This study examined Americans' attitudes toward standard American English (SAE) and nine, non-Anglo foreign accents: Arabic, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Hispanic, Mandarin, Russian, and Vietnamese. Compared to SAE speakers, all foreign-accented speakers were rated as harder to understand, more likely to be categorised as foreign (rather than…

This study investigates variation in listeners' accuracy in accent identification of native and non-native speakers of English. Thirty native speakers of New Zealand (NZ) English completed a free identification task with stimuli extracted from naturalistic conversations of several speakers from three native and two non-native English language…

Past research has tended to ignore the emergence or existence of "middle zone" varieties such as topolects or regiolects. In addition, attitudinal dynamics have received little attention, including their contribution towards the re-evaluation of the status of language varieties. Regarding the status of Cantonese, linguistic, political…

After an introduction to the Italian linguistic situation, highlighting the remarkable number of language varieties present in Italy today, the paper goes on to review briefly the history of micronationalism in Italy, and to propose a classification of language planning based on the distinction between macro- and micronationalism. There follows a…