A study identified second-person singular pronoun usage among Salvadoran speakers living in Houston, Texas, to see what changes, if any, have been caused by contact with other Spanish speakers with different speech patterns. Although the results confirm some linguistic behavior observed by others, some unexpected facts and diverging trends were…

The introduction and spread of "Ms" as the courtesy address title for women is a cornerstone of feminist linguistic planning for English. Its introduction aimed to eradicate the discriminatory inequity in the address system that exposed women through their (non)marital relationship with men. The understanding, use and impact of the courtesy title…

This study investigated the encoding of animate/inanimate distinctions in the pronominal systems of a variety of Bantu languages. Various encoding strategies are found to suggest that there is a strong syntactic opposition between animate and inanimate object markers in Bantu languages. Restricted positions and obligatory presence are particularly…

The report, entirely in French, details a study of the concepts of "anglicism" drawn from a wide sample of French Canadian metalinguistic material published between 1800 and 1930. The study analyzed the use of the term "anglicism" and various associated concepts, identified the principal trends in the way anglicisms were…

The linguistic situation in Ireland over the last few centuries is examined from the rise of Irish dialects of English to the present. Four aspects of this history are examined: factors affecting the emergence of Hiberno-English dialects beginning in the seventeenth century, including opportunity for learning English, patterns in literacy and…

A study investigated the phonemic and morphophonemic patterning of the glottal stop in Agutaynen, a Meso-Philippine language, and some comparison with two northern Philippine languages. Agutaynen glottal stop has as its sole origin a neutralization of contrast rule, the operation of which can be noted in three different linguistic environments.…

It is suggested that the notion of prestige has been too readily appealed to in explanations of language variation and change, and that such appeals result in apparent contradictions and conceptual confusions. The term "prestige" has been used by sociolinguists in widely differing ways, and, as a result, the nature of the term has become…

Idioglossia is a private communication system, most commonly occurring in twins. It also occurs between singletons and between other siblings of multiple births. These communication systems range from manual gestures to a fully developed vocal language with its own grammar. The literature of idioglossia is scanty and largely anecdotal. Much of the…

This study examines quantitatively the systems of tense, mood, and aspect in Puerto Rican Spanish spoken in the United States. In the community under investigation, code-switching is an integral part of the communicative repertoire; also, the codes tend to be switched at points around which the surface structures of Spanish and English map onto…

Explores the role of sex of speaker and sex of addressee in determining the appropriateness of forms of address. (AM)

This paper makes three arguments reaffirming the overwhelming complexities inherent in any real history of the language of blacks in North America. (1) Although the study of black English, however that term may be defined, is desirable in itself and was profitable for white linguists during the 1960s and early 1970s, it did not and never will do…

This paper is a response to Lavandera's question regarding the limits of the study of language variation. Sociolinguistics is characterized by its desire to limit representational meaning much more narrowly than formal linguistics. In addition while formal linguistics views language as species-specific and designed to accomodate logical…

This paper discusses the background of the language situation in Guam, comparing the findings of a 1966 survey to the present situation. Apparent changes both in the language situation and in attitudes towards language and some of the causative factors involved in the changes are discussed. The study currently underway, which utilizes informal…

This paper reports on the Arkansas Language Survey, which had two purposes: (1) to explore the idea advanced by Labov that Americans generally have negative attitudes about their language, and to see to what extent this applies to Arkansawyers; and (2) to determine how Arkansawyers judge the way other Americans speak English. The twenty-four white…

This paper reports on a preliminary quantitative study of syntactic constraints on code-switching within discourses in which no change in participants, setting or topic is evident. The goals of the study are to provide a syntactic description of the points at which switches from Spanish to English and English to Spanish are possible and to assess…