Bilingual Interactions: A conversation borrowed from the Linganth e-mail list. Thanks to all the participants! Q: What do you/we call it when a conversation unfolds… Read More »Asymmetric/unreciprocal/receptive/non-accommodating bilingualism
Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP, has apparently upset some Americans with his reference to “the small people.” My first reaction when I heard Svanberg’s remarks was that he must have been aiming for “the little guy” and produced a near miss.
The Arizona Department of Education is asking school districts to remove teachers who speak “heavily accented or ungrammatical” English from classrooms where students are learning English. In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition.
A piece in Scientific American Mind called “Accents Trump Skin Color” reviews work by Katherine Kinzler and colleagues suggesting that, for young children, accent is as important as visual cues to race, gender, and age in selecting friends. The magazine article was interesting, and led me to look for the research paper it was based on.
A colleague writes to ask:
I read your article ‘Code Switching’ in Sociocultural Linguistics. What I wonder is [why] you didn’t write something about the author Grosjean (1982, Life with Two Languages). He also used the term Code Switching as one of the first. And I can’t get the differences between ‘ language alternation’ and ‘ code switching’? Can you describe the differences?
These are excellent questions.