Bilingualism and multilingualism Books

Book SynopsisIn The Dutch Language in Britain (1550-1702) Christopher Joby offers an account of the knowledge and use of Dutch in early modern Britain. Using extensive archive material from Britain and the Low Countries, Chris Joby demonstrates that Dutch was both written and spoken in a range of social domains including the church, work, learning, the home, diplomacy, the military and navy, and the court. Those who used the language included artisans and their families fleeing religious and economic turmoil on the continent; the Anglo-Dutch King, William III; and Englishmen such as the scientist Robert Hooke. Joby’s account adds both to our knowledge of the use of Dutch in the early modern period and multilingualism in Britain at this time.

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Book SynopsisThe contributions in Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages in North America advance the ever-expanding research program in formal and theoretical treatments of heritage language grammars through in-depth empirical investigations. The core focus on moribund varieties of heritage Germanic languages extends beyond the exploration of the individual heritage language grammars and contributes to larger discussions in the field of Germanic linguistics.

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Book SynopsisTones are the most challenging aspect of learning Chinese pronunciation for adult learners and traditional research mostly attributes tonal errors to interference from learners’ native languages. In Second Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese Tones, Hang Zhang offers a series of cross-linguistic studies to argue that there are factors influencing tone acquisition that extend beyond the transfer of structures from learners’ first languages, and beyond characteristics extracted from Chinese. These factors include universal phonetic and phonological constraints as well as pedagogical issues. By examining non-native Chinese tone productions made by speakers of non-tonal languages (English, Japanese, and Korean), this book brings together theory and practice and uses the theoretical insights to provide concrete suggestions for teachers and learners of Chinese.Trade Review"This book is beyond doubt an excellent source that will surely benefit not only a community of linguists or psycholinguists who are interested in L2 acquisition but also classroom teachers and language learners with not much linguistic background." ~ Mengzhu Yan, Victoria University of Wellington, on Linguistlist (March 2019)Table of ContentsList of Tables List of Figures List of Selected Abbreviations  Mandarin Tones 1 Introduction  1.1 Phonetics and Phonology of Mandarin Chinese Tones  1.2 Chinese Tone Variations  1.2.1 The Variants of T3  1.2.2 Other Tone Sandhi Processes  1.3 Intonation in Chinese  1.4 The Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese Tones  1.5 Organization of this Book 2 Three Puzzles in Mandarin L2 Tone Acquisition  2.1 Prosodic Structures of English, Japanese, and Korean  2.2 Puzzles Surrounding the L2 Acquisition of Tones 3 Methodology: Data Collection and Analysis  3.1 Test Materials  3.2 Participants and Recording Procedure  3.3 Assessment of L2 Tones  3.4 Data Analysis 4 Coarticulation Effects in L2 Chinese Tones  4.1 The Nature of Anticipatory Tone Coarticulation  4.2 Research Questions and Hypotheses  4.3 Results  4.4 Discussion  4.5 Conclusion 5 Phonological Universals and the Acquisition Order of Mandarin Tones  5.1 Phonological Background  5.2 Results  5.3 Discussion: An OT Account for the Acquisition of Identical Tone Sequences  5.4 Conclusion 6 Acquisition of the Third Tone  6.1 The Allophones and Sandhi Rules of Tone 3  6.2 The Second Language Acquisition of T3  6.3 Methodology  6.3.1 Stimuli  6.3.2 Subjects and Recording Procedures  6.3.3 Analysis  6.4 Results  6.4.1 The Error Patterns of Half-T3 and Raised-T3  6.4.2 Substitutions Used for Half-T3 and Raised-T3  6.5 Discussion  6.5.1 Theoretical Implications: The Underlying Form of T3  6.5.2 The ‘Half-T3 First’ Method  6.6 Conclusion 7 Teaching Mandarin Chinese Tones  7.1 Pedagogical Implications  7.2 Current Prevailing Teaching Materials  7.3 Sample Exercises References Index

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Book SynopsisUntil quite recently, the term Diaspora (usually with the capital) meant the dispersion of the Jews in many parts of the world. Now, it is recognized that many other groups have built communities distant from their homeland, such as Overseas Chinese, South Asians, Romani, Armenians, Syrian and Palestinian Arabs. To explore the effect of exile of language repertoires, the article traces the sociolinguistic development of the many Jewish Diasporas, starting with the community exiled to Babylon, and following through exiles in Muslim and Christian countries in the Middle Ages and later. It presents the changes that occurred linguistically after Jews were granted full citizenship. It then goes into details about the phenomenon and problem of the Jewish return to the homeland, the revitalization and revernacularization of the Hebrew that had been a sacred and literary language, and the rediasporization that accounts for the cases of maintenance of Diaspora varieties.Table of ContentsPreface Section 1 Introduction - Diaspora and diasporas - Defining diaspora - The classical Jewish Diaspora - Diaspora attitudes - Living in Diaspora Section 2 - Non-Jewish diasporas - some dimensions of diaspora languages - Case 1 - The Chinese diaspora - a large diverse collection of communities - Case 2 - South Asian diasporas - Case 3 - A return from exile: the Navajo case - Case 4 - A homeless diaspora? Rom or Romani - Case 5 - The Armenian diasporas - an analogous case - Case 6 - Exiles from Arab lands: Syrian and Palestinian diasporas - Case 7 - Russian diaspora communities - old and new - Case 8 - Pasifika in Aotearoa - Dimensions of diaspora languages Section 3- Babylon - the first Jewish Diaspora - The Egyptian captivity - Captivity in Babylonia - The shift to Aramaic - Attitudes to Diaspora - The persistence of Hebrew Section 4 - The Diaspora in Greek cities - The growth of the Diaspora - Jews in Greek colonies Section 5 - Jews in the Arab world - Pre-Islamic Diaspora - Jews in Islam - The Jewish variety of Arabic - The Reconquista and Jewish Spanish Section 6 The European Diaspora - Jews in Europe - Language shift - What is a Jewish variety? - Yiddish origins Section 7 - The Shtetl: the mythic classic Jewish Diaspora - Jews in Slavic lands Section 8 - The Ottoman Sephardic Diaspora - Expelled Iberian Jews move East - The Ottoman welcome and its limits - Jews in the Ottoman Balkans - The development of the millet system Section 9 - The emancipated, secularizing, assimilating Diaspora of modern times - The effect of emancipation - France - Germany - Netherlands - Belgium - United Kingdom - United States - Poland - The Soviet Union - The Arab world - Algeria - Morocco - Tunisia - Egypt - Iraq - Syria - Lebanon - Iran - Turkey Section 10 - "Bring us back" - The problem of returning from diaspora - The challenge of Global English - Rediasporization in Israel Section 11- Diaspora and diasporas - A tertiary diaspora - a note on a new Israeli diaspora - The effects of diaspora on language repertoires - The future of diasporas References

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Book SynopsisDrawing on usage-based theory, neurocognition, and complex systems, Languaging Beyond Languages elaborates an elegant model accommodating accumulated insights into human language even as it frees linguistics from its two-thousand-year-old, ideological attachment to reified grammatical systems. Idiolects are redefined as continually emergent collections of context specific, probabilistic memories entrenched as a result of domain-general cognitive processes that create and consolidate linguistic experience. Also continually emergent, conventionalization and vernacularization operate across individuals producing the illusion of shared grammatical systems. Conventionalization results from the emergence of parallel expectations for the use of linguistic elements organized into syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. In parallel, vernacularization indexes linguistic forms to sociocultural identities and stances. Evidence implying entrenchment and conventionalization is provided in asymmetrical frequency distributions.Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction: The Languages Ideology  0 Ideology  1 Discourse, Ideographs, and the Languages Ideology  2 Ongoing Signs of Discontent  3 A Plausible Alternative 1 The Staying Power of an Illusion  1.0 Introduction  1.1 A History of the Languages Ideology  1.2 The Persistent Power of False Assumptions  1.3 Dissenting Voices  1.4 Languaging, Not Languages  1.5 Summary 2 Entrenchment and the Linguistic Individual  2.0 Introduction  2.1 The Languaging Individual  2.2 Usage-based Theory and Emergent Systems  2.3 Summary 3 Conventionalization and the Illusion of Shared Grammar  3.0 Introduction  3.1 Similarities between Entrenchment and Conventionalization  3.2 Conventionalization as a Complex Emergent System: Lexical Items  3.3 Conventionalization as a Complex Emergent System: Open Slots in Constructions  3.4 The Role of Conventionalization in Linguistic Change  3.5 Summary 4 Vernacularization  4.0 Introduction  4.1 Indexes, and Indexing  4.2 Intersections: Vernacularization, Conventionalization, and the Languages Ideology  4.3 Summary 5 Conclusion  5.0 Introduction  5.1 Repeated Calls to Action, Repeated Ideological Reenactment  5.2 Liberating Insights Entrapped by the Languages Ideology  5.3 Changing the Discourse Appendix I Bibliography Author Index Subject Index

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Book SynopsisMultilingualism and Ageing provides an overview of research on a large range of topics relating to language processing and language use from a life-span perspective. It is unique in covering and combining psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches, discussing questions such as: Is it beneficial to speak more than one language when growing old? How are languages processed in multilingual persons, and how does this change over time? What happens to language and communication in multilingual aphasia or dementia? How is multilingual ageing portrayed in the media? Multilingualism and Ageing is a joint, cross-disciplinary venture of researchers from the Centre for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at The University of Oslo and the editors of this publication.Table of ContentsMultilingualism and Ageing An Overview  Kees de Bot, Charlotta Plejert and Hanne Gram Simonsen Abstract Keywords Preface  1 Introduction  2 Theories of Multilingualism and Ageing  3 Methods in the Study of Multilingualism and Ageing  4 Psycholinguistic Aspects of Multilingualism and Ageing  5 Cognitive Effects of Multilingualism  6 Sociolinguistic Aspects of Multilingualism and Ageing  7 Multilingualism and Neurological Disorders in Elderly People  8 Perspectives on Multilingualism and Ageing  Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe volume explores linguistic practices and choices in the late antique Eastern Mediterranean. It investigates how linguistic diversity and change influenced the social dimension of human interaction, affected group dynamics, the expression and negotiation of various communal identities, such as professional groups of mosaic-makers, stonecutters, or their supervisors in North Syria, bilingual monastic communities in Palestine, elusive producers of Coptic ritual texts in Egypt, or Jewish communities in Dura Europos and Palmyra. The key question is: what do we learn about social groups and human individuals by studying their multilingualism and language practices reflected in epigraphic and other written sources?

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Book SynopsisStep into the heart of Mexico with this captivating collection of bilingual short stories, perfect for adult learners of Spanish. From the vibrant streets of San Miguel de Allende to the nostalgic corners of Oaxaca, these stories explore the complexities of life, love, and self-discovery through the lens of Mexican culture.Each story, written in both Spanish and English, invites readers on a journey of reflection, connection, and transformation.Through themes of family, heritage, friendship, and personal growth, this collection weaves together the beauty of the Mexican landscape with the universal emotions that unite us all. Perfect for those looking to immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of Mexican storytelling while enhancing their Spanish language skills, this book offers a unique and insightful way to connect with the heart and soul of Mexico.

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