Variety Of Languages Research Articles

A Contrastive Analysis of Diglossia in Japanese and Javanese

This study aims to describe the linguistic situation of the use of Japanese and Javanese varieties in a diglossic situation. This research uses descriptive qualitative method by using data analysis method of pairing method. The method used in data collection is the listening method embodied in the tapping technique and when necessary the researcher uses the listening technique with the recording technique. The results showed that the findings in Japanese in jougei kankei (seniority relationship) determine the type of language used in communication. Language levels include the variety of ordinary forms (Futsu) in informal conversations and polite forms (Teinei) respectful forms (Keigo) in formal conversations. The finding of Javanese language that the situation of diglossia between speakers of Javanese speech community in Asahan dominantly occurs in familiar symmetrical and familiar asymmetrical situations. In the familiar symmetrical situation, all language varieties used are ngoko lugu variant forms. The relationship of social factors that are parallel and the relationship of familiar closeness between speakers causes the use of ngoko varieties with the variant form of ngoko lugu between speakers, while in familiar asymmetrical situations it is dominated by using the form of ngoko lugu, the rest are variant forms of ngoko alus and ngoko alus-ngoko lugu and lugu krama varieties.

Диалект села Старошведское: опыт составления словаря неизученного языка (sjǖn — slītas)

The dialect of the village of Gammalsvenskby (Rus. Старошведское; current Ukrainian name Змiïвка) belongs historically to the Swedish dialects of Estonia, which were spoken before World War II in the Noarootsi peninsula (Sw. Nuckö), in the villages of Kurkse (Korkis) and Vihterpalu (Vippal), and in the islands of the Moonsund archipelago: Osmussaar (Odensholm), Vormsi (Ormsö), Hiiumaa (Dagö), as well as on the islands Suur- and Väike-Pakri (Stora och Lilla Rågöarna), Ruhnu (Runö), Naissaar (Nargö). In 1782, around 1,000 Swedes from the island of Dagö, which at the time belonged to the Russian Empire, were resettled in the Kherson Governorate. There, on the bank of the Dnieper River, a village that later came to be called Gammalsvenskby was founded. The native language of its founders was the dialect of Dagö. Up to end of the 2010s, some of the elderly residents of the present-day village preserved a language variety that goes back to the dialect of Dagö; this is the dialect of Gammalsvenskby. The present-day state of this dialect has not been systematically described in linguistic literature. The only source of data for this article is fi eldwork with speakers of the dialect. The main objective is to present material recorded in the interviews in the most complete way possible and to describe the state of the vocabulary and infl ection in the dialect. The entries include the following information: type of infl ection; translation; phrases, sentences and short texts illustrating the usage (with initials of the informants). In many cases full paradigms are given as well. They include all phonetic and morphological forms that have occurred in the interviews.

The language of Nigerian stand-up comedy

Nigeria is complexly multilingual. Arising from this, Nigerian stand–up comedians employ a variety of linguistic strategies to communicate with the audience. This research investigates the peculiarities of language use in Nigerian stand-up comedy by analysing patterns of code choices in the comic performances of four comedians. Because the stand-up comedy industry is predominant in the Southern part of Nigeria, the comedians chosen for this study are representative of the three geopolitical zones of southern Nigeria. The analysis of the data indicates that (1) although Nigerian stand-up comedians primarily use Nigerian Pidgin (NP) they also employ language alternation and code-switch between NP, English, and a variety of indigenous languages. (2) NP is mainly used in the oral medium. Consequently, features of orality: repetition, parallel structures, anaphora, lexical cushioning, semantic extension, metaphor imagery, sentence fragments, and rhetorical devices, are other dominant features of Nigerian stand-up comedy.

Racial difference in receiving computed tomography for head injury patients in emergency departments

Study objectivePrior studies have suggested potential racial differences in receiving imaging tests in emergency departments (EDs), but the results remain inconclusive. In addition, most prior studies may only have limited racial groups for minority patients. This study aimed to investigate racial differences in head computed tomography (CT) administration rates in EDs among patients with head injuries. MethodsPatients with head injuries who visited EDs were examined. The primary outcome was patients receiving head CT during ED visits, and the primary exposure was patient race/ethnicity, including Asian, Hispanic, Non-Hispanic Black (Black), and Non-Hispanic White (White). Multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed using the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey database, adjusting for patients and hospital characteristics. ResultsAmong 6130 patients, 51.9% received a head CT scan. Asian head injury patients were more likely to receive head CT than White patients (59.1% versus 54.0%, difference 5.1%, p < 0.001). This difference persisted in adjusted results (odds ratio, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.06–2.16, p = 0.022). In contrast, Black and Hispanic patients have no significant difference in receiving head CT than White patients after the adjustment. ConclusionsAsian head injury patients were more likely to receive head CT than White patients. This difference may be attributed to the limited English proficiency among Asian individuals and the fact that there is a wide variety of different languages spoken by Asian patients. Future studies should examine rates of receiving other diagnostic imaging modalities among different racial groups and possible interventions to address this difference.

An Analysis of Jargon used by Asian Comic Writers

This research aims to find out the jargon used by comic writers as a social group. This research was applying the qualitative descriptive method to collect data. The method used to analyze the meaning and function of jargon is descriptive analysis which is visible in each paragraph. Collecting data was carried out by finding out the jargon on Asian comics such as manga, manhwa, and manhua on the website. The results of this research show the meaning and function of jargon used by comic writers. Jargon is a variety of language which is used by certain social groups or professions and is not understood by other groups. Research regarding the use of jargon in Asian comics can be conclude that jargon is used by comic writers to describe their work. The jargon found is in the form of words, phrases, acronyms, and abbreviations. The function of jargon used by comic writers is to identify and describe the word. This research proves that the use of jargon is not only in other communities but also in the comic writing community. The weakness of this research is that some comics still use Chinese, Korean, and Japanese terms. This is because there are no equivalent English words that is suitable to describe it. The words are dantian, qi, and mana. Researcher hope this writing can be a reference for future researchers to do a researching in other aspects of comics relate with linguistics or language learning media. Keywords: Asian Comics, Comics Writer, Jargon, Language Variety, Sociolinguistic

"Speech Is Golden": The Importance of Colloquial Arabic for Reading Standard Arabic for Beginning Readers.

We investigated the role of spoken language in the acquisition of literacy in the context of Arabic diglossia, where the written language, Standard Arabic, deviates substantially from the spoken language, Colloquial Arabic, children acquire naturally from birth. The participants (N = 110; 40 girls) were Saudi Arabic-speaking children in Grades 2-4. Children completed assessments of oral paragraph reading and word decoding using a vowelized script. They also completed three spoken assessments of Colloquial Arabic, which include sentence comprehension, sentence completion, and pragmatic knowledge, as well as a test of phonological awareness. We used path analysis to investigate the contributions of each of the spoken language indicators, decoding, and phonological awareness to reading comprehension (RC) in single and multiple serial mediator models. We found that spoken language (i.e., sentence comprehension, sentence completion, and pragmatic knowledge) and word decoding uniquely contributed to RC. Moreover, word decoding mediated the association between spoken language and RC. The path from spoken language to phonological awareness, then to word decoding, and finally to RC was inconclusive. While most studies on literacy acquisition in the context of Arabic diglossia focus on the linguistic distance between the colloquial (spoken) and the standard (written) language varieties, our results highlight the important contribution of spoken language skills to reading skills in Arabic despite this linguistic gap. The important implication of these findings is that spoken language interventions aimed at boosting children's narrative language skills in their home language (Colloquial Arabic) are an important tool for building a foundation for literacy in diglossia contexts.

“Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi Wept”: Exploring Translations of Language, Practices and Story Forms in IsiZulu Journalism

ABSTRACT In multicultural and multilingual societies like South Africa, newswork, or the practices that underpin the news-making process, is made possible by linguistic and cultural translation. In other words, both linguistic and cultural translation play a significant role in contemporary journalism practices in South Africa. While the linguistic level is concerned about language, the cultural level focuses on para language, especially the practices around news gathering and reporting. This paper seeks to illustrate how translation works in terms of language, practices and forms of journalism in multicultural contexts like South Africa. The country is a multicultural and multilingual country meaning that the English media content in mainstream journalism almost always appears as a translation. When sourcing in a variety of languages and cultural contexts, journalists and other media producers have to translate at both linguistic and practice levels. The practice level is influenced mostly by the cultural contexts. Operating in an environment where journalism is conducted within a specific news culture whose borders are inscribed by the hegemonic English and western journalistic cultures, journalists working for indigenous languages newspapers like Ilanga newspaper, an isiZulu newspaper, undertake numerous “translation” processes in the conduct of their work. Central to the arguments in this paper is the idea that both journalism practice and translation are routine aspects of news-work in multicultural countries.

The impact of polish accents on guilt

The impact of Polish regional accents on guilt attribution was investigated in this study. Four recordings of suspect testimony were presented to one hundred and eighteen students who listened to a dialogue between a male middle-aged Polish police officer as an interviewer and a female young suspect. The current study aimed to examine how members of the same group perceive attitudes toward Polish nonstandard varieties of language in the courtroom. I also seeked to investigate stereotypes related to nonstandard Polish speakers as far as such factors as accuracy, creditability, deception, prestige, intelligence and likeability are concerned. Finally, this study aimed to find “the Polish accent of guilt”. The findings revealed that the suspect was assessed as being considerably more guilty while speaking with the Cracovian accent rather than Silesian, Podhale or Zamość accents. The Cracovian accent is the least credible and likeable of all accents which were examined in this study, but excels in the factor of prestige and intelligence. Podhale accent seems to be viewed as the most likeable. Zamość accent was rated the highest in intelligence.

Individual differences in word skipping during reading in English as L2.

The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO; Siegelman et al., 2022) contains data from unbalanced bilinguals reading in their first language (L1) for a variety of languages and in English as their second language (L2). We analyzed word skipping in L2 on the basis of five predictors consisting of the frequency and length of the word in L2 and three measures of individual differences. Besides the L2 proficiency of the participant, two novel measures were also constructed: the average amount of skipping in L1 across participants per language and whether an individual reader skips words often in their L1 compared with other L1 readers in the same language. Word skipping in L2 increased for short and high-frequency words, for participants with higher L2 proficiency, for readers whose L1 featured relatively high average skipping rates compared with the other languages, and especially for participants who skip more often in L1 than their peers. All three individual differences interacted with word length such that their influence was more pronounced for longer words. Our results show that readers prefer to maintain a certain level of word skipping resembling how they read in L1. Due to lower L2 than L1 proficiency in unbalanced bilinguals, word skipping in L2 would often be based on a comparatively less advanced stage in parafoveal word recognition.

‘Asserting the dignity of our words’: envisioning Cypriotness through local vernaculars

ABSTRACT While language is widely recognized as one of the elements upon which nations have been built, emphasis has been placed on codified languages, rather than the uncodified vernacular spoken within a particular territory. Drawing on thematic analysis of qualitative surveys and political documents, this paper examines how Cypriot Greek, a local language variety, is claimed by counter-hegemonic perspectives in Cyprus to foster a sense of collective belonging designating the island as an independent cultural entity. By highlighting how such perspectives challenge the hegemony of Greek Cypriot nationalism, the paper underlines that uncodified vernaculars can shape senses of national belonging.

EvalHyd v0.1.2: a polyglot tool for the evaluation of deterministic and probabilistic streamflow predictions

Abstract. The evaluation of streamflow predictions forms an essential part of most hydrological modelling studies published in the literature. The evaluation process typically involves the computation of some evaluation metrics, but it can also involve the preliminary processing of the predictions as well as the subsequent processing of the computed metrics. In order for published hydrological studies to be reproducible, these steps need to be carefully documented by the authors. The availability of a single tool performing all of these tasks would simplify not only the documentation by the authors but also the reproducibility by the readers. However, this requires such a tool to be polyglot (i.e. usable in a variety of programming languages) and openly accessible so that it can be used by everyone in the hydrological community. To this end, we developed a new tool named evalhyd that offers metrics and functionalities for the evaluation of deterministic and probabilistic streamflow predictions. It is open source, and it can be used in Python, in R, in C++, or as a command line tool. This article describes the tool and illustrates its functionalities using Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) reforecasts over France as an example data set.

Language varieties and labor mobilities

Abstract While language is clearly an important aspect of (labor) migration, there have not been many contemplations and interrogations, although truly compelling and necessary, on language varieties and their place and position in labor migration and transnational work in the contemporary world, and hence why we intend to do so in this article. In our paradigmatic analysis of language varieties in the context of labor mobilities, we shall take the case of the varieties of English arising from the global spread of the language worldwide as our focal point. The world Englishes paradigm thus greatly informs and substantiates our discussion so we shall first give the principles of this paradigm shift in linguistics begun by Braj Kachru. We subsequently connect world Englishes theorizing to labor migration practices. We shall argue that language is not only integral to the work being done by migrants, but is actually the work in itself. A consequence of this is that there are language varieties and Englishes which fit the work to be done more than others, and, therefore, these varieties and Englishes are becoming commodified as well in labor migration. We shall also take a look at the structural ramifications of labor migration on Englishes, how these new varieties are restructured further as they move from one place to another along with labor migrants. As it will become apparent, our discussion covers the situation of labor migrants in precarity more than the hyper-mobile elites often privileged in migratory contexts. Ultimately, we shall synthesize issues relating to language varieties in the context of transnational work and propose strategies in dealing not only with multilingual but also language-varietal diversity in (labor) migrations and mobilities.

THE INCREASING UNJUSTIFIABLE PRESENCE AND USE OF ANGLICISMS IN “YOUTH VIBES”

The paper deals with the cultural issue of the increasingly widespread use of lexis imported from English in Serbian daily news reports, which has given way to the lexical style of the Anglo-Serbian language variety. Using techniques of selective contrastive analysis of com- paring microlinguistic elements, the paper explores the use of these items and their adequate counterparts in the Serbian language. The analysis deals with news articles published in 2023 by Youth Vibes, a news portal aimed at a younger audience. The obtained results illustrate how some word forms imported from English could have been avoided and substituted by translation equivalents and correspondents that are much more acceptable as lexis of the standard Serbian language. The results also show that most often a correspondent can be found in Serbian rather than a translation equivalent, the relationship implying that the anglicisms that have been iso- lated due to their falling into this category are inessential when referring to particular concepts.

Old Permic Universal Dependencies Treebank

Old Permic, also known as Old Komi, is an extinct variety of Komi that was spoken in the late Middle Ages in the lower Vychegda river basin in Northeastern European Russia, in an area that currently is not Komi-speaking. This language variety is attested in fragmentary records from the 14th to 17th century written both in the Old Permic alphabet and in Cyrillic. These records are of significant importance for research on the history of the Komi language. Here we introduce our attempt towards a new Universal Dependencies treebank that will eventually contain the existing corpus of Old Permic in a structured and CoNLL-U annotated format. This will be the first time this material is being made openly available in digital format, and our contribution describes the current state of the art and remaining challenges.

The Acquisition of a Diglossic Language by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: Evidence From a Sentence Production Task.

The current study aimed to examine morphosyntactic errors in sentences produced by DHH students, who are signers of Israeli Sign Language, and also users of Palestinian Colloquial Arabic (PCA) and written Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Nineteen school-age DHH students participated in a sentence elicitation task in which they retold events portrayed in 24 videos in PCA and MSA. A control group of 19 hearing students was tested with the same task. Sentences in each language variety were coded for grammatical versus ungrammatical productions and for type of morphosyntactic errors for the latter. In addition, code-switched words were counted. The hearing group showed no morphosyntactic errors, whereas the DHH students showed morphosyntactic errors in both PCA and MSA. In addition, both groups code-switched in both PCA and MSA, with more code-switching in the MSA task than in the PCA task. Furthermore, an interaction with age revealed that young students code-switched more in MSA and older students code-switched more in PCA. It is suggested that the morphosyntactic abilities of DHH students are incomplete in both language varieties. Lack of spoken language input may negatively influence the acquisition of spoken language, which impacts further the acquisition of the standard language in diglossic contexts. Code-switching is explained as both due to lexical gaps, when occurring in MSA, and an effort to raise the register in PCA.

Theoretical considerations on linguistic innovation through new combinations in African youth language practices, exemplified in Yanké and Langila (DR Congo)

Abstract In youth language practice, diverse creative linguistic strategies are applied to derive a language variant distinct from what is perceived as the norm. Since linguistic innovation is of primary interest for the study of “deviant” speech varieties, this paper discusses whether the structural similarities and differences observed between African youth languages can be addressed by determining the linguistic strategies employed by speakers in order to innovate. Defining innovation as a new combination of existing material, I identify two higher-level types of practices that I propose lead to linguistic innovation: (i) combining two or more resources from different languages in the speaker’s linguistic repertoire, and (ii) using a linguistic strategy with a part of the speaker’s linguistic repertoire. To illustrate these two types, reference is made to the Lingala-based youth language practices Yanké and Langila. Although both types of strategy may occur simultaneously, I argue that Yanké speakers rely more on combining different languages from their repertoire, whereas Langila speakers more heavily rely on applying creative language games to their repertoire. The question is raised as to whether the structural differences between the two youth language practices can be accounted for by determining the type of innovation practices employed by the speakers.

Online anti-immigrant discourse in Germany: ethnographically backed analysis of user comments

This article investigates discourse- and language-specific features of online anti-immigrant extreme speech in Germany. We analyze a context rich dataset collected and annotated through a collaborative effort involving fact-checkers, ethnographers and natural language processing (NLP) researchers. Using a bottom-up annotation scheme, we capture the nuances of the discourse and develop a typology of lexical innovations. The analysis combines thematic and critical discourse analysis with a linguistic perspective, revealing that direct forms of racism intertwine with argumentative forms of antagonism and playful word games within anti-immigrant discourses, in ways that center around narratives of victimhood and perceived threats from migrants. We further show how the specific conditions in Germany, including strict legal regulations of speech, have shaped the emergence of a non-standard language variety in and through anti-immigrant discourse, which helps the discourse community maintain group identity. The ethnographically backed analysis provides a granular understanding of the phenomenon of online extreme speech in the German context, contributing to the broader field of discourse studies and offering insights into the varieties within anti-immigrant discourse.

Modular language product lines: concept, tool and analysis

AbstractModelling languages are intensively used in paradigms like model-driven engineering to automate all tasks of the development process. These languages may have variants, in which case the need arises to deal with language families rather than with individual languages. However, specifying the syntax and semantics of each language variant separately in an enumerative way is costly, hinders reuse across variants, and may yield inconsistent semantics between variants. Hence, we propose a novel, modular and compositional approach to describing product lines of modelling languages. It enables the incremental definition of language families by means of modules comprising meta-model fragments, graph transformation rules, and rule extensions. Language variants are configured by selecting the desired modules, which entails the composition of a language meta-model and a set of rules defining its semantics. This paper describes: a theory for checking well-formedness, instantiability, and consistent semantics of all languages within the family; an implementation as an Eclipse plugin; and an evaluation reporting drastic specification size and analysis time reduction in comparison to an enumerative approach.

A diachronic perspective on ‘prosodies’ in Central Chadic languages (Afroasiatic)

Abstract The paper reports on generalisations drawn from the author’s historical analysis of a sample of some five thousand words, which reflect more than two hundred lexical items from up to sixty-six Central Chadic languages and language varieties. The paper provides illustrative examples from present-day languages with explicit diachronic analyses of the evolution of their synchronic segmental and ‘prosodic’ suprasegmental structures. Four typologically characteristic prosodies (i.e., palatalisation, labialisation, nasalisation, glottalisation) operate across words, which are – in synchronic perspective – mostly monomorphemic, while in diachronic perspective they are mostly polymorphemic. The paper shows that, and how the four reconstructed prosodies lead to the diachronic emergence of innovative phonemes in the modern languages, which were not part of the segmental phonological inventories of the common proto-language. This empirical fact poses considerable challenges to the application of the well-established ‘comparative method’ as originally developed by the Neogrammarian school of historical linguistics.

Indonesian Sound Errors in Television Advertisements

Language sound errors at the phonological level. Phonemes or language sounds in Indonesian consist of vowels, consonants, diphthongs 'double vowels', and clusters 'consonant groups'. Differences in phonemes will change standard language varieties into non-standard ones. Phonological problems occur because vowel, consonant or diphthong phonemes change into other phonemes, thereby changing standard language into non-standard ones. This research aims to analyze language sound errors, namely deletions, additions and changes in vowel phonemes, consonant phonemes, combined vowel phonemes and combined consonant phonemes. This study used descriptive qualitative method. The data collection technique for this research is by listening and using the language watched in Indonesian television advertisements. This data analysis technique consists of (1) data collection (2) data reduction, (3) data presentation (4) interesting conclusions. The results of data analysis of Indonesian language sound errors in Television Advertisements are language sound errors in Indonesian consisting of vowels, consonants, diphthongs 'double vowels', and 'consonant clusters' clusters due to errors in language use that do not match Indonesian Spelling (EBI) . Errors in Indonesian sounds or pronunciation that occur in television advertisements like this occur due to ignorance or on purpose so that the advertisement displayed will attract the attention of consumers or people who see, watch and listen to it.