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This article explores religious impact on language maintenance and language shift in two Hakka communities in Malaysia. While research has shown a trend towards language shift in these communities, whether religious institutions can play a role in heritage language maintenance remained unclear. The key findings are as follows: (i) language use patterns differ among various religious groups; (ii) this difference is due mainly to religious practices, that is, whether a heritage language is used as the 'language of religion'; and (iii) most religious institutions, except Taoist temples and Basel churches, seem to fuel shifting. However, the tendency to move towards the 'bi-language of religion' threatens even the efforts of Basel churches. The study indicates interesting possibilities regarding religious impact but also shows, paradoxically, that the priority of Hakka-based religious institutions is to promote their religions, not to sustain the threatened heritage language. (Language maintenance, language shift, religious impact, Hakka Chinese community) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early research on bilingualism and emotion suggests that bilingual speakers' L1 may be preferred for emotional expression whereas L2 may be used for emotional detachment. The evidence comes primarily from surveys, interviews, and laboratory studies. Studies of bilingual codeswitching (CS) and emotion tend to focus on perception and recollection of experience rather than actual language data. This article uses data from domestic migrant-worker returnee narratives to explore the use of CS in storytelling. Domestic-worker returnees in Indonesia participated in sharing sessions in which they talked about the trauma they experienced while they worked overseas as domestic helpers. CS was widely used and, through a discourse analysis of selected excerpts, the article shows that CS is used for addressee specification and emotional alignment. The article concludes by considering how researchers may use the trauma narratives of repressed groups for social activism. (Codeswitching and emotion, domestic migrant workers, trauma narratives, Indonesia)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, the members of a community on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru have tended to limit their social ties to members of their own families. But the residents have begun to forge a ‘community’ through a semiotic distinction between private and public spaces, social practices, and domains of morality. Particular discursive phenomena in the asamblea ‘community meeting’ are deployed to create and maintain the community as a domain of action distinct from kin commitments, and participation in the asamblea offers a context in which to assume a novel political and moral subjectivity. Thus, the social organizational construct of the community is emergent in public interactions. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of public discourse in another comunidad nativa ‘indigenous community’ that has not embraced the notion of ‘community’, and demonstrates how code-switching allows leaders there to invoke both the private and public modes of social authority. (Amazonia, Andes, Matsigenka, Spanish, Quechua)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses the concept of stance to examine a series of activities and plurilingual heteroglossic performances and improvisations in a Corsican language-planning event. It focuses on how stances taken by performers attribute stances to the audience, as well as how stance objects (language, community, heritage) are construed in performance. This analysis is used to examine how these language-planning events mediate ideological tensions in Corsican language planning, specifically between traditional monolingual/purist ideologies and plurilingual, polynomic ones. (Stance, Corsica, performance, ideology, heteroglossia)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Italy, barzellette are short funny stories that speakers perform in various social events with large groups of friends, relatives, or colleagues. In Northern Italy, where a strong anti-immigration platform has been implemented by two influential political parties of the Veneto region, barzellette are performed to represent certain immigrant groups, especially the so-called extracomunitari. In this article, I examine the performative power of multidialectal language play in race-based humor through an analysis of two such joking events. I show how Veneto speakers perform barzellette in their local language, Veneto dialect, to mock immigrant voices, using approaches that purport, not necessarily in a deliberate fashion, to ‘contain’ or ‘conceal’ their racist remarks in their local code. In this way, they sharpen an exclusionary divide between an ‘us’, as insiders, as the local speakers of this language, and a ‘them’, as outsiders, or the immigrant ‘others’, who do not share this code. I thus examine issues of covert racist discourse within an ‘unmarked’ framework in which race and racializing discourses are embedded in social and cultural patterns. (Code-shifting, jokes, Lega Nord, migration, race, racialized discourse, Veneto dialect)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The past two decades have seen an explosion of interest in interactionally orientated perspectives on identity. The Community of Practice framework was employed by sociolinguists working within this paradigm because it firmly grounds identity in social practice seeing it as a process that speakers engage in during actual interactions. Interest in variation within communities of practice is growing, as the well-boundedness of linguistic and social concepts (including identity and language) is increasingly questioned. The current article develops this perspective by exploring code-switching practices of British-born Greek-Cypriots in two distinct contexts: community meetings and a dinner. Findings indicate that this community of practice does not constitute a uniform entity: complex interactions transpire between local and global variables including gender, community-specific setups, contexts, and discourse types. The study also problematizes the concepts core and periphery, used to describe variation within communities of practice, offering a revised understanding of practice, which focuses on silent participation. (Code-switching, community of practice, Greek-Cypriot, gender, identity, individual variation) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the use of English discourse markers in Louisiana French, focusing in particular on English but and its French counterpart mais. Based on data collected in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes, we examine the speech of bilinguals to determine the status of these markers, which provide a window onto the role of discourse markers in situations of language contact. Though the markers show an overlapping semantic and functional distribution, but more often appears in the context of at least one pause. We also provide acoustic evidence and an analysis of the markers in different functions to conclude that the need for iconic contrast via language mixing (Maschler 1994, 1997; de Rooij 2000) is only one possible motivation for the use of foreign markers. We conclude that discourse markers may carry social meaning and be the site of identity construction as much as they are the site of text organization. (Discourse markers, bilingual discourse, codeswitching, language shift)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the social functions of codeswitching (CS) between Standard Arabic (SA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The data came from thirty-five audio and video recordings in the domains of religious lectures, political debates, and soccer commentaries. The findings suggest that speakers create a functional division between the two varieties by designating issues of importance, complexity, and seriousness to SA, the High code, and aligning less important, less serious, and accessible topics with DA, the Low code. The CS patterns therefore reproduce the unequal social values and distribution of SA and DA in the Arabic sociolinguistic landscape and simultaneously call for a reconceptualization of the notion of diglossia as presented in Ferguson's (1959) work. Other functions of CS as a marker of speakers' attitudes and as an index of pan-Arab or Muslim identities are discussed. (Arabic, bidialectal codeswitching, High/Low dichotomy, functional diglossia, identity, language attitudes)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his landmark contribution to the field of language shift/maintenance, Fishman maintains that, for language shift to be reversed, "face-to-face, small-scale social life must be pursued in their own right and focused upon directly." This article responds to this call to examine language shift at the level of face-to-face interaction. It describes a specific interactional practice, referred to as "medium request," observed in the Rwandan community in Belgium, where language shift is taking place from Kinyarwanda-French bilingualism to French monolingualism. The practice consists in the fact that younger members of the community, when in interaction with adult members, constantly (albeit indirectly) request the latter to "medium-switch" from Kinyarwanda to French. The article therefore describes the practice as a specific type of language/medium negotiation, examines its various strategies, and shows how, through this interactional practice,members of the community actually talk language shift into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intertwined role of language ideologies and affect in language shift and revitalization can be understood by taking a language socialization perspective on local micro-level interaction between adult Gaelic learners and fluent Gaelic-English bilinguals. Seven adults living in the Western Isles were interviewed about their efforts to learn and speak Scottish Gaelic, a minority language spoken by 1-2% of Scotland's population. Their negative affective stances in describing their interactions with local Gaelic-English bilinguals indicate that they were being socialized into an ideology of local Gaelic-English sociolinguistic boundaries: an "etiquette of accommodation" to English speakers and wariness about public Gaelic speaking. This socialized combination of ideology and negative affect reduces opportunities for Gaelic speaking, hindering both Gaelic learners' efforts to become fluent speakers and their potential contribution to language revitalization. In contrast, however, the interviewees described "sociolinguistic mentors" who socialized them into a more inclusive vision of Gaelic speaking laden with positive affect. (Language socialization, L2 language learning, affective stance, language shift, language revitalization, Scottish Gaelic, Scotland). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for an account of language shift that focuses on ideological conflicts and competing discourses of language, identity, and progress in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The study is based on ethnographic research on patterns of language use, ideology, and boundary differentiation in several Mexicano (Nahuatl)-speaking communities in the Malintzi region of Central Mexico. Metadiscursive practices consisting of three discourses that have local, regional, and national expressions are analyzed: the pro-development metadiscourse of saliradelante, 'forging ahead' and improving one's socio-economic position; the discourse of menosprecio, denigration of indigenous identity; and the pro-indígena or pro-indigenous discourse that promotes a positive attitude toward indigenous identity. Analysis of these discourses offers an understanding of the semiotic resources speakers employ as they orient toward and against particular identities that are both "traditional" and "modern," as they respond to changing social and economic circumstances. It is concluded that a focus on individuals and communities, through ethnography and discourse analysis, is of critical importance to understanding how and why speakers shift their ideologies and their languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the reasons for and the effects of the language shift in Zimbabwe represented by the increasing use of pan-ethnic lingua francas, or urban vernaculars, of local origin. It is suggested that essentialist/primordialist assumptions about "indigenous" languages that feature prominently in current accounts of language endangerment should be made more complex by understanding their historical and social origins. In Zimbabwe, this means understanding the origins of Shona and Ndebele during the colonial period as the product of a two-stage process: codification of dialects by missionaries, and creation of a unified standard by the colonial regime. In the postcolonial context, these languages and the ethnic identities they created/reified are giving way to language use that indexes not ethnic affiliation but urbanization. The article adduces data showing that as Zimbabweans move with relative ease across language boundaries, urban vernaculars express their shared social experience of living in postcolonial urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russian-speaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item code switching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use. (Writing systems, Russian, English, codeswitching, borrowing, hybridity.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses language behavior among Dominican children. In Dominica, rural adults forbid children from speaking Patwa (a French-lexicon creole) in favor of acquiring English (the official language), contributing to a rapid language shift in most villages. However, adults value Patwa for a range of expressive functions and frequently code-switch around and to children. Children increasingly use English but employ Patwa for some functions during peer play when away from adults. Critically, they draw on their verbal resources and physically embodied social action to create imaginary play spaces both organized by and appropriate for Patwa. A growing body of literature on peer interactions in multilingual settings illustrates that adolescents and school-age children use code-switching for a variety of functions, such as structuring play, games, and other activities, negotiating meanings and rights, and asserting their shifting identities and allegiances. Children in Dominica also engage in complex code-switching practices between English and Patwa in their role play with peers. Their language choice in role enactment illustrates their emerging sensitivity to the ways in which these contrasting languages index particular social identities, places, and activities

This article investigates children's procedures for constructing oppositional stances in argumentative exchanges. While most previous research on children's arguments entails a monolingual bias, the present analysis focuses on bilingual practices of code-switching in disputes emerging during play activities. Drawing on more than ten hours of video-taped play interaction in a bilingual school setting, it is shown how the language contrast arising through code-switching displays and highlights the affective intensity of oppositional stances. Sequential analyses show how code-switching works to escalate social opposition, often to the peak of an argument, resulting in subsequent back down or full termination of the dispute. Moreover, in certain participant constellations code-switching may be used to constrain opponents' opportunities to engage in further adversative interaction. Finally, it is argued that an approach to play discourse concerned with children's methods for accomplishing accountable actions allows for a view of bilingualism as socially distributed; that is, as an emergent and interactionally managed feature of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that examined code-mixing and code-switching of Tariana dialects spoken in the multilingual area of the Vaupés basin in Northwest Amazonia, Brazil. Overview of the Vaupés area; Discussion on the principles of choosing a language; Analysis on the use of different languages in varied circumstances such as code-switching and code-mixing.