Evidence of Variable Gender Role in Defining Language Change Leadership in Syrian Arabic

This study aims to present evidence of gender variability among leaders of language change across different sociolinguistic variables, five phonological variables (a consonant and four vowels) and a discourse variable in Syrian Arabic, within the same speech community. Employing a sociolinguistic variationist approach and comparing children to adults yielded different gendered linguistic behavior. Children show the same dramatic gendered linguistic difference as adults regarding the variable (q), with males using much more rural [q] than urban [ʔ] than females. Regarding the vowel variables, children dramatize their gendered linguistic difference much more than adults; boys show much higher use of the rural vowels than girls compared to the difference between men and women. This pattern is reversed in the discourse variable (yaʕni) ‘that is/I mean’; the gendered linguistic difference is more dramatic among adults than it is among children, and gender effect diminishes in the linguistic distribution of the variable. This multidirectionality in gender effects bears implications for sociolinguistic variationist research. Variables indexed to urban refinement/prestige and social meanings such as femininity/masculinity are more likely to be led by females than males. Conversely, variables that lack these types of social/gender identification indexicality, regardless of whether they are phonological or discursive, do not follow the same pattern of leadership.

On the treatment of super-heavy syllables in Arabic Dialects: an Optimality Theoretic approach to historical typology

This study provides a historical typological Optimality Theoretic analysis of the treatment of potential super-heavy syllables in six Arabic varieties: Hijazi, Egyptian, Emirati, Kuwaiti, Algerian, and Palestinian. The analysis in this study uses the same violable OT constraints for all languages, and the differences between the grammars are represented by the order in which the constraints are ranked relative to one another. The similarities and differences between these varieties are examined from the point of view of one approach to historical OT (Cho 1998), which states that individual pairs of constraints may be ranked or unranked in relation to one another, one operation at a time, meaning that switching the order of two constraints takes two steps historically. According to Cho (1998, 45), “each step of a sound change should be viewed as a change in the ranking of constraints.” Cho’s approach in detecting the historical typological differences between varieties by counting the steps of constraint reranking is compatible with a common approach to historical linguistics. Specifically, Wichmann et al. (2010) provide a quantitative method for determining the geographic homeland of a group of related languages, which takes into account a simple linguistic-difference metric and the geographic distance between the languages. Using constraint reranking in place of Wichmann et al.’s linguistic-difference metric to calculate the homeland of Arabic dialects results in an area around Hijaz as the homeland of Arabic dialects, since Hijazi, Egyptian and Emirati dialects form a cluster of geographically close, but linguistically diverse dialects.

Tense Alternation in Japanese Literature: Translating Free Indirect Discourse and Focalization in Kashimada Maki’s Meido meguri

This paper examines the phenomenon of tense alternation in Japanese literary narrative, making specific reference to Kashimada Maki’s (鹿島田 真希) novella Meido meguri (冥途めぐり Touring the Land of the Dead, 2012) as a case study. It argues that tense alternation in sentence‑final predicative verbs should be regarded a stylistic technique that serves as an indicator of free indirect discourse and of focalization through a central character, and that it moreover establishes an opposition between external narration and internal focalization. It then illustrates how this dynamic is employed in Meido Meguri to create a contrast between a mode suggesting narrative distance and another suggesting mental interiority. This paper thus highlights a significant linguistic difference in the construction of free indirect discourse in Japanese and English narratives.

“Mock Jewish” in Early Twentieth-Century Tunisia: Linguistic Form and Social Meaning

The article presents a sociolinguistic profile of “Mock Jewish,” or the stylized varieties of Judeo-Arabic deployed for humorous purposes in early twentieth-century Tunisian public culture. We assembled a corpus of texts from both print and audio-visual media, including newspaper columns, television and radio performances, folktales, and plays, in which “Jewish” (yahūdī) or “Israelite” (isrāʾīlī) voices are stylized with exaggerated forms of linguistic difference. The purpose of the analysis is not to evaluate the inauthenticity of Mock Jewish vis-à-vis Judeo-Arabic proper, but to understand how performers deploy these markedly “Jewish” stylistic tactics to create diverse social meanings and assess the effects of these performances on language and society. We argue that Mock Jewish forms part of the broader “ideologies of linguistic differentiation” that construct Jewish speech as separate and distinct from non-Jewish varieties. However, the performances of Mock Jewish are not limited to sectarian polemic, but engage diverse targets, derive from different motivations, and provoke divergent responses from audiences.

Reimagining Race and Language

This chapter presents a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, the chapter explores how and why these categories have been co-naturalized and imagines their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. The chapter explores five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (1) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (2) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (3) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (4) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (5) contestation of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect an investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality, on the one hand, and a commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other.

Teaching Comparative Literature in English(es): Decolonizing Pedagogy in the Multilingual Classroom

This article reflects on the challenges that arise when the comparative literature classroom, especially in the Netherlands, is increasingly multilingual and simultaneously increasingly monolingual in its focus on English as a primary language. In view of moving comparative literary studies beyond its Eurocentric framework, what opportunities lie in teaching translated texts in “English(es)” in such a multilingual setting? What are the effects of such an interplay of mono- and multilingualism in view of a commitment to decolonizing the literary curriculum and pedagogical practice? What attention to language and linguistic difference might be available given the diverse linguistic and cultural literacies of students? Less interested in questions of translating texts, the article pursues how teaching literary texts in translation can foster listening to linguistic difference and encourage relational attunement when degrees of literacy and illiteracy are shared at varying levels of competence across students and teachers.

“Your English is Accented!”: Surviving With Otherness While Approaching Positive Becoming

Taking a critical intercultural approach, this paper explores the discrepancies between the critical communication pedagogy (CCP) ideals and pedagogical struggles of international graduate teaching assistants (IGTAs) rendered by their linguistic difference due to border crossing. I theorized IGTAs’ linguistic Otherness as racialization of their accent. I further suggested undoing the negative becoming with positive becoming by intervening in the dualistic ways of knowing and hearing in order to shatter the mentality that dehumanizes and dominates the Other.

Trianon és a Brit földrajz I.

The ‘dismemberment’ of Hungary as a result of the Treaty of Trianon (1920) was a momentous event. This paper examines the reaction of British geographers to Hungary’s dramatic and extensive loss of territory and much-reduced national sovereignty. It considers two works by British geographers, Marion Newbigin (in 1920) and Alan Ogilvie (in 1922), who attempted to explain Hungary’s situation following the Treaty. To Hungary’s geographers, Trianon ruptured historical associations between nature and nation. Boundaries previously formed upon the Carpathians’ natural geography and the hydrography of the Great Hungarian Plain were now replaced by ethnic considerations, even although these proved difficult to effect in practice as the basis of the new boundaries. The paper explores maps produced by Hungarian geographers, and most notably Pál Teleki’s ‘Ethnographical Map of Hungary’ (1919)—the so-called ‘Carte Rouge’—which attempted to reveal Hungary’s ethnic identity and territorial integrity. The paper then examines Marion Newbigin’s ‘Aftermath: A geographical study of the peace terms’ (1920) and Ogilvie’s ‘Some aspects of boundary settlement at the peace conference’ (1922) as Britain’s geographers tried to explain and justify Trianon in terms of post-war geopolitics, ethnic diversity, and linguistic difference. For Newbigin, Hungary’s ethnic delimitation post-Trianon was largely dictated by the Western powers (principally by the American delegation to the 1919 Paris peace conference). In his work Ogilvie (a member of the British geographical delegation in Paris) shows that the principles on which Trianon was determined were often compromised in practice. The paper shows how the new geography of Europe and Hungary dictated by Trianon elicited different responses from different geographical communities.

Cross-linguistic variation in word-initial cluster production in adult and child language: evidence from English and Norwegian

Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both) of the elements. Vocalic insertion, coalescence and metathesis are said to be used more seldom (McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001). Data from Norwegian children, however, have shown vocalic insertion to be more frequently used (Simonsen, 1990; Simonsen, Garmann & Kristoffersen, 2019). To investigate the extent to which children use this strategy to differing degrees depending on the ambient language, we analysed word initial cluster production acoustically in nine Norwegian and nine English speaking children aged 2;6–6 years, and eight adults, four from each language. The results showed that Norwegian-speaking children produce significantly more instances of vocalic insertions than English-speaking children do. The same pattern is found in Norwegian- versus English-speaking adults. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference is an example of the influence of prosodic-phonetic biases in language-specific developmental paths in the acquisition of speech.