Sociolinguistic Considerations Research Articles

Cultural, Clinical, and Sociolinguistic Considerations in the Neurocognitive Assessment and Care in Arabic-speaking Patients with Dementia

Abstract Recent research from many Arabic-speaking countries indicates that the aging population is more prone to certain neurodegenerative diseases. This increased vulnerability implies exploring the specific needs and challenges faced by individuals with dementia within these communities. Neurocognitive interventions and assessment-based protocols for dementia have recently shifted from a disease-centered approach to a person-centered care model, which recognizes people with dementia as psychosocial individuals who live and interact in a particular sociocultural and linguistic context. This shifting paradigm embraces a more holistic approach, acknowledging the significant impact of their psychosocial functioning as well as their experience of the disease. In this context, we provide an overview of dementia in Arabic-speaking people with Alzheimer’s disease, with a focus on sociolinguistic and sociocultural profiles. We detail the cultural aspects that should be incorporated into cognitive testing and care for their home or host countries if they are migrants. We discuss the limits of diagnosis, neurocognitive testing, and therapeutic interventions in this context. We formulate a set of recommendations for clinicians dealing with neurocognitive disorders, related to the acculturation and diglossic differences between the dialect spoken by the clinician and the client. However, limited access to interpreters and the lack of adapted resources can reveal deeper issues which require systemic solutions. Therefore, clinicians should be aware of cultural differences in language, culture, and country of origin. Many so-called “ethnic, translinguistic, and diglossic misunderstandings” are linked to poor linguistic comprehension, language barriers, and illiteracy.

Bisaya-English Dynamics in Online Communication: An Investigation of Code-Switching among Bisdak Content Creators

Social media has changed the way people use and share language. Online spaces unite people from different backgrounds, creating a diverse language environment. This study comprehensively analyzed the code-switching types and functions employed by Bisdak (Bisayang Dako) content creators within interview segments shared on the Facebook platform. It also examined the underlying reasons and motivations behind the use of these patterns. The research employed a qualitative research approach, specifically content analysis. The content analysis offered a nuanced lens to interpret how code-switching operates within this digital realm, enabling a comprehensive exploration of language practices embedded in online discourse. The findings reveal that the most prevalent form of code-switching observed was intrasentential, manifesting in 20 instances, closely followed by intersentential code-switching. On the other end of the spectrum, tag-switching surfaced as the least frequent code-switching type, registering a single occurrence in the analyzed dataset. Concerning the functions of code-switching manifested in the spoken discourse, there are four referential, eighteen expressive, two phatic, one poetic, six metalinguistic, and no occurrence for directive code-switching. The underlying reasons behind the use of code-switching are the following: to express cultural affiliation, to emphasize specific points, to signal or establish status, to express emotions, and to create a sense of intimacy. The findings stress the importance of sociolinguistic considerations in fully grasping the tapestry of code-switching's functionality. This research adds a pivotal layer of understanding to the evolving dynamics of language practices in the digital age.

Sociolinguistic Consideration on Use of the Japanese Word ‘Omakase’ in Korea: Focusing on Newspaper Articles

Sociolinguistic Consideration on Use of the Japanese Word ‘Omakase’ in Korea: Focusing on Newspaper Articles

Sociolinguistic Consideration on Use of the Japanese Word ‘Omakase’ in Korea: Focusing on Newspaper Articles

Sociolinguistic Consideration on Use of the Japanese Word ‘Omakase’ in Korea: Focusing on Newspaper Articles

Perception in Black and White: Effects of Intonational Variables and Filtering Conditions on Sociolinguistic Judgments With Implications for ASR.

This study tests the effects of intonational contours and filtering conditions on listener judgments of ethnicity to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding on how prosody influences these judgments, with implications for austomatic speech recognition systems as well as speech synthesis. In a perceptual experiment, 40 American English listeners heard phrase-long clips which were controlled for pitch accent type and focus marking. Each clip contained either two H* (high) or two L+H* (low high) pitch accents and a L-L% (falling) boundary tone, and had also previously been labelled for broad or narrow focus. Listeners rated clips in two tasks, one with unmodified stimuli and one with stimuli lowpass filtered at 400 Hz, and were asked to judge whether the speaker was “Black” or “White”. In the filtered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were more likely to be rated as “Black”, with an interaction such that broad focus enhanced this pattern, supporting earlier findings that listeners may perceive African American Language as having more variation in possible pitch accent meanings. In the unfiltered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were less likely to be rated as Black, with no effect of focus, likely due to the fact that listeners relied more heavily on available segmental information in this condition. These results enhance our understanding of cues listeners rely on in making social judgments about speakers, especially in ethnic identification and linguistic profiling, by highlighting perceptual differences due to listening environment as well as predicted meaning of specific intonational contours. They also contribute to our understanding of the role of how human listeners interpret meaning within a holistic context, which has implications for the construction of computational systems designed to replicate the properties of natural language. In particular, they have important applicability to speech synthesis and speech recognition programs, which are often limited in their capacities due to the fact that they do not make such holistic sociolinguistic considerations of the meanings of input or output speech.

The Judeo-Arabic Dialect of Yefren (Libya): Phonological and Morphological Notes

Abstract The present article offers a preliminary description of the Judeo-Arabic variety spoken in Yefren (Libya), based on interviews collected from three elderly female informants. It analyzes the phonology and morphology of the dialect, attempting some sociolinguistic considerations on issues of dialect contact between Muslim and Jewish varieties of Libyan Arabic. In conclusion, the article discusses the position of Yefreni Judeo-Arabic within the context of Libyan and North African Judeo-Arabic as a whole. While belonging to the Eqa:l group of North-African Judeo-Arabic, a sufficient number of isoglosses allows us to posit the existence of two separate subgroups within Libyan Judeo-Arabic, here indicated as the Tripoli and Yefreni types.

Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: who’s in a usage guide and why

ABSTRACT Weiner (1988. “On Editing a Usage Guide.” In Words for Robert Burchfield’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by E. G. Stanley, and T. F. Hoad, 171–183. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 173) describes usage guides as being ‘as broad as the English language, covering spelling, punctuation, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis, and involving sociolinguistic considerations’. This paper focusses on these ‘sociolinguistic considerations’, to try and answer the question of why people like greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters are stigmatised for certain perceived linguistic errors. The greengrocer’s apostrophe is well known (Beal, Joan C. 2010. “The Grocer’s Apostrophe: Popular Prescriptivism in the Twenty-First Century.” English Today 26 (2): 57–64), but the other three categories, the sports commentators’ adverb (the flat adverb), the estate agent’s pronoun (yourselves for you) and the television presenter’s demonstrative pronoun (these/those ones), I first encountered in Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), one of the three most recent and most prescriptive publications in the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems. Discussing Taggart’s usage guide as a case study, I will go into the question of why certain groups of speakers are made into the object of prescriptivism and will argue that the British class system plays an important role in this. As a case study, this article highlights the need for more linguists to view usage guides as a genre that needs to be treated critically rather than be ignored, as is generally the case at present.

A Sociolinguistic Consideration of Intermediation in Greeting Discourse among the Yo?ru?ba of South West Nigeria

Existing studies on Yoru?ba? greeting forms dwell on the appropriateness of their use, with respect to time of the year, event, condition, occupation, vocation, context, politeness and content. The studies portray greetings as discourse between two people or parties who are capable of exchanging pleasantries. None of the existing works has discussed intermediation in greeting discourse among the Yoru?ba? people such that greetings that are directed to the second person(s) such as toddlers, extremely sick persons, kings and the bereaved are answered on their behalf by a third party. This paper examines intermediation and the rationale in greeting discourse among the Yoru?ba? people. The data for this study were drawn from participant observation, Yoru?ba? literature texts, and Yoru?ba? home movies. The Mutual Contextual Beliefs Theory of Pragmatics as proposed by Bach and Harnish (1979) was adopted for the data analysis. The study established, among other things, that greetings are sacrosanct in Yoru?ba? culture and the answer/reply is obligatory, irrespective of the state, status, circumstance and condition of the person(s) being greeted. It is also shown that intermediation in greeting discourse could be for politeness, incapacitation, authority and educating the young ones.

Contact between Old Persian and Hebrew? A Rejoinder to A. Wilson-Wright

Abstract In his recent article “From Persepolis to Jerusalem: A Reevaluation of Old Persian-Hebrew Contact in the Achaemenid Period”, Aren Wilson-Wright reexamines the list of proposed Persian loans in Biblical Hebrew as well as their distribution, specifically in relation to the distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew. He seeks to demonstrate direct contact between speakers of Old Persian and Hebrew and proposes two further Old Persian calques. This paper reevaluates Wilson-Wright’s proposals on both methodological and philological levels, and offers a fuller dataset for several phenomena. While allowing the principal distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew, questions of textual genesis and transmission are combined with sociolinguistic considerations to explore the possible ramifications of the proposed linguistic interaction: What do we know about the use of Old Persian apart from royal inscriptions? What do we know about Iranians, locals and their use of language in the Achaemenid administration? The result is a much more complex picture of multiple linguistic interference with many unknowns.

Language choice and gender in a Nordic social media corpus

This study analyzes language choice, bi- and multilingualism, and gender in a corpus of over 22 million Twitter messages by almost 36,000 authors from the Nordic countries and territories. Author location, gender, and tweet language are identified using a novel method. Three principal findings are discussed: First, gendered preference for particular languages in the Nordics can be explained in part by patterns of gendered migration. Second, a distinct geographical pattern of female/male preference for the national languages of the region and for English is evident for users who are likely native users of a Nordic language: Females are more likely to use English, while males are more likely to use a Nordic language. Third, while high rates of bi- and multilingualism are found across the whole sample, males are more likely to use more than one language in all the Nordic countries/territories. The latter two findings are interpreted in light of sociolinguistic considerations as evidence for incipient language shift towards English for Nordic users on the Twitter platform.

A sociolinguistic consideration of free and open source software teams as virtual communities of practice

A sociolinguistic exploration of free and open source software (FOSS) development teams as virtual communities of practice will offer further conclusions about the identity of these groups and their relevance to linguistic inquiry. Making use of the "third wave" notion of style laid out by Eckert (2012), it is revealed how a FOSS community may make use of certain language norms to cement their identity both against their opponent of proprietary software groups and within the larger spheres of the Internet.

A Sociolinguistic Considerations of Linguistic Landscapes in Jeju

This paper aims to investigate how Jeju linguistic landscape is composed by analyzing the official and non-official signs of the two different places in new town and old town in Jeju city. The collected signs were analyzed and classified on the basis of Backhaus’ research questions and analytical categories. It shows that multilingual signs are much more than monolingual ones in new town, which is quite the opposite in old town and that English is predominantly used on both the monolingual and multilingual signs of the two areas, apart from Korean. However, there is something unique about the multilingual signs on Baozen street, new town, are composed of Chinese much more than in old town. This enables us to predict there are more chinese customers visiting in new town than in old town. As a result, linguistic overview from a linguistic analysis seems to provide some insight into the better understanding of language use in Jeju.

중국어 ‘-族’류 신조어의 사회언어학적 분석 : 2000-2010년의 ‘-族’류 신조어를 중심으로

An affix, "family(族)" formed an independent domain among the phenomena of languages in the new era as it is rapidly derived because the term-formation is very strong and the category was already and significantly created. This study examines the semantic aspects of a neologism, "-family(族)" series, used in China from 2000 to 2010. An detailed analysis of the neologism used for 10 years, "-family(族)" series, has not been done until now and an sociolinguistic analysis was not done based on surveys. Therefore, this study first performs a morphologic and semantic analysis of the neologism, "-family(族)" series. Next, it grasps the formation mechanism and psychosocial factors by conducting a survey focusing on awareness and social consciousness about the neologism, "-family(族)" series from the viewpoint of sociolinguistics. The systematic and sociolinguistic analyses of "-family(族)" series are thought to be helpful for studies on Chinese neologisms, education, and social phenomena. This paper does not include the new neologisms disappeared while they were popular for a short period of time in the research scope. The neologisms treated in this paper are thought to be trusty in sociolinguistic consideration because their vitality has been verified for a long time as they have been defined in Chinese Neologism Dictionary, Daum Chinese Dictionary, Naver Chinese Dictionary, Naver Open Dictionary, and encyclopedias.

Sociolinguistic Consideration through Assimilated /t/

Sociolinguistic Consideration through Assimilated /t/

How can curriculum history benefit from sociolinguistics? The importance of language controversy in the making of citizens in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe

AbstractBased on small case-study illustrations from a variety of European countries, this study aims to explore methodological aspects of the study of curriculum history by expanding its traditional research scope. In so doing, it is argued that sociolinguistic issues are essential to this discussion. The main argument is that sociolinguistics and curriculum history are more closely intertwined than has been proposed by previous academic literature. Under the examination are often two sides of the same coin which are viewed from different, albeit closely related, research angles. In effect, the curriculum’s contextualisation is also structured and modified by sociolinguistic considerations. In the conclusion, it is maintained that citizenship education—understood here as the historical manifestation of the dominant cultural expectations towards the citizens as the bearers of a particular nation state during a specific timeframe—should be better informed by sociolinguistic literature, and by that, also pl...

The Socio-Linguistic Paradox of Goa

Abstract This article sets out to explore the socio-linguistic situation of Goa, a small territory corresponding to the former district of Goa of the Portuguese Estado da Índia, occupied and annexed by India in 1961. Goa had to choose between local language, Konkani, and the language of the neighbouring state of Maharashtra, i. e., Marathi, which was traditionally used as a cultural language by the Hindus of Goa, who nowadays form the large majority of the population. Even if virtually every Goan is able to speak Konkani, this was, according to recent statistics, the mother tongue of only 61 % of the population of the state, the rest being forms by people from other parts of India, who migrated here. This phenomenon explains the feeble proportion of Konkani speakers in the total population of the state, which favours the resort to English as a means of communication and explains why Konkani only keeps an elevated status in churches, where it is currently used for praying and preaching. Drawing upon historical facts, but also on socio-linguistic consideration, we will try to explain this paradox.

English and Celtic in contact (review)

Reviewed by: English and Celtic in contact Richard Coates English and Celtic in contact. By Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto. New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xix, 312. ISBN 97804155266024. $133 (Hb). This book offers a painstaking presentation and evaluation of the evidence that has been claimed as relevant to the question of how great the influence of Celtic (C) on English (E) has been over a period of some 1,500 years. After a brief introduction, the authors present two large balanced sections, one dealing with 'early' influences and the other with influences 'in the modern age'. The shorter 'epilogue' consists of a chapter on the history of scholarship in this area (which is in many ways a recap of major themes in the earlier sections), a chapter 'reassessing' the evidence for C influence on E from both demographic and theoretical (including typological and sociolinguistic) perspectives, and a short conclusion. The apparatus consists of a rather small set of footnotes, a bibliography, a cited-author index, and a subject index. The authors, already well known individually for their original work on C-influenced varieties of E (e.g. Filppula 1999, Klemola 2000, Filppula et al. 2002, Paulasto 2006), are well informed both theoretically and philologically. Scholars should turn to this book as a valuable, sophisticated, and comprehensive account of the strongest relevant evidence. At one level, saying that is a sufficient appraisal of the book. If it consisted only of Part 2 and the epilogue, it would be largely uncontroversial. There is overwhelming formal evidence for the impact of the C languages on regional Englishes at all linguistic levels, and this is supported by a range of well-known sociolinguistic considerations. But there is a monster in the room provided by Part 1, and I concentrate on the issues that are raised in that part. The book has a rhetorical structure through which the undoubted plausibility of the claims made in Part 2 may stiffen the reader's attitude in favor of the more controversial material in Part 1, especially when reinforced by the recap in the epilogue. Part 1 covers the period from the earliest known contacts (encompassing the end of the period of Roman rule in Britain, c. 350-450) to approximately the Tudor period (1485-1603), with some reflection on modern dialect features that have stayed outside of the developing standard language and are, or may be, presumed to be early, in some sense. The great unresolved issue of this period is whether any of the long-recorded formal characteristics of E, especially those of the standard dialect, can be ascribed to contact with C. The traditional view notes the extreme paucity of C lexical borrowings into E and, at its crudest, infers from it that meaningful contact was negligible, at least in the earlier part of this period before the rate of the Anglo-Saxon westward advance [End Page 441] slowed down. During the twentieth century, some voices were raised proposing that some syntactic features of E invited comparison with C languages individually or collectively (e.g. the cleft construction, do-periphrasis, and the decline of the external possessor construction) and suggested a historical connection irrespective of the lexical evidence. More recently some evidence has been adduced from morphosyntax (e.g. the so-called Northern Subject Rule). The authors rehearse this intellectual history meticulously. The importance of the book is due to the position that it occupies in the growing wave of interest, since Poussa's work of 1990 onward, in the prehistory of E in its C context, which has generated a wealth of new data claimed to speak in favor of important effects of early contact. A state-of-the-art report right now is timely. The general problem with Part 1 can be summed up in a kind of syllogistic schema. There are a number of propositions, each of which is illustrated by a range of data. First, there are those that suggest there is something to explain: E is in many respects a structurally atypical (West) Germanic language. Second, there are those that suggest that the reasons may lie in C: C languages display many of the divergent features that...

A Range of Considerations and Perspectives on Interpreting: Metzger, M. & Fleetwood, E. (Eds.). (2007). Translation, Sociolinguistic, and Consumer Issues in Interpreting. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. 226 pages. Hardcover.

This volume is the third in a series on sign language interpreting. The previous two volumes have dealt with emerging research on interpretation and the challenges faced by interpreters. In this book, the authors explore three sets of considerations for interpreters: (a) translation considerations, (b) sociolinguistic considerations, and (c) consumer considerations. Each of the three parts of the book is comprised of two chapters: the first chapter in Part 1 is an exploration of how to incorporate English idioms into a signed language interpretation. The unique challenge for signed language interpreters identified by Santiago and Barrick is that while there is a ‘‘rich assortment’’ of idioms in English, there are relatively few in signed languages (American Sign Language in this context), which creates difficulties in achieving equivalence in meaning and form when interpreting these ‘‘idiosyncratic’’ elements of language. The second chapter of Part 1 engages in an intriguing discussion of how interpreters can maintain impartiality in a higher education classroom in which semantics and pragmatics are introduced. The theoretical viewpoint of Leeson and Foley-Cave focuses on the linguistic decision-making processes interpreters engage in and the importance of background knowledge of the topic and the presenter. Part 2 begins with an examination of code switch

The national language issue in Congo-Kinshasa: Some sociolinguistic considerations

This paper attempts to show the importance of language in man's life in general and in that of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in particular. After showing that ‘national language' and ‘nation' are synonymous for many countries/nations in the world, it is noted that the situation is different in Congo where one finds more than one language that qualify as national languages – Kikongo, Lingala, Swahili and Tshiluba.. There are also more than two hundred ethnic languages and most people in Congo are more attached to their ethnic than to the national languages. This plurilingualism makes it difficult for the Congolese people to communicate as one nation. LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol.3 () 2006: pp.159-168

Possessive pour in the French Lexicon of the Ivory Coast and Language Contact

Any variationist study of Ivory Coast French needs to take into account sociolinguistic considerations and systemic features of other contact languages. For instance, there is a specific usage of pour against which the interference hypothesis can easily be tested: FI: Le kaki que je porte présentement, c'est pour un bachelier qui me l'a laissé avant de partir en fac, cadeau. (Lafage 2003: 676). Avant de te moquer du linge de ta voisine, regarde si pour toi est propre.. In Ivory Coast French, pour (N/Pro) can display a variety of functions: it can be part of associative predications, it can stand for genitive phrases in an anaphoric construction, make reference to an object in relation with another and participate in various idiomatic expressions. This paper has a twofold objective. First, I argue that pour (N/Pro) constructions has to be analysed as an empty headed "associative" noun phrase. Second, I will show the relevance of extra- AND intersystemic factors in accounting for language variation. Incidentally, the use of pour (N/Pro) constructions seems to be conditioned by the availability of similar constructions in other Ivory Coast languages on the one hand, such as baoule (o liε) or dioula (à tá), and, cultural needs on the other.