Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
The Impact

This book breaks new ground in the study of language standards and standardization through its focus on Asia and in the attention paid to multilingual contexts. The chapters add to our understanding of the ways in which multilingualism is implicated in language standardization, as well as the impact of language standards on multilingualism.

Usage, media, and grammaticalization

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-83
Author(s):  
Liang Tao
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Chinese Text ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
Beijing Mandarin ◽  
Grammatical Change ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This report presents a case study on a current grammatical change in a rhetorical question 不是…吗 (isn’t it the case…?) and its spreading from spoken Beijing Mandarin to Mandarin Chinese in general. The study addresses three interrelated issues that concern the development and spreading of this new pattern: (1) usage-based language variation and change in spoken Beijing Mandarin; (2) Socio-cultural factors that may have promoted the adaptation of the new pattern in Mandarin Chinese; and (3) the impact of media, which may enhance the rapid spreading of the pattern in China. The report offers another instance of usage as the main driving force leading to language variation and grammaticalization.

Paris: a sociolinguistic comparative perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID BRITAIN
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article assesses the sociolinguistic impact and importance of the other articles in this special issue on Paris, considering three main themes that are evoked. First, the contribution of the articles here to the development of work on language variation and change on Hexagonal French within the variationist paradigm. Second, I address what I see as the important contribution made to our understanding of the ‘city’ as a sociolinguistic site. Finally, I focus on ethnicity as a social construct in recent variationist work in cities and consider what the articles here, and in comparison with cities elsewhere, add to our understanding of the impact of immigration on local manifestations of language variability. In each case, I attempt to show how these articles foreground or even problematize these three issues, and provide a prospectus for further research that can address unresolved questions.

scholarly journals “Infeliz” or “Triste”: A Paradigm for Mixed Methods Exploration of Outcome Measures Adaptation Across Language Variants

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Evans ◽  
Clara Paz ◽  
Guido Mascialino
Keyword(s):  
Measurement Invariance ◽  
Outcome Measures ◽  
Psychometric Testing ◽  
Psychotherapy Research ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Large Sample ◽  
Language Effects ◽  
The Impact

The literature on measure translation tends to hold, overtly or covertly, a questionable assumption about the possibility of exact translation and almost completely ignores issues of within language variation. Equally, psychometric methods used to assess cross-cultural validity after translation focus on large sample tests of cross-sectional measurement invariance. Such invariance is often not found and is of dubious pertinence to change/outcome measures usually used in psychotherapy research. We present a sequential process of three substudies using quantitative and qualitative procedures to explore whether an outcome measure needs to be changed when used across language variation. Qualitative data confirmed that an item was not ideal in the new context. However, quantitative exploration showed that, although statistically significant and affected by gender and item order, the impact of changing the item in the overall score was small, allowing retention of the existing Spanish translation. We argue that the myth of perfect translation and over-reliance on large-sample psychometric testing pursuing measurement invariance limit exploration of language effects. We recommend that these be used in the companion of user-based, sequential, mixed-method exploration to support the development of a richer field of understanding of outcomes and change self-report measures across languages and cultures and both across and within languages.

Compositionality, Pluricentricity, and Pluri-Areality in the Catalan Standardisation

2021 ◽  
pp. 182-197
Author(s):  
Joan Costa-Carreras
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
Communicative Space

Current language standardization processes must face the challenge of preserving variation, as speakers are very sensitive to their language identity. In the Catalan communicative space, two official agencies are in legal charge of language standardization: the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, whose target is all Catalan speakers and which applies a monocentric “compositionality”, and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, whose target is Valencian speakers only and which applies a “convergent pluricentricity.” This chapter will analyze the official texts of both academies studying how language variation is focused on applying the notions of compositionality, pluri-areality, and pluricentricity.

Third Factors in Language Variation and Change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly Van Gelderen
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Generative Syntax ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
Cyclical Process ◽  
The Impact

In this pioneering study, a world-renowned generative syntactician explores the impact of phenomena known as 'third factors' on syntactic change. Generative syntax has in recent times incorporated third factors – factors not specific to the language faculty – into its framework, including minimal search, labelling, determinacy and economy. Van Gelderen's study applies these principles to language change, arguing that change is a cyclical process, and that third factor principles must combine with linguistic information to fully account for the cyclical development of 'optimal' language structures. Third Factor Principles also account for language variation around that-trace phenomena, CP-deletion, and the presence of expletives and Verb-second. By linking insights from recent theoretical advances in generative syntax to phenomena from language variation and change, this book provides a unique perspective, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students in syntactic theory and historical linguistics.

scholarly journals Perceptions of Black Children's Narrative Language: A Mixed-Methods Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique T. Mills ◽  
Leslie C. Moore ◽  
Rong Chang ◽  
Somin Kim ◽  
Bethany Frick
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Mixed Methods Study ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
Pertinent Information ◽  
Mainstream American English ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Narrative Language

Purpose In this mixed-methods study, we address two aims. First, we examine the impact of language variation on the ratings of children's narrative language. Second, we identify participants' ideologies related to narrative language and language variation. Method Forty adults listened to and rated six Black second-grade children on the quality of 12 narratives (six fictional, six personal). Adults then completed a quantitative survey and participated in a qualitative interview. Results Findings indicated that adults rated students with less variation from mainstream American English (MAE) more highly than students with greater variation from MAE for fictional narratives, but not for personal narratives. Personal narratives tended to be evaluated more favorably by parents than teachers. Black raters tended to assign higher ratings of narrative quality than did White raters. Thematic analysis and conversation analysis of qualitative interviews supported quantitative findings and provided pertinent information about participants' beliefs. Conclusion Taken together, quantitative and qualitative results point to a shared language ideology among adult raters of variation from MAE being more acceptable in informal contexts, such as telling a story of personal experience, and less acceptable in more formal contexts, such as narrating a fictional story prompted by a picture sequence.

Revisiting culture and language in global management teams

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Cohen ◽  
Jane Kassis-Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Global Scale ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Social Construction Of Reality ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
Positive Side ◽  
Narrow View ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact

In research on international business (IB) and management, a narrow view of language and culture has given way to a greater understanding of the complexity of the interplay of language- and culture-related issues in today’s world. The “linguistic turn” in the social sciences along with the more recent unravelling of the deterministic cultural dimension has led to reexamining the importance of language and culture in the social construction of reality. The key role played by multicultural, multilingual teams in organizations operating on a global scale has spawned much research on the impact of language and cultural diversity within teams. Some scholars have focused on the negative aspects of diversity implying that language standardization, through the adoption of lingua franca policies and practices, is the most appropriate strategy for collaboration across languages and borders. Others have uncovered the positive side of this diversity; they argue the case for the coexistence of different working languages together with communication practices that facilitate the contextualization necessary for sense-making processes in multilingual teams. This has led a growing number of scholars within different research fields to take the “multilingual turn” exploring novel ideas and concepts emerging around the phenomena of multilingualism, thereby advancing the discussion in IB and management studies. Applying these emerging notions to a study of a multilingual team in an international organization, we question the widely held assumptions about language, culture, and identity and show the need to refresh the way in which these concepts are framed when examining team performance.

Chatbots Language Design: The Influence of Language Variation on User Experience with Tourist Assistant Chatbots

2022 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Ana Paula Chaves ◽  
Jesse Egbert ◽  
Toby Hocking ◽  
Eck Doerry ◽  
Marco Aurelio Gerosa
Keyword(s):  
User Experience ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Language Design ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Language Choices ◽  
Similar Content ◽  
The Impact

Chatbots are often designed to mimic social roles attributed to humans. However, little is known about the impact of using language that fails to conform to the associated social role. Our research draws on sociolinguistic to investigate how a chatbot’s language choices can adhere to the expected social role the agent performs within a context. We seek to understand whether chatbots design should account for linguistic register. This research analyzes how register differences play a role in shaping the user’s perception of the human-chatbot interaction. We produced parallel corpora of conversations in the tourism domain with similar content and varying register characteristics and evaluated users’ preferences of chatbot’s linguistic choices in terms of appropriateness, credibility, and user experience. Our results show that register characteristics are strong predictors of user’s preferences, which points to the needs of designing chatbots with register-appropriate language to improve acceptance and users’ perceptions of chatbot interactions.

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