Conservative attitudes toward loanwords and toward change in grammar often hamper efforts to revitalize endangered languages (Tiwi, Australia); and incompatible conservatisms can separate educated revitalizers, interested in historicity, from remaining speakers interested in locally authentic idiomaticity (Irish). Native-speaker conservatism is likely to constitute a barrier to coinage (Gaelic, Scotland), and unrealistically severe older-speaker purism can discourage younger speakers where education in a minority language is unavailable (Nahuatl, Mexico). Even in the case of a once entirely extinct language, rival authenticities can prove a severe problem (the Cornish revival movement in Britain). Evidence from obsolescent Arvanitika (Greece), from Pennsylvania German (US), and from Irish in Northern Ireland (the successful Shaw's Road community in Belfast) suggests that structural compromise may enhance survival chances; and the case of English in the post-Norman period indicates that restructuring by intense language contact can leave a language both viable and versatile, with full potential for future expansion. (Revival, purism, attitudes, norms, endangered languages, minority languages, contact)

This study examines the functions of the bilingual discourse strategy of language alternation in the process of marking boundaries of continuous discourse. The focus is on switched discourse markers – employed, it is argued, to metalanguage the frame of the discourse. The corpus is comprised of audio recordings of over 20 hours of Hebrew-English bilingual conversation. The strategy of language alternation at discourse markers is illustrated, and the switched discourse markers are classified according to Becker's approach to context (1988b) as a source of constraints on text. This classification is then related to the phenomenon of clustering of discourse markers at discourse unit boundaries in both bilingual and monolingual discourse. Finally, cross-linguistic differences in discourse markers are related to a theory of metalanguage. (Discourse analysis, bilingual discourse, discourse markers, languaging, metalanguage, Hebrew/English comparative discourse)

Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act clearly forbids an employer to discriminate against persons of color for reasons of personal or customer preference. Similarly, a qualified job applicant may not be rejected on the basis of linguistic traits linked to national origin. In contrast to racial discrimination, however, an employer has considerable latitude in matters of language, provided in part by a judicial system which recognizes in theory the link between language and social identity, but in practice is often confounded by blind adherence to a standard language ideology. The nature and repercussions of this type of linguistic discrimination are here explored. (Language and law, accent, discrimination, standard language ideology, critical language studies)

The role of the connective and is here considered as a preface to questions in spoken interaction. Using data from informal medical encounters, it is argued that and-prefacing is used to link a question to a preceding question/answer pair or pairs. In such contexts, and-prefacing indicates that the questions it prefaces have a routine or agenda-based character. This in turn can be a resource which invokes and sustains an orientation to an activity or course of action that is implemented through a series of question/answer pairs, but transcends any individual pair. The general characteristics of and-prefaced questions are contrasted with “contingent” or “follow-up” questions, which are not normally and-prefaced. Some strategic uses of and-prefaced questions are described, and the role of the device within the more general sociolinguistic context of the data is discussed. (Connectives, conversation analysis, discourse, institutional interaction, medical encounters, turn design)

Assessments of the narrative abilities of patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease should consider the interactions that generate the narratives. By analyzing the discourse of an AD patient in interaction with two different interlocutors, namely her husband and the author, this study calls attention to ways in which one interaction facilitates narratives and the other does not. Previous psycholinguistic research, largely focusing on the resultant narrative, has understood the AD patient's deteriorating narrative skills as a result of the progressively debilitating nature of the disease. This is undoubtedly true, but extensive and meaningful talk is nevertheless possible, partially grounded in and constructed through social interaction. (Discourse analysis, Alzheimer's disease, narrative social interaction)

A social dialect survey of a working-class suburb in New Zealand provides evidence that eh, a tag particle that is much stereotyped but evaluated negatively in NZ English, may persist in casual speech because it plays an important role as a positive politeness marker. It is used noticeably more by Maori men than by Maori women or Pakehas (British/European New Zealanders), and may function as an in-group signal of ethnic identity for these speakers. Young Pakeha women, though, seem to be the next highest users of eh. It is unlikely that they are using it to signal in-group identity in the same way; instead, it is possible that they are responding to its interpersonal and affiliative functions for Maori men, and are adopting it as a new facet in their repertoire of positive politeness markers. (Gender, ethnicity, politeness, New Zealand English, intergroup and interpersonal communication)

This longitudinal study examines the construction of the apprenticeship relationshiP between professor (expert) and graduate student (novice) during office-hour interactions. The findings demonstrate that apprenticeship is constituted by the strategic use of affect-indexing linguistic markers in discourse. By indexing stances of cooperativeness, interdependence, and shared Discourse membership, professor and student create a positive affect bond which provides a linguistic means of negotiating miscommunication arising from the student's incomplete socialization to the target Discourse. The socialization process is shown to proceed through a series of interim Discourses where quantifiable shifts in the participants' discourse strategies reveal the student's increasing mastery of the target Discourse. Constraints imposed by the institutional setting are also shown to structure the discourse strategies which characterize the interim Discourses. The results of this study strongly suggest that affect plays a measurable role in the process of language socialization, and is essential for defining “trusf”-based apprenticeship relationships. (Affect, language socialization, discourse analysis, apprenticeship)

Using data from four sets of alternating forms in a moribund Dutch-lexicon creole, this article addresses the characteristics of variation in moribund languages, and “the usefulness of variationist approaches in the description and analysis” of them (Drechsel 1990:552–53). The analysis shows how variable phonological rules continue to exist in a dying language, even after large numbers of words have been bled from the rules' inputs, thereby providing support for Dressler's hypothesis of lexical fading (1972). A three-stage scenario of rule loss is proposed to account for the fact that, in the Negerhollands case, there is substantially greater phonological variation at the level of the community than at the level of the individual. (Obsolescence, phonological variation, phonological change, creole languages, Virgin Islands, Negerhollands)

In arguing for the necessity of gender-based language reform, feminist theorists have generally assumed that language is not a neutral and transparent means of representing reality. Rather, language is assumed to codify an androcentric worldview. While sexist language clearly reflects sexist social practices, the continuing existence of such practices throws into question the possibility of successful language reform. Because linguistic meanings are, to a large extent, socially constructed and constituted, terms initially introduced to be nonsexist and neutral may lose their neutrality in the mouths of a sexist speech community and/or culture. In this article we first examine the way in which nonsexist innovations have been appropriated by a sexist speech community. More specifically, we examine uses of neutral generics such as chairperson, spokesperson; singular they; he or she; and neutral titles such as Ms.; and we demonstrate that these terms are often not used nor interpreted in their intended (neutral) way. Rather, they are used in ways that maintain sexist stereotypes and distinctions. Then we examine the use of feminist linguistic innovations as they appear in the print media. We demonstrate the extent to which such terms get redefined and depoliticized by a speech community that is not predominantly feminist and is often sexist. (Language and gender, language and race, nonsexist language, gender-based language reform, neutral generics, discourse analysis)

This article deals with the use of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) as a written language in a literary or poetic function. It is argued that HCE's lack of what Kloss 1967 calls Abstand ‘autonomy, distance’ presents certain technical problems for writers, and acts as a barrier to further Ausbau (also Kloss's term, ‘elaboration’) in the literary domain, particularly in the novel. Because it has no writing system of its own, HCE is represented as if it were a deviant or non-standard variety of English. In other words, HCE is forced to be a literary dialect rather than a literary language. Some practical problems connected with the elaboration process are examined, such as standardization and related theoretical issues associated with narrative technique. The article concludes by considering the likelihood of successful resolution of these problems within the current political situation in the Hawaiian Islands. (Hawai'i, pidgin, creole, minority language, standardization, Abstand, Ausbau, orthography, literature, narrative, genre)

This study examines how identification and recognition is achieved in Swedish telephone conversation openings, and compares the patterning of Swedish telephone openings with the analyses of telephone conversation openings in other linguistic communities. The analysis suggests that Swedes overwhelmingly self-identify by name over the telephone, like Dutch interactants: but Swedes also avail themselves of the recognitional resources that have been found within American materials to achieve recognition without explicit name-proffer. This finding bears on orientations toward formality and informality in Swedish culture. (Conversation analysis, telephone conversation openings, communication and culture)

The communal creation of religious meaning is here examined in the context of an Irish Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting. Through a micro-analysis of the “spontaneous” ritual language of one such meeting, various discursive strategies are revealed which function to create for the participants an experience of divine/human communication. These include an explicit effort on the part of speakers to construct a thematically consistent and coherent ritual event out of a sequence of apparently spontaneous individual speech acts, as well as a marked use of evidentials to attribute spiritual authorship and authority to personal speech acts. In contrast to what has been suggested as the self-evident nature of ritual speech, the frequent use of evidentials is related to the relatively recent emergence of the movement, its ideology, and its emphasis on the personal narrative as the central form of religious discourse. (Ritual language, evidentials, Catholic religion, charismatic religion, religious movements, authority in discourse)

The article examines the fact that the push for democracy and the end of Communist rule in Central Europe was phrased in terms of traditional European notions of freedom and democracy, in spite of longlived Communist attempts to redefine these and related terms in order to make them a Communist reality. Communist language usage was forcefully brought home to the West by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially in his notion of “doublethink”. We use the semantic theory of David Kronenfeld, along with Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and Jean Piaget's views of how children's cognitive systems develop (including natural language), to derive a theoretical explanation for the failure of the Orwellian prediction and of the Communist linguistic efforts on which it was predicated. The explanation involves Ferdinand de Saussure's central idea that language is an interlinked system which is crucially social, and points to the critical role of childre's early language learning (in mundane, everyday contexts) on the development and structuring of their adult system. (Extensionist semantics, politics and language, cognitive dissonance, Central Europe, Poland, George Orwell, propaganda, language change)

Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of appropriation is a potentially powerful way to conceptualize discourse development in children. Typically, studies of discourse development have emphasized structural aspects of text. However, children appropriate not only forms, but also words, themes, purposes, and styles. From a developmental point of view, the concept of appropriation raises at least three questions: What is it that children appropriate? Where do they get their material? And what do they do with that material? In an attempt to make sense of appropriation as a developmental construct, we examine one third-grader's writing: Suzanne's book, The missing piece. We find that Suzanne appropriated material from two major sources: (a) adult-authored text – Margaret Sidney's novel, Five little Peppers and how they grew – and (b) the meanings and values of a stratified local peer culture. We conclude by discussing the significance of this work for future research on children's discourse development. (Discourse development, Mikhail Bakhtin, peer culture, social context of writing, children's writing, appropriation)

The Budget is a newspaper which has served Amish communities for over a hundred years by disseminating community news to Amish settlements across North America. The main feature of this newspaper are newsletters written by volunteers from local Amish settlements, called “scribes,” who report news and happenings from their church districts. In this study the generic characteristics of the newsletters are identified, as is their role in the reproduction of Amish cultural values. The newsletters display generic consistency demonstrated in the predictable location, form, and content of the components of the newsletter. Scribes' reports of community news report events which are central to maintaining the importance of the interpersonal basis of Amish community life, and serve to maintain those items as reportable and noteworthy topics in the Amish communicative economy. (Amish, genre, written communication)

Children in many African societies have meaningful names – unlike their Western counterparts, whose names are primarily labels. In Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, and many other cultures, namegivers traditionally chose personal names that pointed to a range of people and circumstances that were relevant at the time of the child's birth. These highly individual or unique names were part of particular social frameworks that have long been evolving with Western acculturation. Like the social frameworks within which they are embedded, naming practices are in the process of change.

This article investigates change in Zulu naming practices as a reflection of wider social changes. Taking historical accounts as the source of traditional namegiving, an analysis of rural, farm, and urban names shows quantitative and qualitative differences in naming practices. Contemporary names differ significantly from traditional ones, and provide evidence that the world view within which names are given is in the process of redefinition. (Anthropological linguistics, naming, South Africa, Zulu)

This article describes a preliminary experiment looking at possible differences in how females and males interact in conversation. The article analyzes data from an experiment where two females and two males talked to each other in all possible pairs; a total of 60 minutes of conversation (six dyads) was transcribed. The goal was to isolate quantifiable entities related to controlling or directing the conversation. We looked at issues such as who talked how much, how fluently or confidently – and how the two people in the conversation interacted in terms of interruptions and indications of support, agreement, or disagreement. The findings from such a small sample are only relevant to suggest hypotheses for further research. However, we noticed a number of interesting differences: the female speakers used more 1st person pronouns and fewer 3rd person references than the male speakers; the female speakers used mm hmm at a much higher frequency than the male speakers; the female speakers also interrupted each other more; and the female/female conversation seemed more fluent than the other conversations, as measured by number of disfluencies and number of affirmative transitions upon speaker change. All of these differences suggest that this area is a fruitful one for further investigation. (Conversational analysis, gender differences)