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This chapter explores Korean‐American children's language socialization into Korean address terms and their creative uses of these terms in a Korean‐English bilingual context. The data revealed that, while children's acquisition and use of Korean address terms were mostly mediated by language socialization practices with their parents, their bilingual practices were not directly imposed by these practices. That is, children created their own ways of addressing other Koreans, ways which were novel to adult members of the community. For example, children in this study (1) “anglicized” a social superior's name in Korean utterances and therefore established its bivalency and (2) code‐switched from Korean into English in order to avoid terms that index hierarchy and in‐group intimacy. Such improvised linguistic practices illuminate their ongoing negotiation and construction of the self and the creative potential of children's active participation in their language socialization processes.

Bilingualism is a concept that relies on a variety of theoretical constructs, including the notions of “language,” “speakers,” and “community.” Subjecting these key notions to empirical and theoretical challenges, this study applies an anthropological approach to bilingualism's most emblematic phenomenon, code‐switching. Audio‐visual recordings of spontaneous interactions collected in a Samoan community in Southern California are examined. Three phenomena are considered: (1) the routine adoption of kinship terms (Dad and Mom) in Samoan discourse; (2) the “island‐like” status of proper names which are not adapted to the Samoan phonological register called “bad speech” spoken at home; (3) the code‐switching to Samoan words that do have an English equivalent and are associated with church activities. It is argued that these phenomena are indexes of social change, revealing that Samoan parents in the U.S. tend to take the child's point of view and that persons are constructed as less contextualized, more permanent entities.

This chapter is an examination of the personal side of language maintenance and language shift in the United States, as told by Asian‐Americans from immigrant families. Pertinent selections were taken for over 250 “language autobiographies” submitted over several years in a course at the University of California at Berkeley. In these autobiographies, the students reveal their struggles with learning English and the concomitant decline of their heritage tongue. They describe from a personal point of view the processes of language attrition and the embarrassments, intergenerational isolation and ultimate regrets coming from their own illiteracy, incomplete learning and attrition of their family's native language. The conclusion points out the waste of heritage languages which, if supported better in the school system, could be important resources for the United States.

This introductory chapter reviews research on the language(s) of CMC in a variety of linguistic/sociocultural contexts, focusing on constraints of writing systems; linguistic and discourse features of communication online, with special attention to Japanese and Greek; gender and culture; language choice and code switching; and linguistic diversity on the Internet, compared with linguistic diversity worldwide. Specific issues addressed include how speakers of languages not using the Roman alphabet improvise creative ways to represent their languages online, online language choice in multilingual European contexts, and the status of English vis-à-vis minority languages on the Internet. The eighteen chapters in the book are then described and classified according to the CMC mode(s), linguistic phenomena, and user demographics analyzed in each. The review of literature includes a sampling of publications in European languages.

This chapter investigates creative uses of writing systems on the electronic bulletin boards (BBSs) of two college student organizations in Taipei, Taiwan. Data were collected from postings on bulletin boards and semi-structured interviews with members of the student organizations and it was analyzed using qualitative and ethnographic methods. Four popular creative uses of writing systems are identified and discussed: the rendering in Chinese characters of the sounds of English, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, and the recycling of a transliteration alphabet used in elementary education. It is argued that these practices are enabled by the written nature of the Internet, the orthographic systems available in the society, and the multilingual situation in Taiwan, and that everyday meanings associated with the writing systems and languages are appropriated and reproduced through online practice, resulting in a unique mode of communication.

There has been a good deal of concern around the world about the disproportionate role of English on the Internet and thus a possible displacement of other languages. Yet little prior research has investigated the relationship between use of English and other languages online. This chapter combines linguistic analysis, a survey, and interviews to examine English and Arabic language use in online communication by a group of young professionals in Egypt. The study indicates that among this group, English is used predominantly in World Wide Web browsing and formal email communication, but that a romanized version of Egyptian Arabic is used extensively in informal email messages and online chats. This online use of English and Arabic is analyzed in relation to broader social trends of language, technology, globalization, and identity.

This chapter examines the linguistic choices made by multilingual Swiss medical students on an asynchronous Internet discussion list. A quantitative analysis of language choice in over 1,000 messages sent to the list over a period of four calendar years shows that English was progressively adopted as the lingua franca by the French, German, and Italian native speaking members of the association, largely superceding the use of their native languages. The analysis also reveals that although some messages were in English, French, and German, only a small minority of messages contain code switching. A qualitative analysis of participants’ linguistic choices and their own metalinguistic commentary provides clues as to why English has gained in importance on this list and in Switzerland as a whole.

English is the dominant language on the Internet, but as more people access the Internet, more nationalities and languages meet. This study examined language encounters in the Internet-based shared virtual environment (SVE) ActiveWorlds. The aim of the study, based on participant observations, was to discover whether language minorities are accepted or rejected by the language majority in SVE conversations, and how different conditions affect the outcome of the language encounter. It has been hypothesized that English would be the dominant language, but that minority languages would be common and well accepted by majority language-speaking users. The results showed strong English dominance. Shifts to minority languages introduced by participants were rarely accepted by English speakers and were fully accepted only in language-specific worlds.

Having considered the Romans' relationship with Greek culture from Cicero by way of the Elder Seneca, Quintilian, the Younger Pliny, and Suetonius down to Apuleius, in particular, the implications of code-switching and the linguistic annexation that made Greek a resource for the improvement of Latin and a mark of superior Roman education, the chapter turns to the specific cases of Fronto, in whom Greek negotiates social complications (as in the correspondence with Marcus, does the language of love), particularly between superior and inferior, and of Gellius, who is far more relaxed about Greek discourse and ready to admit that Latin cannot always compete, but brings out cases where it does. Moreover, he expects a Roman to be master of the latter, his own language, as well as Greek. Finally, these authors' practice in respect of Greek is compared with those of Tertullian, Aelian, and Ulpian.

Chapter 9 confronts an a priori objection to double syntax, raised variously by Dahlhaus, Smith and Lerdahl. The problem is framed through a consideration of a passage from Schubert’s C-major Symphony. Evidence in support of the cognitive viability of double syntax is recruited from linguistic theories of code switching, and from anecdotal introspection on quotidien interactions with the world. One advantage of double syntax is that it encourages a plausible model of the evolution of pitch systems across the long nineteenth century. A four-stage evolutionary model is proposed here, developing a suggestion of Patrick McCreless. The chapter and book end with a preliminary assessment of the role of overdetermination in the development of European music, not only at the level of the triad but also at that of the diatonic scale and the twelve-note chromatic collection. The duality between tonal and pan-triadic syntax explore in this book is positioned within, and seen to instantiate, a more general tension tension between acoustic and group-theoretic conceptions of musical materials and relations.

This introductory chapter begins by discussing the book's main focus, which is the influence of ancient languages such as Greek and Latin on English literature since the Renaissance — the literary uses of the phenomena of language contact, of Greek and Latin in contact with English literature. It then explains three of these phenomena from a literary perspective. These phenomena are ‘code-switching’, language purism, and interference. It also gives a brief background on the rest of the chapters.

This chapter illustrates how Brown's understanding of the oratorical forms of rhetoric including addresses, debates, and speeches depends upon recognizing how he distinguishes “rhetoric proper” from the “merely rhetorical.” By examining the various modes of rhetoric in Clotel (1853) from formal speeches to seemingly mundane songs, it outlines an African American engagement with the Declaration of Independence and Patrick Henry's maxim to contest the institution of chattel slavery. Central to the book's larger claims about how blacks participated in the civic sphere and as an example of what Harriet Mullen has called “resistant orality,” the chapter underscores Brown's use of the slave Sam's ostensibly rudimentary and unskillful song as a model for how Brown's own novel itself assumes the form of political discourse.

This chapter extends the discussion of rhetoric and sound by considering issues of prosody to analyze how African American poets used songs and musical cadences to translate their political messages. It examines various sonic emanations including muted voices, song lyrics, and instrumental airs embedded in mid-19th century African American verse by poets such as James M. Whitfield and Joshua McCarter Simpson. Focusing primarily on Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper), it interrogates how these poets exploited musical elements of prosody as mnemonic devices to simultaneously fashion their verses as artful poetry and political discourse. Theorizing this art form as “the remix,” the chapter illustrates how utterly attuned African Americans were with the idioms of the national language and how they engaged in practices of code-switching.

After a century and a half of French colonial rule, most adults in the Marquesan archipelago of French Polynesia now use both their Eastern Polynesian language 'Enana as well as a local variety of French, code-switching between them—sometimes intrasententially—across genres and contexts. This chapter explores the contradictions and effects of both official discourses and everyday socializing interactions in such a context of shifting languages. In particular, language socialization data from two families at two time periods a decade apart evidences the ways in which 'Enana are rejecting in practice the diglossic separation of their two codes, producing and reproducing instead the officially lamented but covertly prestigious charabia/sarapia to index their identities as both French and Polynesian.

Research in code-switching, undertaken against the backdrop of very negative attitudes towards the concurrent use of two or more languages within the same conversation, has traditionally been geared towards rehabilitating this form of language use. From being seen as a random phenomenon reflecting the user’s lack of competence, code-switching is currently seen as sign of an advanced level of competence in the languages involved and as serving different interactional functions. This chapter discusses in some detail the research effort which has led to the rehabilitation of code-switching, with a special focus on studies conducted from a socio-functional perspective. Key paradigms in this perspective are covered, including Gumperz’ interactional sociolinguistics model, Myers-Scotton’s markedness (rational choice) model and Auer’s and Gafaranga’s conversation analytic model of code-switching. In turn, this overview of existing research serves as a context for the challenge the study of code-switching is face with, namely that of its continued relevance.

Language contact intruded into virtually every aspect of life in ancient societies, including high literature, law, medicine, magic, religion, provincial administration, army, and trade. This book focuses on sociolinguistic issues, such as the nature and motivation of code-switching. The languages which come up in this volume are numerous. Apart from Greek and Latin, there are Lycian, Phrygian, Gothic, Hebrew, Turkish, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Arabic, Gaulish, Etrusean, Venetic, Middle English. Sumerian Eme-sal, Demotic and Coptic in Egypt, and Aramaic and its dialects, including Palmyrene and Syriac. This book examines the particular problems posed by the assessment of written texts as specimens of bilingual performance. Another important theme recurring in this volume is the relationship between language and cultural/political systems.

In the second century BC, a substantial number of Italian and Greek traders of comparable status came together on the island of Delos, setting up a potential competition between the two public languages on a roughly equal footing. This chapter deals with questions of linguistic identity, that is, the perception which the negotiatores had of themselves and the part played by bilingualism and language choice in the establishment of identities. Other issues, more technical or linguistic, are also considered, such as the distinction between interference, code-switching, and accommodation. Code-switching is a speaker’s switch from time to time into another’s language as an act of solidarity or politeness. There are inscriptions in which the adoption by a Greek of the Latin pattern of filiation may be seen as a form of accommodation.