions of the same group of professionals between 1999 and the years of 2016-2019, thus spanning almost 20 years. A total of 167 hits…

Since the colonization of the Americans, Filipinos have been using English as their second language and have been accustomed to using the language alongside local languages. The centuries of the extensive contact between American English and Filipino language raises questions pertaining language change and language identity. This paper reports the…

This research is a multi-aspect exploratory investigation of Russian English institutional written discourse and highlights its features demonstrated by Russian native learners, tertiary students of English for the tourism and hospitality industry. The author approaches the theme from the perspectives of World Englishes and the pedagogical agenda.…

This article focuses on "gheada," a phonetic feature characteristic of certain areas of Galicia (Spain), unknown in Castilian and Portuguese, consists of the pronunciation of /g/ ([g], [y]) as [h]. This phonetic innovation, which is widespread in Western Galicia, has been traditionally stigmatized as a sign of rusticity and lack of…

The analysis of interviews with 14 speakers of Honduran Spanish found that group "r,""l" glides, and "s" inhibit spirantization variably, much as they do in Colombian Spanish, presenting a view that attributes spirantization to syllable structure for a more comprehensive explanation of the variable processes. (29…

A formal reading of word groups and a same/different listening test revealed that Hungarian Americans in South Bend, Indiana, exhibit a continuum in a short front unrounded low vowel phoneme, showing important differences between the informant's perception and production. The Hungarian-American and metropolitan Hungarian data were compared to…

Variations in the use of perfect "have" and its alternatives in the Trinidadian creole continuum are examined, based on data from a sample of speakers from different social backgrounds. The findings have implications for the study of morphosyntactic variation in other divergent dialect situations. (Contains 56 references.) (Author/LB)

The empirical basis for this article is a series of studies of glottalization in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. These studies show that, while females lead in the use of glottal replacement, males prefer glottalization. This pattern is interpreted in terms of a preference of males for localized variants, whereas females lead in adopting supra-local…

Notes that English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Suggests the existence of an attractive theoretical integration of categorical and variable processes in the grammar to account for the constraint. (26 references) (Author/CK)

The phenomenon of retroflexion is discussed, and its occurrence in about 150 selected languages is examined from a geographical and a diachronic point of view. The clustering of such languages into distinct areas has been explained through the postulation of a hypothesis regarding their development in language. After a detailed examination of four…

Standard manuals of Spanish pronunciation recognize that both [+continuant] and [-continuant] surface variants occur for the voiced obstruents/bdg/. Within generative phonology, it has been assumed that the systematic phonemic representation for these voiced obstruents should be [-continuant] /bdg/, with a rule of spirantization converting these…

Analysis of the distributional properties of non-syllabic vowels within word boundaries in Italian demonstrates: the role of phonological constraints on the distribution of non-syllabic words; the syllabification possibilities within each type of sequence by setting up a structural model; and the phonemic occurrences in vowel sequences collected…