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The emergence of new English dialects in postcolonial regions has transformed the politics of English in the world and language ecologies in many regions. Why, how, and when did these dialects develop? Why do they have the accents and grammars that we hear? Are the grammars of these dialects completely different due to the influence of local languages, or similar due to natural tendencies in human cognition? In terms of social identity, do these new speakers behave like native speakers of British or American English, or like language learners? Focusing on two prominent cases; English in India and in Singapore; this book examines the social, historical, and cognitive forces that together crea...
From Here to Denmark: The Importance of Institutions for Good Governance represents the journey of developing nations from a state of poor governance - that manifests itself in various forms, such as lack of respect for rule of law, delay (and even denial) of justice, a capricious and corrupt ruling elite, lives deprived of basic human dignities and marked with fear and insecurity - to a state of good governance, reflected in predictability, accountability, and fairness in governance matters, and the strong presence of the rule of law. Drawing on experiences of some countries which have made the transition to 'Denmark' over time, the book identifies basic enablers which help a society to make the journey from here to Denmark. These are: building sufficient human capital (education and health) and enabling the effective participation by citizens in having a meaningful say in how they are governed.
Multidirectional language contact involving more than two languages is little described. However, it probably represents the most common type of contact in the world, where colonization, rapid socioeconomic and demographic change, and society-wide multilingualism have led to dramatic linguistic change. This book presents fascinating cases of multidirectional contact and convergence between highly diverse languages in an emerging linguistic area in Suriname and the Guianas and proposes a framework for comparable studies.
This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.
This volume emphasizes the energetic nature of linguistic diversity and its consequences of how we think about language, how it affects the individual, education in school, and urban spaces across the globe. Hence, linguistic diversity reflects the constant state of rapid change prevalent in modern societies bearing opportunities as well as challenges. It is the prime objective of this selection of contributions to give a differentiated picture of the chances of linguistic diversity. Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity pays tribute to more recent developments in the study of language, applied linguistics, and education sciences. Contributions in this volume discuss how the concept of language is contextualized in a world of polylanguaging, investigate latent factors of influence, multilingual individuals, multilingual proficiency, multilingual practices and development, multilingual communication as well as teaching practices and whether they foster or hamper multilingual development.
In the three decades of its existence, the annual Going Romance conference has turned out to be the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current theoretical ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are exchanged. The twenty-ninth Going Romance conference was organized by the Radboud University and took place in December 2015 in Nijmegen. The present volume contains a selection of 18 peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages. They represent the wide range of topics at the conference and the variety of research carried out on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and in general linguistics.
Heritage languages, such as the Turkish varieties spoken in Berlin or the Spanish used in Los Angeles, are non-dominant languages, often with little prestige. Their speakers also speak the dominant language of the country they live in. Often heritage languages undergo changes due to their special status. They have received a lot of scholarly attention and provide a link between academic concerns and educational issues. This book takes a language contact perspective: we consider heritage languages from the perspective of their history, their structural properties, and their interaction with other surrounding languages.
Variationist work in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) began in the mid 1970s and steadily progressed during the 1980s. Much of it was reviewed along with newer approaches in Bayley and Preston 1996 (B&P), heavily devoted to VARBRUL analyses that exposed the variability in developing interlanguages and placed variationist work within the canon of SLA. This new volume features three developing trends. First, it widens the scope of L1s of learners (from 6 in B&P to 8) and L2 targets (2 in B&P to 7) and in each case has brought more careful demographic and variable considerations to bear, including heritage languages and study abroad. Second, it modernizes statistics by moving from VARBRUL to the more widely used log-odds probabilities that allow more detailed consideration of variables and their influences. Finally, it deepens consideration of variable sociolinguistic meaning in learner behaviors, a dominating feature of 3rd Wave variationist work.
There are more than 100,000 people in the Netherlands born in a Spanish speaking country, or with at least one parent born there. A large part of them fits the definition of heritage speaker: persons exposed to a heritage language in a naturalistic setting from birth, simultaneously or subsequently exposed intensively to another language in childhood, and with varying degrees of proficiency in the heritage language. This dissertation investigates the Spanish spoken as a heritage language by members of a small but tight-knit subgroup: the first and second generation of Chileans in the Netherlands. This Dutch-Spanish bilingual community was studied from a sociolinguistic perspective, and then linguistically on the basis of 60 hours of recordings. These were gathered through visual elicitation and personal interviews with 40 participants - 24 bilinguals and a control group of 16 monolingual homeland speakers in Chile.