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The article discusses how the teaching of Catalan literacy has affected Catalan dialects in Spain since 1975. Young speakers of Lleidatà, a Catalan dialect of northern Spain, have been examined to asses the impact of scripts on oral speech. The local dialect was found to be converging towards the standard dialect through writing. Uneducated and illiterate children living in the rural areas were unaffected by the writing norms and maintained the actual pronunciation of the dialects. Catalan literacy program, however, changed the dialectal pronunciation of children who were attending the program.

The article focuses on the study conducted by René Dailey, Howard Giles, and Laura Jansma which examines the relation of the quantity of Spanish exhibited in the linguistic landscape in southern California to the attitudes of the people toward Hispanics. The study involved 190 Anglo and Hispanic high-school age respondents. It found that the combination of perceived linguistic landscape and respondent ethnicity has predicted Hispanic responses to Anglo-accented speech. The author ends by asserting that the study has certain implications for determining the impact of the linguistic landscape on multilingual community relations.

The article presents news related to anthropological research from the world. In a study of transnational call center workers in New Delhi, India, researcher Kiran Mirchandani demonstrates how such a practice-centered approach can be employed to understand how workers in this particular context of transnational capitalism negotiate and resist the pressures that they face as they speak with North American clients. Researcher Mark Whitaker argues that TamilNet.com's effective use of the Internet as an auto-ethnographic tool represents a form of popular anthropology. By strategically shaping the form and content of their message to reach these audiences, the founders of TamilNet.com have taken advantage of the Internet to advance their nationalist agenda. Researchers Seppo Kuukasjärvi and colleagues have found, in contrast, that men may be able to detect a woman's fertile period on the basis of olfactory cues even if they are not fully conscious of this ability. Kuukasjärvi asked 81 women to wear the same T-shirt to bed on two consecutive nights. Thirty-one men and 12 women rated the sexual attractiveness of each T-shirt without knowing anything about its wearer. Men rated the odor of women who were at midcycle as significantly more attractive than the odor of women at any other point.

Examines the learning of politeness patterns in human beings. Many studies have shown that women express politeness in speech more often and more explicitly than men, using more compliments and apologies and interrupting less often. However, researchers have not established the age at which this gender difference is acquired or the mechanisms by which it is established. Past research has suggested that children's speech is modeled on parental speech and therefore children use gender-specific language at an early age.

The article discusses how English language can be used to index modernity through advertising in South Korea. Discussing the relation between language choices and the product being advertised, the manner of promotion, and the population to which each type of advertisement is directed, researcher Jamie Shinhee Lee argues that the aforesaid characteristics help to determine the linguistic construction of modernity in South Korean television. Reportedly, more than half of the younger generation has a certain degree of Korean-English bilingualism. The practice has been adopted by several companies to test reward high English skills.

The article reports on the study conducted by Yihong Gao and colleagues on the influences of language acquisition and target-language proficiency to undergraduate Chinese English-learners. The researchers used a questionnaire to study how the types of self-identity changes, demographics and starting age of language acquisition interact with target-language proficiency. Research showed that productive bilingualism is a realistic possibility for 30-50% of ordinary students, that women show more positive changes in productive and additive bilingualism and men demonstrate more subtractive bilingualism. It concludes that English proficiency is of little significance in provoking identity changes.

The article reports on how language interact with biological sex and sexual orientation. It discusses the research conducted to test on the hypothesis that homosexual men and women's language fall between heterosexual men and women. Researchers examined 1,600 online personal ads to compile the linguistic profiles of heterosexuals, gay men and lesbians. The ads were divided into 5 dimensions which are linguistic property, social processes, psychological processes, time and spatial context and current concerns. The hypothesis on gay linguistic trait was disproved and that lesbian speech show more differences from the other three groups.

The article discusses a study which appeared in volume 32 (2005) of the "Journal of Child Language" in which Şeyda Özçişkan and Susan Goldin-Meadow observed speech and gesture combination development in children. The authors contend that such combinations in children predict the developmental onset of two-word phrases, and they disprove the theory that caregivers are the primary influence on childrens' gestures. The three types of gestures analysed are deictic, which refer to objects within a context; iconic, which illustrate some aspect of the intended referent; and conventional, which follow cultural customs.

A summary is presented of the article "'Other tongue' policy and ethnic nationalism in Nigeria," by L. Oladipo Salami, in "Language Policy." The article reports that Nigeria is finding it difficult to integrate its disparate ethnic groups and so has instituted an "other tongue" policy, encouraging all citizens to learn Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo in addition to their native language. People are willing to comply with the other tongue policy, but hopes that it will foster ethnic unity seem to be in vain, as willingness to learn another language does not translate to positive attitudes towards the group that speaks it.

This article reflects on a study performed by anthropologist Farzad Sharifan on the interpretation of the English language by native children in Australia. This study was focused on examining how the meanings of specific words within a common language can vary across a spectrum of dialectal variation. The groups of children examined, from different dialectal regions, each showed a distinct conceptualization of target words assigned for them to define. Sharifan argues that these differences in interpretations present important information about cultural differences for the regions examined.

The article cites a study related to the role of children in the development of a new sign language. Deaf children and adults in Nicaragua have historically been isolated from each other. Over the past 25 years, a deaf elementary and vocational school has caused a sizable population of deaf adults and children to interact, and in this setting a new sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), has emerged. Researcher Ann Senghas and colleagues argue that this language demonstrates the development from a gestural form into a linguistic system. In examining the signing of cohorts of NSL signers, they focused on two hallmark traits of language in distinguishing true language from other forms of communication: discreteness, in which elements are broken down into minimal units, and hierarchical combinatorial patterning, in which these discrete units are used to build larger units.

The article cites a study related to communication strategies for athletes. Many people believe that men and women communicate differently, but academic research has offered only mixed support for this view. Researcher Philip Sullivan examined intercollegiate and intramural sports teams, which offer environments rich in nonverbal communication, close camaraderie, and same-sex groups, all factors likely to produce gender-based differences if they exist. Relatively gender-neutral sports such as soccer and volleyball were chosen to reduce extraneous complications. The athletes were surveyed on aspects of effective team communication: acceptance, or interpersonal support; distinctiveness, measuring inclusive team identity; positive conflict, encompassing modes of compromising in arguments; and negative conflict, covering confrontational disagreements. Sullivan found that athletes did not evidence distinct sexed communication styles, verbally or nonverbally. Significant differences were found between the communication styles of intercollegiate and intramural athletes.