By Jen Malat, on November 4th, 2019%
SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE is Canada Research Chair in Language Variation and Change and a Full Professor and Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. She is the author of six books, including: Making Waves, Variationist Sociolinguistics (Wiley-Blackwell 2012, 2015) and Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation, Roots of English and Teen Talk (CUP 2006, 2013, 2016). She has published on African American varieties, British, Irish and Canadian dialects, teen language and television across the major journals of the field. Her research has been funded by agencies in Canada, the US and UK. Her most recent research program is the Ontario Dialects Project, which focuses . . . → Read More: Interview with Sali A. Tagliamonte
By James McKellar, on March 7th, 2017%
Blog post by Louise Cummings, Nottingham Trent University . . . → Read More: The merits of a case study approach in communication disorders
By James McKellar, on January 20th, 2017%
Blog Post by Douglas Kibbee, author of Language and the Law: Linguistic Inequality in America
Early in the fall of 2016 several news agencies speculated that Donald Trump might be suffering from early onset dementia. Could this be related to his adamant monolingualism? During his campaign Donald Trump rebuked Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish, telling him to talk English, he’s in America (2015). In the campaign against Hilary Clinton, Trump dismissed bilingual communities, refusing to advertise in languages other than English. America will not be made great by making it monolingual. Monolingualism is not just a threat to national security and economic competitiveness. It’s a threat to public health.
One of the greatest weaknesses of our educational system is the decline in foreign-language . . . → Read More: Trump’s Monolingual Disadvantage
By James McKellar, on November 18th, 2016%
Cambridge Professor Ian Roberts discusses Language, cats and extra-terrestrials…. . . . → Read More: Language, cats and extra-terrestrials
By James McKellar, on June 15th, 2016%
Cambridge author Paul Warren, Victoria University of Wellington answers out questions on Uptalk: The Phenomenon of Rising Intonation . . . → Read More: Uptalk: The Phenomenon of Rising Intonation: an interview with author Paul Warren
By James McKellar, on April 27th, 2016%
Mobile phones are a multifaceted scourge; they’ve been blamed for everything from poor social skills to short attention spans. As a linguist, I’m intrigued by one particular claim: that texting makes people illiterate. Not only are text messages short (and thus unsuited for complex ideas), they’re riddled with near-uninterpretable abbreviations: idk, pls, gr8. Young people are especially vulnerable to these altered forms; critics frequently raise the specter of future students studying a Hamlet who texts 2B or not 2B…… . . . → Read More: Text Messaging and the Downfall of Civilization
By James McKellar, on April 23rd, 2015%
Post written by Jennifer Austin, María Blume & Liliana Sánchez authors of Bilingualism in the Spanish-Speaking World.
Bilingualism, and how it affects language and cognitive development, is a topic of increasing relevance in an interconnected world. In Bilingualism in the Spanish-Speaking World, we examine how the outcomes of bilingualism are shaped by factors at the individual level, such as age of acquisition and the amount and type of input, as well as societal support for the minority language in the form of dual-language education and similar initiatives. By analyzing previous research on the effects of these variables on bilingual speakers’ linguistic representations, as well as their minds and brains, we have attempted to provide a better understanding of some emerging conceptual . . . → Read More: Bilingualism in the Spanish-Speaking World
By James McKellar, on July 29th, 2014%
written by Professor Bernard Spolsky
It’s great to be relevant! A few weeks after my sociolinguistic history of the Jewish people was published, a Reuters story highlighted a dispute between the visiting Pope Francis and the Israeli Prime Minister over the language spoken by Jesus (Reuter, 28 May 2014). “Jesus spoke Hebrew”, Netanyahu stated. “Aramaic”, responded the Pope. He almost certainly knew both Hebrew and Aramaic, and also Greek (and maybe a little Latin), I would have answered, as I did in one of the earliest studies that I published that marked my growing interest in the language of the Jews.
But this disagreement turns out to be only one the many examples of disputes that I found in my research. There are, I learned, . . . → Read More: Some unsolved questions about the languages of the Jews
By admin, on April 7th, 2014%
How do children develop bilingual competence? Do bilingual children develop language in the same way as monolinguals? Set in the context of findings on language development, Bilingual Language Acquisition examines the acquisition of English and Spanish by two brothers in the first six years of their lives. (The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 1).
Introduction
Bingual language acquisition
The terms bilingual and bilingualism have received diverse definitions. In this book, bilingual (the person), and bilingualism (the condition or state of affairs) refer to the use of two (or more) languages in everyday life. Two major patterns of language acquisition have been identified in studies of early bilingualism: simultaneous bilingualism and sequential bilingualism, but no agreement exists with respect to the age at . . . → Read More: Bilingual Language Acquisition
By admin, on December 16th, 2013%
written by Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University
One of the linchpins of human information-processing are the frames of expectation we apply to the constant flow of information. These frames allow us to impose meaning on the things we see, hear, or read and to position ourselves with regard to ideas and arguments. In the case of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH), these frames require us to adopt one of the three recognizable positions: for (which may brand us as radicals), against (a marker of a skeptic or a rational thinker), or in-between (a sign of a temperate scholar willing to consider the pros and cons of everything). The adoption of conventional frames of expectation saves us a lot of valuable time . . . → Read More: Sapir, Whorf, and the hypothesis that wasn’t
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