This study investigates the effect of Facebook on Arabic language attrition, i.e., decrease in language proficiency, as exhibited in the use of Colloquial instead of Standard Arabic, use of foreign words although Arabic equivalents exist, and committing spelling errors. A sample of Facebook posts and a corpus of spelling errors on Facebook were…

This dissertation explores Bai language use in Jianchuan County, China. On the basis of interviews with 42 language users, transcripts of spontaneous conversation and elicited narratives, excerpts from Bai texts in an alphabetic orthography and Chinese characters, and six months of participant observation, I demonstrate how language users'…

This paper describes how Chinese-English bilinguals in Taiwan use their languages in asynchronous computer-mediated communication, specifically, via Bulletin Board System (BBS) and email. The main data includes two types: emails collected from a social network and postings collected from two BBS websites. By examining patterns of language choice…