Berbice Dutch is one of two recently rediscovered Dutch-based Creole languages spoken in Guyana. It is spoken in the county of Berbice, which corresponds to the former Dutch colony of Berbice, founded in the early seventeenth century.

This language possesses certain features that make it unique in comparison to other European language-based Creoles spoken in the Atlantic region. Because of these unique features, it represents a promising test case for the presence of substrate influence, and as such, is of obvious relevance for the present creolist debate between substratists and universalists.

The article discusses four different conceivable hypotheses to explain the origin of Berbice Dutch. The first of these assumes that a mixed Dutch–Kalaịarḅ trading jargon was developed in Africa as a result of the operations of the slave traders, and that this formed the basis of Berbice Dutch.

The second hypothesis depends critically on the ethnic homogeneity of the slaves. This hypothesis would assume that the planters/overseers in Berbice attempted to learn those aspects of Eastern Ịjọ that could be utilized on the plantations.

The third hypothesis assumes that Berbice Dutch is genetically descended from Eastern Ịjọ, but that this is not obvious due to large-scale relexification.

The fourth hypothesis assumes that Eastern Ịjọ was replaced by Berbice Dutch under the catalysing influence of (creole) Dutch, rather as the fully inflected Romani language was replaced in England by the creolized Anglo-romani under the catalysing influence of English.

The hypothesis that is selected as probably the best is the fourth, where it is argued that Berbice Dutch was adopted as the language of the Berbice slaves because it offered a means of expressing the identity of a newly created “ethnic” group.

The most important moral that can be drawn from this article is that the development of each Creole must be examined individually. Only after such an examination has taken place for a significant number of Creoles will it be possible to define what is meant by creolization. In addition to the detailed linguistic examination required, it will also be necessary to carry out detailed (socio)historical work demonstrating if possible that the linguistic sequence of events is supported by the available historical data. (Creole language, substrate, Ịjọ language, ethnicity, mixed language)

The particle one of Singapore English is widely used in Singapore culture, but it is little mentioned and its invariant meaning has not been described, so that not much is known about its meaning and the cultural norms it reflects. This article provides a detailed semantic analysis of this particle, articulates its meaning in the form of a reductive paraphrase using natural semantic metalanguage, and argues that its use reflects Singapore English speakers' tendency to speak definitively and exaggeratedly. The discussion of Singaporean speech norms reflected by this particle includes reference to relevant Anglo English speech norms for comparison and contrast.I am indebted to Anna Wierzbicka for her detailed comments on an earlier version of this article. I am grateful to Jane Hill, Peter Tan and another, anonymous reviewer for their very generous and constructive overall feedback on this paper. I have also benefited from stimulating discussions with Cynthia Allen and Avery Andrews on the topic of relative clauses and the syntax of the nominal one. Jane McGary provided valuable editorial assistance and native Anglo English speaker intuition in regard to some examples. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude toward writer Hwee Hwee Tan for giving me a soft copy of her manuscript to do electronic searches.

Unlike class or ethnicity, gender-based differences are assumed to result from social difference, not distance, yet across multiple societies, researchers find that gender separation is practiced to varying degrees. Such separation creates distance. Preference for same-gender affiliations emerges around age three, peaks in middle childhood, and lessens during the teen years, yet persists in the workplace and later life. Though reasons for this are many, Thorne (1993:51) identified one finding in these terms: “Where age separation is present, gender separation is more likely to occur.” Because age segregation varies with stage of life, one may predict that gender segregation would wax and wane across the lifespan. This study investigates this prediction with three sociolinguistic variables of Puerto Rican Spanish. In turn, it explores the prediction across other varieties of Spanish, German, and English, focusing on variables that are stable, undergoing change, or in the end stage of loss.I want to send very special muchísimas gracias to Miriam Meyerhoff and William Labov for critical, insightful, and engaged readings of an earlier version of this research. Over the past two years, I have presented portions of this research at various conferences. In these contexts, on more than one occasion, Greg Guy, Gillian Sankoff, and Shahrzad Mahootian have provided both critical and supportive comments. I admire and love all these people. Finally, I thank Jane Hill and the two reviewers whose very useful comments called for clarification and qualification. I appreciate their attention very much. None of these individuals is responsible for shortcomings in the research. I hope any shortcomings here will stimulate long-term research elsewhere. Besos a Diana González-Cameron, mi esposa.

This article underscores the importance of examining interlocutors' history in studies of intercultural communication. Five historical factors and four contextual factors are proposed and illustrated with interview and videotaped data, showing how each factor predetermines the interactants' power dynamics, thus shaping and influencing the process and outcome of interaction. Analyzing videotaped interactions between Japanese technical supporters and American workers on the production floor also demonstrates the interlocutors' creative utilization of available communicative resources and co-construction of meaning as interactions unfold. This co-construction of meaning occurs despite the severely limited knowledge of the other group's language and sociolinguistic norms.I thank all the study participants at Japan Die Company, who spent their precious time for my research. I am indebted to Miyako Inoue, Elizabeth Keating, Keith Walters, and Tony Woodbury for providing me with useful comments, insights, and encouragement, and Ellen Nakamura for proofreading the text. Thanks also to the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for supporting my writing of this article. Earlier versions of this project were presented at Stanford University, Nagoya University, and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and I appreciate the audiences' valuable feedback.

Cantonese and non-Cantonese students of the Guangzhou (Canton) Foreign Language Institute took part in a matched-guise experiment, expressing judgments about two samples of speech produced by the same person but presented as coming from two different speakers. In one sample the person spoke good Putonghua (Mandarin), in the other a Putonghua heavily influenced by Cantonese. All judges tended to agree that what they thought was the better Putonghua speaker would have a better chance for social advancement. However, Cantonese judges also showed some positive evaluation of a “heavy Cantonese accent” in the sphere of personal empathy. Such empathy was stronger among male than among female Cantonese. Similar attitudes regarding a “high” (Putonghua) and a “low” (Cantonese) variant in a multilingual society are typical for most Western societies that sociolinguists have studied. They now seem to be equally typical for an Oriental, socialist society like that of China. (Chinese dialects, evaluative reactions, comparative sociolinguistics)

In this article I discuss language ideologies and stigma, exploring how a group of South Africans living with HIV confronted the perceived language of HIV and engaged with international aid to live “positive lives” amid stigma. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a Zulu choir that functioned as an HIV support group and AIDS activist organization, I analyze talk about how others talked about HIV (metapragmatic discourse about HIV) to suggest a language-ideological component of stigma. I also explore how choir members' engagement with scientific medicine and international aid provided an alternative ideological framework in which the foreign was positively valued. I analyze how choir members creatively incorporated English medical terminology into isiZulu discourse as an alternative to the language of stigma. This analysis provides a model of the language-ideological constitution of stigma that suggests links to theorization of language and other types of marginality and abjection. (Language ideologies, stigma, HIV/AIDS, South Africa, Zulu, exclusion, markedness)*

Code-switching from the Fijian language into a variety of Hindi is commonly used for joking among indigenous Fijians. Examples of this codeswitching are described here, and its role in Fijian joking relationships is outlined. A survey of code-switching used for humor in other societies shows that code-switching may be a signal for joking, that the switching itself may be considered humorous, and that the variety to which one switches may be used for humorous mockery or parody. Three different psychological approaches to the study of humor throw some light on why code-switching into Hindi is funny to Fijians. A final discussion examines code-switching in relation to both unintegrated borrowing and style-shifting. (Code-switching, borrowing, humor, joking, Fijian, Hindi)

To investigate discourse and interactive functions of quote formula + hey + pseudoquotation, that is, invented quotation, in current English communication, tokens were collected from public and commercial broadcasts and miscellaneous readings during a four-month period. In addition, all instances of hey with context were extracted from the Brown Corpus of American English. Only 26 possible tokens, the majority from radio and television, were located; one instance in Brown indicates existence as early as 1961. A speaker uses quote formula + hey + pseudoquotation to dramatize and thereby give emphasis to an important point (in these examples, generally in an expository discourse), a practice reported for both sophisticated and folk discourse. Instead of a rhetorical question, the device makes a rhetorical answer to an unasked question. Although pseudoquotation can be found either without discourse marker or with other discourse marker, hey is an appropriate marker for pseudoquotation, simultaneously to mark an important point in a discourse and to bind listeners to the ongoing interaction by (re)capturing their attention. (Discourse markers, conversational interaction, pragmatics, dramatization, hey, quotation)

This article argues that an androcentric Basque nationalist pedagogy is enacted in secondary schools in San Sebastian (Donostia), Spain. Textbooks present men as the exemplary Basque speakers and cultural agents by erasing women's contributions to Basque language and culture. Schools also contribute to a recursive language ideology, linking “authentic” ethnic identity, “naturalness,” and solidarity with vernacular Basque, of which the most pragmatically salient marker is the familiar form of address hi. Hi, in turn, indirectly indexes male speakers and masculinity, thereby creating an iconic relationship between authentic Basque identity, Basque culture, and masculinity. However, many women in Basque society have challenged this male privilege in various domains, thereby opening up the possibility of a Basque nation that embraces its female as well as its male members. As such, the Basque case has interesting implications for theorizing the relationships among language, gender, and nation.

Existential constructions in a corpus of spontaneous English from Bequia (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) are used to explore a linguistic problem (Is variation in verb form in existential constructions best viewed as grammatical or lexical?) and a sociolinguistic problem (What aspects of variation change over a lifetime?). We compare “urban sojourners” (Bequians who have been away) with their home village norms. We observe differences in the frequency of the type of existential preferred in different villages and by the urban sojourners. We also observe differences in whether or not the main verb agrees in number with a postposed plural subject. Building on William Labov's early discussions of constraints on variation imposed by the “sociolinguistic monitor,” we suggest that variation in individual speakers supports the notion that variables that are fundamentally grammatical are less likely to mark social factors than lexical variables are. (Bequia, Caribbean English, existentials, subject-verb agreement)*

With special attention to the use of unconventional practices and pictorial signs in casual letter writing, this article shows how young Japanese women effectively exploit affect-laden shape, form, and function in order to establish intimate and solidary relationships. They rely on both conventional and unconventional aspects of Japanese orthography, encoding affect specific to the given context and merging spoken with written modes of self-representation. In so doing, they seem to draw on diverse “frames” of written language, and to manipulate symbolic means of association and integration for achieving reciprocity. These features not only provide the basis for reciprocity, but may also suggest a new mode of literacy caused by social change. (Writing, literacy, affect, Japanese, pictorial signs, letter-writing)

This paper documents attitudes toward English, Spanish, and Spanish-English Code-switching in Juarez, Mexico, the oldest and largest city along the Mexican–U.S. border. It refutes the finding of related work which has shown two distinct orientations – integrative and instrumental – toward English as a foreign and as a second language, but supports various assumptions regarding the relationship between attitudes and use and the impact of the local milieu on language attitudes. It also explores attitudes toward correctness and sentiments of language loyalty, and highlights the influence of language loyalty on perceptions of Spanish-English Code-switching. Eighty-five Juarez residents were interviewed. (Language attitudes, so-ciolinguistics, Hispanic linguistics, border studies, ethnic studies, Latin American studies)

McWhorter challenges the validity of the limited access model for creole formation, noting that “the mainland Spanish colonies put in question a model which is crucial to current creole genesis.” His thesis is that in the Spanish mainland colonies the disproportion between the Black and White populations was enough for the emergence of a creole language. This article focuses on one colony, Venezuela, and argues that Africans there had as much access to Spanish as they did in islands such as Cuba. Based on this fact, the relevant linguistic evidence is analyzed. The most important contribution of this study is the discussion of the Spanish crown's monopolization of the slave trade, which kept the Black/White ratio relatively low in certain Spanish colonies until the end of the 18th century. Until now, this part of the puzzle has been absent in the discussion of the missing Spanish creoles.

This article examines the discourse about race and racism that ensued in the US media after the shooting death of an African American youth, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in February 2012. The analysis examines news programs from the three major cable television channels in the United States: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The theoretical framework builds upon Hill's (2008) discussion of the ‘folk theory of race and racism’ in contrast to critical race theory, and asks, to what extent does the mainstream media's discourse about race remain embedded in folk ideas and to what extent (if at all) does the conversation move beyond those ideas? The paper aims to unpack the ideologies of race and language that underpin talk about race and racism in an effort to expose the hidden assumptions in the discourse that hinder more productive dialogue on the topic. (Critical race theory, folk theory of race and racism, George Zimmerman, ideology, language ideology, media discourse, race, race talk, racism, slurs, Trayvon Martin)*

Recent research in American Sign Language (ASL) has concentrated on demonstrating that ASL, a language channelled through the manual—visual modality, has linguistic properties similar to those of oral languages, except for physical sound. The absence of sound, however, really presents no theoretical problem since ASL has a formational level of structure analogous to, but not dependent on, the phonological component of oral languages (Stokoe 1960; Battison 1974).

This paper will discuss a relatively new area of research in Sign linguistics, ethnic—social variation. Because of attitudes and educational policy, Black signers in the South have developed different varieties of signing from Whites. Concentrating primarily on Black signs in Georgia, this paper will discuss some of the lexical and formational (phonological) variation observed in old and young Black signers. (Sociolinguistic variation; sign languages; linguistic change; minority group languages.)

An illocutionary act presupposes not only a speaker, but also an other who is the intended recipient of the utterance's illocutionary force. Thus every illocutionary act has an intersubjective component; it connects two centers of experience in a particular way. This article proposes that the intersubjective illocutionary force of an utterance depends on (1) whether it concerns the speaker's or other's experience, (2) whether it takes the speaker's or other's viewpoint, and (3) whether or not the speaker must presume specific knowledge of the other to make the utterance. These three dichotomous principles of classification are called source of experience, frame of reference, and focus, respectively. The eight possible combinations of “speaker” and “other” values define a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of families of intersubjective illocutionary acts – Disclosure, Advisement, Edification, Confirmation, Question, Interpretation, Acknowledgment, and Reflection – which I have elsewhere called “verbal response modes.” The modes are associated with characteristic grammatical forms, which retain a “formal” portion of their illocutionary force even when used to express a different intent, yielding a taxonomy of 64 distinct form-intent combinations. Differences between this taxonomy and other taxonomies of illocutionary acts are partially traceable to the present system's roots in the study of psychotherapeutic processes and the previous systems' roots in the study of explicit performatives.

Tariana is spoken by about 100 people in the multilingual area of the Vaupés basin in northwest Amazonia (Brazil). Other languages spoken in the area are members of the East Tucanoan subgroup, with its most numerous representative, the Tucano language, rapidly gaining ground as a lingua franca. Also spoken are Makú languages; Baniwa, an Arawak language spoken on the fringes of the area and closely related to Tariana; and Portuguese, the national language. The area is known for its language group exogamy and institutionalized multilingualism, with its language being the badge of identity for each group. Language choice is motivated by power relationship and by status, and there are strict rules for code-switching. Inserting bits of other languages while speaking Tariana (“code-mixing”) has different consequences that mirror existing ethnic stereotypes. Code-mixing with Tucano is considered a “language violation”; using elements of Baniwa is considered funny, while mixing different Tariana dialects implies that one “cannot speak Tariana properly.” Overusing Portuguese is associated with the negative image of an Indian who tries to be better than his peers.

This study examines two public hearings on a zoning proposal that would allow the construction of a Super Wal-Mart Center on a field over the town's aquifer. Many citizens speak out against the zoning change because of the risk to drinking water, as well as other issues. Citizens face the speaker's problem of how to make their presentations convincing, given the technical matters involved and the fact that Town Board members have likely already heard about these issues. Some speakers draw on the words of others in their presentations. Using another's words allows the speaker to cite an authoritative source or to respond to what another has said, to evaluate it, and often to challenge it. Speakers use other devices in addition to quotes, such as formulations, repetition, and membership categorizations to develop their evaluative stances in the reporting context. The study's focus is the discursive construction and rhetoric of using others' words for the speaker's own purposes.We gratefully acknowledge the early discussions and help in transcribing from Katherine Hobbs, Diana Martinez, and Jackie Smith. Thanks for the useful comments from Jamie Dangler, Kendall Phillips, Karen Tracy, Donal Carbaugh, Benjamin Bailey, Robin Shoaps, and Vern Cronen. Portions of this study were presented to the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, 2006, at the National Communication Association Convention, San Antonio, 2006, and at the International Communication Association Convention, San Francisco The final version of this paper benefited tremendously from detailed comments and criticisms from Barbara Johnstone and the two anonymous reviewers.

In the first part of the article, an approach to Greek diglossia is proposed, focusing on the differing social functions of the two coexisting Greek languages. The adoption of “pure” Greek in the early 19th century represented a compromise, which made possible the rejection of Ancient Greek as the official language of the new state. The language question that developed at the turn of the century represented an effort to modernize Greek culture in the context of economic and social change brought about by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Starting in the interwar period and increasingly after the civil war, “pure” Greek became associated exclusively with authoritarian politics. The language reform of 1976, which formally abolished diglossia, thus came at the end of a long process of devaluation of the official “pure” language. Yet, in recent years, a metalinguistic prophecy of language decline has received widespread acceptance. The second half of the article examines the reasons for its success and the resulting revival of the argumentation questioning Demotic Greek, and concludes that they should be attributed to a crisis of national identity. (Diglossia, language ideology, language planning, Greek)

This study places conversational performance, or speakers' attempts during everyday talk to draw attention to the aesthetic form of their utterances, at the center of an analysis of linguistic ideology. It examines, in particular, the ways in which two white, middle-class, U.S. university students use performance strategies to construct as Other an English-speaking man whom one student encounters on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a socially and ideologically situated theory of verbal art, this article proposes five interconnected relations between performance and ideology. Together, these relations constitute a step toward an integrated theory of an inextricable link between the ideological structure of performance and the potential for performance in ideological discourse.I wish to thank Jane Hill, Kimberly Jones, Douglas Adamson, and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and on the dissertation from which it comes. I also greatly appreciate Jane McGary's careful editing.