Volume 34, Issue 3 -

This study seeks to explore the hybrid cultural and linguistic spaces that Portuguese immigrants create in Macau in the process of engaging in intercultural communication with the Chinese local community. I use critical discourse analysis to examine data collected through in-depth interviews and observations in order to arrive at an understanding and provide an explanation of how Portuguese residents in Macau negotiate their interactions with the Chinese host culture. In these interviews participants furnish accounts of how they preserve their own cultural and linguistic space, while at the same time achieving functional integration in Macau when interacting with the Chinese population. Using hybridity as the theoretical framework, my research shows how participants deal with living and communicating within and between two distinct cultures; it also demonstrates how their lack of literacy in Cantonese limits the degree and form of integration that they are able to achieve.

The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how “one-parent, one-language” family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent–child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as interviews. Detailed interactional analysis is employed to investigate parental language maintenance efforts and the child’s agentive orientation in relation to the recurrent interactional practices through which parents attempt to enforce a monolingual, heritage language “context” for parent–child interaction. We examine the interactional trajectories that develop in parents’ requests for translation that target the focus child’s (a7-year-old girl’s) lexical mixings. These practices resembled formal language instruction: The parents suspended the ongoing conversational activity, requested that the child translate the problematic item, modeled and assessed her language use. The instructional exchanges were asymmetrically organized: the parents positioned themselves as “experts”, insisting on the child’s active participation, whereas the child’s (affectively aggravated) resistance was frequent, and the parents recurrently accommodated the child by terminating the language instruction. The study argues that an examination of children’s agency, and the social dynamics characterizing parental attempts to shape children’s heritage language use, can provide significant insights into the conditions for language maintenance

This paper aims to gain insight into (Spanish) tourists’ multilingual experiences by analyzing spontaneously written online travel diaries. Using the conceptual framework of Rapport Management Theory (RMT; Spencer-Oatey 2008), I analyze reports on the tourists’ mother tongue, local languages, and English as lingua franca in order to examine the relations between language choice and the three interactional principles distinguished in RMT: interactional goals, face concerns, and sociality rights concerns. The data suggests that using one language rather than another may have different implications. Spanish tourists assign a privileged role to their mother tongue, especially for realizing interpersonal goals. Furthermore, tourists regularly describe low English proficiency as a potentially face-threatening characteristic of their own ethnolinguistic group. Finally, Spanish tourists do not seem to consider services in their mother tongue as a commercial right, except in specific contexts where the absence of Spanish language contrasts with other contextual features. On a methodological level, this study seeks to explore the potential of analyzing spontaneously written online diaries as a source of information for sociolinguistic research on multilingualism.

A mixed-language phenomenon such as language shift has been acknowledged to constitute one of the hallmarks of the manuscripts in which the members of the City of London livery companies recorded their financial transactions during the late medieval period. Despite these texts having been studied by scholars in very diverse disciplines, inconsistencies pertaining to the exact date when some companies shifted from Latin and/or French to English as their official language of record keeping have prevailed in the literature. This article is intended to shed light on the evolution over time of language shift in different livery companies, by revisiting the two single studies which, albeit marginally, have so far touched on this topic (Heather Creaton’s [1976] edition and translation of the London Mercers’ Wardens’ Accounts and Lisa Jefferson’s [2003] edition and translation of the London Goldsmiths’ Wardens’ Accounts and Court Minutes), and by contrasting each perspective with linguistic information from first-hand sources. I conclude that there remains a need for a much more consistent and focused approach to the issue of language shift in the City of London livery companies.

Research in second language pragmatics is increasingly investigating the sequential organization of interaction and how it might be affected by second language learners’ developing proficiency. In this paper, we are focusing on a specific aspect of request organization, namely multiple requests. Through data from natural interaction and role plays, we found that multiple requests occurred in a single turn, either as an original request and its same-format reiteration bracketing accounts and explanations or as repetitions with a more complex and polite format. Multiple requests across turns served a repair function. We argue that same-turn multiple requests are recipient designed to increase the likelihood of acceptance. Higher-level learners of Arabic were more likely to produce multiple requests in the same turn than low-level learners whereas the latter exhibited more multiple requests across turns. The data collection method did not have a discernible effect on findings.