Linguistic Shift Research Articles

Bilingualism, language shift and the corresponding expansion of spatial cognitive systems

Neo-Whorfians argue that the structures our language uses to encode spatial relations influence the way we conceptualise space. One explicit test of this link has been studies of how speakers of different languages configure arrays of objects in non-linguistic rotation tasks. Subjects perform these tasks differently depending on their dominant linguistic frame of reference: relative e.g. left/right terms, or absolute e.g. N/S/W/E terms. One prediction is that changes in the linguistic system should result in corresponding cognitive changes. Such a linguistic shift has occurred among Gurindji people (Australia). Traditionally Gurindji people used a system of cardinal directions, however many have now also been exposed to the English left/right system. This paper demonstrates that this language difference is reflected cognitively. The ‘Animals-in-a-row’ task was administered to 107 Gurindji people. The results show strong ‘viewpoint independent’ responses, nonetheless those with a Tertiary education gave significantly more ‘viewpoint dependent’ responses which we attribute to exposure to English, and perhaps associated literacy practices.

A Change of a Consonant Status: the Bedouinisation of the [j] Sound in the Speech of Kuwaitis: A Case Study

In light of sociolinguist phonological change, the following study investigates the [j] sound in the speech of Kuwaitis as the predominant form and characterizes the sedentary population which is made up of both the indigenous and non-indigenous group; while [ʤ] is the realisation of the Bedouins who are also a part of the indigenous population. Although [ʤ] is the classical variant, it has, for some time, been regarded by Kuwaitis as the stigmatized form and the [j] as the one that carries prestige. This study examines the change of status of [j] and [ʤ] in the speech of Kuwaitis. The main hypothesis is that [j] no longer carries prestige. To test this hypothesis, 40 Kuwaitis of different gender, ages, educational background, and social networks were spontaneously chosen to be interviewed. Their speech was phonetically transcribed and accordingly was quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. Results indicate that the [j] variant is undergoing change of status and that the social parameters and the significant political and social changes, that Kuwait has undergone recently, have triggered this linguistic shift.

The National Physical Activity Plan: a call to action from the American Heart Association: a science advisory from the American Heart Association.

The health benefits of regular physical activity and the relation between physical inactivity and chronic disease morbidity and mortality are well established. Also clear is the fact that efforts to increase physical activity at the population level will require collective action by government, nongovernment, for-profit, and nonprofit entities working together at the local, state, and national levels. The US National Physical Activity Plan (NPAP), developed by the National Physical Activity Plan Alliance, of which the American Heart Association (AHA) is a member, is designed to facilitate this collective action, to help organizations from all sectors of society work together to increase physical activity in all segments of the American population. The purposes of this advisory are to summarize the data that describe the health benefits of regular physical activity and the public health burden of low levels of physical activity, to describe the NPAP and the role it will play in increasing population levels of physical activity, and to encourage readers of Circulation to join the AHA’s efforts to promote its implementation. As summarized in Table 1, there is substantial evidence supporting the benefits of regular physical activity to prevent a wide variety of disease conditions and to enhance quality of life. Interestingly, there is less of an appreciation of noncardiovascular benefits of lifestyle physical activity and structured exercise, and this is an area of great opportunity for educating the public and healthcare practitioners. View this table: Table 1. The Health Benefits of Regular Physical Activity Physical inactivity is rapidly becoming a major global concern and is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide.2,3 As noted by Kohl and colleagues, “In view of the prevalence, global reach, and health effect of physical inactivity, the issue should be appropriately described as pandemic, with far-reaching health, economic, environmental, and social consequences.”4 According …

Optimality in the “Grammars” of Ancient Translations

This paper proposes a new methodology for describing, explaining, and tracking the linguistic and non-linguistic shifts that occurred in the ancient biblical translations. It first surveys the approach to Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) taken by Gideon Toury, outlining pertinent theoretical points. Second, it summarizes the principles and methods of Optimality Theory (OT), arguing that this linguistic model may be harnessed in order to benefit the study of ancient translations. Third, this article applies the theory and methods developed here to a single sample verse, 2 Sam 11:1. Through this study, I demonstrate that the combined theoretical and methodological model provided by DTS and OT allows us to identify, describe, evaluate, and organize the norms constraining the translator of Tg. Jon. to Samuel—and, by extension, to the other ancient Versions. Finally, I argue that we may use OT's notational system to capture regularities and anomalies in ancient translations, outlining their respective “grammars.”

En alguna parte del mundo. Montevideo, Buenos Aires, París

In this article the author discusses the language of writing of sociology. The work of the sociologist as situated practice, which is localized in part as a result of the language of writing. A number of problems arise in connection with the languages of scientific discussion, with independence of thought with respect to the social reality studied, and with the relationship between sociology's language of writing and the social practices that are the object of sociological reflection. The author points to a critical productivity effect brought about when one comes into contact with sociology written in a language different than one's own, an effect that makes it possible to take into account the frameworks and contexts of knowledge production. That productivity tends to evaporate with the conversion to a lingua franca. A methodological reflection triggered during a trip by the author through Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Paris, as he traveled between Spanish and French. A journey in which social trajectories are confused with the linguistic shifts of the researcher. In that reflection on his own social and linguistic movements, the author also tries to take into account the debt that the questions that guide research owe to the specific political junctures in which they emerge. This reflection imposes a consideration of the relationship between discursive and non-discursive practices as a problematic relationship, given that the one is not reducible to the other, and as the territories were both kinds of agency become confused.

A mid- to late Holocene sequence from Weld Range, Mid West Western Australia, in local, regional and inter-regional context

The late Holocene Aboriginal archaeology of the inland Mid West region of Western Australia remains poorly synthesised. In this paper a mid- to late Holocene sequence excavated at rockshelter Weld-RS-0731 is considered in the local context of surface archaeology and other excavated sites. The site’s lithic assemblage is distinct in terms of artefact size, technological types and lithologies, pointing to repeated patterns of site function and specialist task activities. At the inter-regional scale, a paucity of data means that models of late Holocene cultural and linguistic shifts have inadequately considered the role of the inland Mid West, despite the occurrence of some highly significant sites, such as Walganha, and Wilgie Mia and Little Wilgie ochre mines. A fragment of ochre excavated at Weld-RS-0731 and geochemically provenanced to Little Wilgie dates to approximately 2500 cal. BP, providing the earliest absolute age estimate for use of that mine. The possible role of the inland Mid West in late Holocene inter-regional relations and the resultant cultural and linguistic shifts is discussed.

Upper-Caste Idioms in Translation

Upper-Caste Idioms in Translation Christi A. Merrill (bio) Unclaimed Terrain Ajay Navaria Translation by Laura Brueck Navayana Publishing www.navayana.org 200 Pages; Print, $25.00 And what of the debates over multilingualism taking place in languages other than English? Here we must contend with issues of translation in more than one sense, because the translation into English must find a way to convey the multilingual play of the source text, itself considered—by many a postcolonial theorist—to be a type of translation. G. N. Devy for one has claimed (in After Amnesia [1992]) that, since the Indian subject must learn from birth to communicate in multiple languages, everyone operates with an unmistakable “translating consciousness” that has become an instinctual part of daily language use. Such an assertion forces us to rethink not only the definition of “translation” but also of “language.” Devy’s postcolonial examples feature highly-educated intellectuals shifting smoothly between one or more of India’s official languages and the language of the former colonizer (in this case, English) as well as illiterate speakers switching (unconsciously) to whichever dialect and register their addressees of the moment might understand. India is, after all, characterized by a multilinguality that is decidedly fluid. In this regard, we should add to Devy’s list of examples the ways speakers might emphasize a more Sanskriticized or Arabicized vocabulary in the Hindi-Urdu continuum depending on their interlocutor’s perceived ethnic identity (often understood reductively in Hindu vs. Muslim terms), a strategy the prominent Hindi-Urdu author Munshi Premchand put to particularly artful effect nearly a century ago. Also, we cannot ignore the ways linguistic shifts have been used conventionally to mark caste hierarchies, both to exalt and to insult. Here too Premchand is considered a master of the form: his ability to render these dramatic social interactions in his short stories and novels has made this kind of fluid multilingualism a key feature of Hindi literature since the late colonial era, inspiring generations of subsequent writers, confounding his many English-language translators, and consternating Dalit activists, in particular, who in the last decade have made very public stands denouncing his treatment of untouchable characters. At issue is not only the fact of these characters being represented as untouchables, but of their being portrayed as speaking a distinctive, class-inflected, caste–bound idiom that is essential and inescapable. How do we understand such nuances a language away, in English? Laura R. Brueck devotes an entire chapter of her recent monograph, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (2014), to analyzing the complicated reception of Premchand by Dalit writer-activists—that is, by those who have come into consciousness (“chetna”) about the pervasive oppressiveness of the caste system. Brueck opens her book with a description of the burning of Premchand’s novel, Rangbhumi (1925), at a public park in the center of India’s capital, New Delhi. (An English-speaking reader may want to read Christopher R. King’s 2010 translation, Rangbhumi: The Arena of Life, to understand the wider context of the critique.) The event was staged to raise awareness about the ways mainstream society unthinkingly colludes with an upper–caste mindset and ultimately condones caste–based discrimination. In her discussion, Brueck uses the example to pose more general questions about the vexed relationship of politics to aesthetics in literary criticism. After all, the novel is celebrated in mainstream Hindi criticism for its realistic portrayal of an exceedingly diverse range of characters facing all manner of difficult circumstances. How does the American scholar reconcile these two different ways of valuing (and evaluating) postcolonial literature: as representative works (i.e. Great Books) of important literary traditions around the world, or as evidence of systemic discrimination still taking place in specific local cultures? Her discussion draws attention to the heterogeneity of perspectives on the history of Hindi literature beyond facile colonizer/colonized binaries because it accounts for hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and regional identity in the writing of these very literary histories. She rightly insists that those with literary training need to bring back the focus on issues of rhetorical technique in understanding the forces contributing to those evaluations without...

Examining the linguistic self in a multilingual context: reflecting on a South African adaptation of Shaw's Pygmalion

This article reflects on a production that explored the relationship between language and identity in the contemporary South African context, where 11 official languages are embraced and English serves as lingua franca. The construct of the ‘linguistic self’ within South Africa's multilingual context was examined in a 2011 adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Shifts in dialect portrayed in Shaw's play and the impact on identity are equated to the linguistic shifts that the second-language (L2) speaker of English navigates in the South African context, and hence the article examines features such as code switching. The link between language and identity extends beyond the individual, since complete assimilation of a second language could result in transfer to a different ‘speech community’. The construct of ‘speech community’ shifts and the impacts it yields are manifested in the adaptation of Shaw's play. Finally, the experiences of the young socially and linguistically diverse ensemble, who contributed to and performed the adaptation, are briefly described, highlighting areas where the characters' speech community shifts echo the cast members' own personal and linguistic uniqueness.

The Materiality of Resistance

ion and Allegory By contrast with the proliferation of the insignia of resistance in English and other European languages, only in rare instances are Arabiclanguage graffiti inscribed on Bethlehem’s apartheid wall. This linguistic shift from the Arabic graffiti of the first intifada to the English graffiti of the postintifada apartheid wall attests to the reconfiguration of the demographics of the graffiti artist and of the graffiti’s intended audience. Beyond the obvious linguistic shift, the representations of resistance diverge in other ways as well. Whereas Englishlanguage graffiti is configured as a didactic discourse, bent on improving international relations, the Arabiclanguage graffiti that adorn the segregation wall adopt the representational strategy of allegory. Mired in the immanence of unmediated experience, they suggest no concrete solution, and promulgate no message of hope. Not unlike the Arabic graffiti of past centuries, including the fascinating specimens collected in the Book of Strangers (Kitāb adab alghurabā’) attributed to the prolific litterateur Abū alFaraj alIs.fahāni (d. 967), contemporary Arabiclanguage graffiti is less concerned with

The Language Question in the Teaching and Examination of ‘A’ Level Shona: A Case of Masvingo District in Zimbabwe

This paper investigates the perceptions of Zimbabwean teachers, examiners and pupils towards the shift from English to Shona in the teaching and examination of Advanced level (‘A’ level) Shona Paper 2 in a context where English, a foreign language, has always mediated the teaching and examining of this paper. The paper also attempts to discover the attendant impact that this linguistic shift has had on candidates’ performance in the examinations. Research findings indicate that although the official policy advocates using Shona language to teach Shona, practice in some schools indicates a laissez-faire implementation of the policy where individual teachers continued to rely on English or, in some cases, code-switched from Shona to English during classroom interactions. Most teachers castigated the existing situation where there were more Shona Grammar textbooks written in English compared to Shona, a situation that demanded translation competence from teachers whose own college and university training had been done in English. However, the introduction of Shona in the teaching of ‘A’ level Shona Paper 2 has been widely welcomed as a development which has helped Zimbabwe retain her linguistic autonomy. The majority of respondents argued that it is intellectually cramping for learners to be expected to ‘learn’ their own language in a ‘borrowed’ language as this negates their performance in the national examinations. The paradox of this research, however, is that although the introduction of Shona has engendered a marked quantitative increase in the number of candidates passing ZIMSEC examinations, the quality of examination passes has been affected.

The Radheshyam Ramayan and the Sanskritizationof Khari Boli Hindi

AbstractThis paper charts the linguistic shifts in a popular iteration of the story of Lord Ram, commonly known as the ‘Radheshyam Ramayan’ (composed in the first quarter of the twentieth century), across four versions of the text published in the devanāgarī script, between 1939 and 1969. It argues that the author, Radheshyam Kathavachak, likely revised his text over the course of many years, in large part to bring its language closer to śuddh (pure) Hindi on the Hindi-Urdu spectrum—a labour that was in the service of the Hindi language movement, if not also Hindu nationalism. Whilst the language in the 1939 printing is a mixed register of Hindi-Urdu, by 1959, the language has undergone a process of ‘Sanskritization’. That is, much of the vocabulary of Persian and Arabic origin, and also much vocabulary associated with the Braj tradition, have been replaced with words from Sanskrit. The progressive editing of text also shows a deep concern for the standardization and occasionally, elevation of literary Hindi, and simultaneously, the correction of defects in meter and style. The example of Kathavachak's ‘many Radheshyam Ramayans’ offers insight into the timing and pace of the Sanskritization of Hindi letters, suggesting that for some, the process may have been more protracted and anguished than is often thought.

The Quichua System of Beliefs about Language Acquisition and Social Use: Cultural Resilience in Quichua-Spanish Contact

Exploratory research conducted in Imbabura, Ecuador, reveals that the Quichua system of beliefs about language acquisition and social use involves three components: cognitive development, language socialization, and childcare (more precisely, hygiene and diet). Most interviewees shared this core belief system regardless of their score on a biculturalism scale, age, educational background, and mother tongue. The Quichua belief system remains even when linguistic shift occurs, in which case it is transposed to the acquisition of the new language (Spanish). Linguistic shift thus does not necessarily imply global acculturation.

Regional dialect leveling in Najdi Arabic: The case of the deaffrication of [k] in the Qaṣīmī dialect

AbstractThis study investigates the effect of linguistic and social factors (age, gender, and level of education) on the patterns of variation in the affrication of [] for [k] in the stem and suffix in the informal speech of 72 speakers of Qaṣīmī, a local dialect of Najdi Arabic, spoken in the Qaṣīm province in central Saudi Arabia. Findings indicate that affrication is significantly favored in the phonological context of front vowels, particularly the high front ones. Whereas suffix-based affrication is categorically used as [-], stem affrication is strongly correlated with the age, educational level, and gender of the speaker. In particular, older uneducated speakers from both sexes tend to maintain the use of the local variant [], whereas younger and middle-aged educated speakers, particularly women, increasingly shift toward the use of the supralocal variant [k]. The present findings are suggestive of patterns of variation that are typical in regional-dialect leveling, wherein the supralocal variant(s) associated with the major city dialect is (are) diffusing outward, at the expense of traditional and socially marked variant(s), by speakers of smaller towns' dialects. The substantial socioeconomic changes that Saudi Arabia has undergone in the last half century are suggested to have triggered and accelerated the linguistic shift.

Strasbourg revisited: c'est chic de parler français

This article describes the results of a follow-up sociolinguistic study to assess changes which have taken place in Strasbourg, France, since the early 1980s, when the situation there was studied by the same author. The linguistic context and the results of the original study are described, as well as the implications and difficulties of such real-time studies. Although the latest large-scale statistical surveys are not directly comparable with the earlier ones, an accelerating shift away from the Alsatian dialect to the use of French is nonetheless evident. This results partly from diverse social changes affecting the city as opposed to the countryside. Alongside this, there is a snowball effect of trends which were already visible in the 1980s, reflecting the loss of an elderly dialect-speaking generation who helped maintain Alsatian within the family. Rapid anonymous surveys carried out in town show the dialect to be used only in specific “pockets”. Some six hours of conversations involving code-switching were also compared with a similar corpus collected earlier, and revealed a decline in more complex grammatical forms of switching in favor of more single-word switches. Alternation was the dominant pattern although different proportions of switch-types occurred in different conversations. The functions of code-switching, e.g., for humor and solidarity, remained similar. The conclusion reiterates the difficulties but also the advantages of real-time sociolinguistic comparisons, as different socioeconomic and lifestyle factors interact with ongoing linguistic shift and change.

Korean-Pop, Tom Gay Kings, Les Queens and the Capitalist Transformation of Sex/Gender Categories in Thailand

Since the early 2000s, masculine style for queer women in Thailand has been heavily influenced by Korean popular culture, or “K-pop”. K-pop is marked by deliberate gender androgyny and overall gender play. This new aesthetics of masculinity used by masculine-identifying women has been accompanied by linguistic shifts in which explicitly sexualised terms, such as queen and king , themselves products of complex transnational borrowings, have been borrowed from Thai gay male culture. This paper seeks to explore the possibilities of queer cultural transformation through forms of commodified images and capitalist intrusions. It also explores the process of creative borrowings made through transnational, national and local circuits of knowledge. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 focused on young queer women in Bangkok who have adopted the K-pop style and the new sexualised terms of identity, such as tom gay king and les queen , for example. It is also based on review of printed material including the fashion magazine Tom Act and the NGO publication Anjareesarn.

POLLEX-Online: The Polynesian Lexicon Project Online

The Polynesian lexicon project, POLLEX, was initiated in 1965 by Bruce Biggs in order to provide a large-scale comparative dictionary of Polynesian languages. Since then, POLLEX has grown to include over 55,000 reflexes of more than 4,700 reconstructed forms in 68 languages. These data have enabled many fundamental advances in Polynesian linguistics and prehistory. At almost half a century old, POLLEX is one of the longest-standing databases of linguistic information, and has moved through various incarnations, from typewriter and edge-punched cards, through microfiche to mainframe computer. In the last few years, online databases of linguistic information have become increasingly more prevalent, representing a major shift in the way linguistics is conducted. Online databases provide many advantages over the older forms of data distribution, including high availability, more robust data storage, and easy data manipulation and searching, and they also facilitate the replication of previous studies. This paper announces the latest reincarnation of the POLLEX database as an online resource, POLLEX-Online ( http://pollex.org.nz ), and describes the technical implementation details.

The Rise of English, the Decline of French: Supplications to the English Crown, c. 1420–1450

It is now some thirty years since the researches of John H. Fisher and Malcolm Richardson highlighted the importance of the records of the central government in the process of English-language “vernacularization” in early-fifteenth-century England. Their publication of the Anthology of Chancery English provided irrefutable evidence of a linguistic transition that overtook some key types of government records, which began to be drafted in English where previously they had been written in Anglo-Norman French and, to a lesser extent, Latin. But while the existence of these early examples of “official” written English cannot be doubted, the forces that underlay this linguistic shift are less clear. From the very outset, doubts were expressed about the hypothesis advanced by Fisher and Richardson, that the spread of English in the records of the central government could be directly attributed to a “language policy” put into place by the Lancastrian regime and, in particular, to the personal initiative of Henry...

Turkish versions of To the lighthouse from the perspective of modernism

This article deals with the reception of modernism in Turkey, from the tracks of the Turkish versions of Virginia Woolf's To the lighthouse. Accordingly, it compares the Turkish versions of To the lighthouse (from 1944 to 2000), so as to reveal the way in which ‘modernism’ has been perceived as a literary genre, and the stages it has gone through during its reception. Methodologically, the linguistic shifts are identified and categorized not only to reveal the Turkish brand of modernism, but also to unravel the ever-changing norms in translation processes in line with the political, economic and social revolutions taking place during the foundation years of the Turkish Republic. Therefore, it studies not only the notion of modernism as a literary genre, but also the notion of Modernization, or Westernization as a social event that has changed the direction of the newly-founded nation from the East to the West. In conclusion, this article discusses, from the perspective of translation studies, the national policy of the newly-founded Turkish Republic in pioneering Western values, after 800 years of the hegemony of social, religious and cultural dogmas of the East.

What Science Underlies Natural Language Engineering?

One of the most thought-provoking proposals I have heard recently came from Lori Levin during the discussion that concluded the EACL 2009 Workshop on the Interaction between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics. Lori proposed that we should form an ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistics. At first blush, I found the idea weird: Isn’t it a little like the American Academy of Pediatrics forming a SIG on Medicine (or on Children)? Second thoughts, however, revealed the appropriateness of the idea: In essence, linguistics is altogether missing in contemporary natural language engineering research. In the following pages I want to call for the return of linguistics to computational linguistics. The last two decades were marked by a complete paradigm shift in computational linguistics. Frustrated by the inability of applications based on explicit linguistic knowledge to scale up to real-world needs, and, perhaps more deeply, frustrated with the dominating theories in formal linguistics, we looked instead to corpora that reflect language use as our sources of (implicit) knowledge. With the shift in methodology came a subtle change in the goals of our entire enterprise. Two decades ago, a computational linguist could be interested in developing NLP applications; or in formalizing (and reasoning about) linguistic processes. These days, it is the former only. A superficial look at the papers presented in our main conferences reveals that the vast majority of them are engineering papers, discussing engineering solutions to practical problems. Virtually none addresses fundamental issues in linguistics. There’s nothing wrong with engineering work, of course. Every school of technology has departments of engineering in areas as diverse as Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, or Biomedical Engineering; there’s no reason why there shouldn’t also be a discipline of Natural Language Engineering. But in the more established disciplines, engineering departments conduct research that is informed by some well-defined branch of science. Chemical engineers study chemistry; electrical engineers study physics; aeronautical engineers study dynamics; and biomedical engineers study biology, physiology, medical sciences, and so on. The success of engineering is also in part due to the choice of the “right” mathematics. The theoretical development of several scientific areas, notably physics, went alongside mathematical developments. Physics could not have accounted for natural phenomena without such mathematical infrastructure. For example, the development of (partial) differential equations went hand in hand with some of the greatest achievement in physics, and this branch of mathematics later turned out to be applicable also to chemistry, electrical engineering, and economics, among many other scientific fields.

Managing graphic information in terminological knowledge bases

The cognitive shift in Linguistics has affected the way linguists, lexicographers and terminologists understand and describe specialized language, and the way they represent scientific and technical concepts. The representation of terminological knowledge, as part of our encyclopaedic knowledge about the world, is crucial in multimedia terminological knowledge bases, where different media coexist to enhance the multidimensional character of knowledge representations. However, so far little attention has been paid in Terminology and Linguistics to graphic information, including visual resources and pictorial material. Frame-based Terminology (Faber et al. 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) advocates a multimodal conceptual description in which the structured information in terminographic definitions meshes with visual information for a better understanding of specialized concepts. In this article, we explore the relationship between visual and textual information, and search for a principled way to select images that best represent the linguistic, conceptual and contextual information contained in terminological knowledge bases, in order to contribute to a better transfer of specialized knowledge.