Recent sociolinguistic research is used to show that the American Sign Language (ASL)-English contact situation does not result in the emergence of a pidgin as supposed. Variation along the ASL-English continuum can be accounted for by interplay of foreigner talk, judgments of proficiency, and learners' attempts to master the target language.…

Analyzes the structure, origins and meanings of the "-o" formations in French slang, characterizing the social groups within which they have gained currency. Points out that this spoken language device usually has a purely expressive, connotational function and that numerous examples of the same formation are found in American English.…

Presents a list of 46 new socio-political terms in Spanish that are being used more frequently in literature today. Definitions of the terms are included as well as the sources where the terms were used. (NCR)

Spanish loanwords in Arizona Tewa are compared with their counterparts in Rio Grande Tewa and Hopi and the process of linguistic acculturation and culture contact are evaluated. Implications for ethnohistorical and comparative research are discussed. (SW)

The purpose of this article is to briefly review recent findings on Ontarian French; to refute claims that it is not an authentic French dialect; and to examine some of the implications these findings may have for French language instruction in Ontario. (Author/SJL)

Reviews what is known about Esperanto as a home language and first language. Recorded cases of Esperanto-speaking families are known since 1919, and in nearly all of the approximately 350 families documented, the language is spoken to the children by the father. The data suggests that this "artificial bilingualism" can be as successful…

Provides a description of the characteristics of intrasentential language mixing produced by a group of Korean-English bilingual children, with a special focus on the distinction between code switching and borrowing. Data suggest that intrasentential language mixing is determined by the bilingual abilities and preferences of the speaker as well as…

Examines the historical changes in agreement patterns between Old Arabic and the New Arabic dialects to see whether they support Versteegh's radical hypothesis of pidginization, creolization, and decreolization. The conclusion is reached that the changes are chiefly because of processes of normal transmissions, "drift," and diffusion. (24…

Discusses phonological errors and their causes in the language performance of beginning to advanced Slovak grammar school students learning English as a foreign language under conditions suggested by G. Nickel (1989). Errors in perception, production, and perception/production are shown to be of different quality and distribution; interferential…

The overall role played by hypercorrection in the literature on language change, language variation, and second language acquisition is reviewed. The paper argues that hypercorrection is not a completely unified phenomenon, citing an empirical study showing that quantitative methods applied to qualitative hypercorrection necessarily involve…

A study of 47,542 telephone directory listings of business names in Brazil to document the extent of Englishization in Brazilian Portuguese indicated that business names, rather than being linked to an international variety of commercial English, may be viewed as a form of function interlanguage identifying the referent as trendy or unique. (28…

Twelve papers on codeswitching are reviewed briefly in this introduction to a special journal issue. The following topics are covered: borrowing versus codeswitching, codeswitching in a political discourse context, situational uses. (16 references) (LB)

Examines the extent to which material from a donor language (Embedded Language or EL) appearing in a recipient language (Matrix Language) shows internal differentiation. It is suggested that models of structural aspects of codeswitching must provide a unified account for all EL material in codeswitching utterances. (Author/LB)

It is argued that anglicisms in Canadian French cover a much broader spectrum than in any European variety of French, with traits of the English language incorporated into spelling, pronunciation, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and phraseology. A typology of these features is proposed, with examples. (Author/MSE)

An analysis of letters written by 19th-century African Americans shows constraints on verbal "-s" marking that parallel those found in the writing of Scotch-Irish immigrants in the same time period and region, specifically a subject type constraint and a proximity to subject constraint. (MDM)