This thesis comprises an applied linguistic study exploring the influence of national language policy and local language practices on education in Saudi Arabia, where Arabic is the official language. However, Arabic is a diglossic language, with two main forms: Standard Arabic, which is mainly associated with literacy and typically learned in school, and Local Arabic, which is normally acquired at home from families and often used in everyday interactions (Ferguson, 1959; Albirini, 2016). The aim of the present study is to explore the extent to which the diglossic situation influences the learning and teaching of Standard Arabic in the early years of school. The current study is important because the issue of actual language use in school and in education more generally in the Arab world is under-researched (Amara, 1995; Maamouri, 1998). This thesis is one of the few studies that has addressed this gap. Four primary schools in Riyadh (the capital of Saudi Arabia) participated in this study (involving Year One students aged 6-7 years old, their parents and their teachers). A combination of qualitative and quantitative data was gathered over a period of over three months through a questionnaire survey as well as interviews (to explore preschool language experiences), language assessment activities (to tap into the students’ speaking and listening abilities), classroom observations and interviews (to explore classroom language use and the rationale behind the participants’ choices of language). The key findings suggest that 1) Local Arabic is the predominant type of Arabic used in communication at home before entering school and the amount of exposure to Standard Arabic before attending primary school is generally low, 2) parental levels of education and monthly incomes appear to influence children’s preschool language experiences, 3) preschool exposure to Standard Arabic books and attendance at preschool appear to have a positive influence on Year One pupils’ Standard Arabic listening comprehension, and 4) both Standard and Local Arabic are used in the classroom, although spoken Local Arabic is predominant in teaching-learning activities, whereby this variety is used to facilitate the learning process. The thesis concludes by providing pedagogical recommendations to enhance the teaching and learning of Standard Arabic.

This thesis examines language policy and Russian-titular bilingualism in the Republic of Tatarstan twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tatarstan is an autonomous and multi-ethnic republic situated within the political framework of the Russian Federation and has its own language policy which was implemented in 1992. Both Russian and Tatar were declared to be of equal status in all spheres of language use. Additionally, as a result of an education policy implemented in 1998, Tatar language learning was made a compulsory subject in schools for all nationalities. These policies were part of Tatarstan's nation-building processes (Sharafutdinova, 2003; Wertheim 2003 and Yemelianova, 2000). In particular this research aims to compare Tatar language use between the Russian and Tatar populations as a way to measure how successful the Tatar language policy as a nation-building process has been. According to Rodgers (2007) and Polese (2011), people's attitudes show the extent to which they are participating in the reconstruction of nation-building and identity. Therefore, if Russians show that they are able to use written Tatar and that they use it in everyday situations without showing resistance, then the language policy could be deemed as successful. Empirical research was carried out during two field trips to Kazan in October 2010 and April-May 2013. The results of the study revealed that overall the language policy seems to have been successful amongst the Russian population, particularly in the sphere of education due to Tatar language being compulsory in schools. However, it does not seem to have changed attitudes towards the Tatar language.

Linguistic minorities are playing a crucial role in determining how states are reimagining themselves in more plural and inclusive ways. Pressure from both supranational and sub-state levels of government has meant that the repression of linguistic minorities by state institutions is no longer acceptable and even attitudes of neglect are widely condemned. However, while there has been a noticeable change in attitudes towards linguistic minorities in many European states, the specific role of the central state in relation to these groups remains ambiguous and merits further study. This thesis thus compares the language policies of the central states of Spain and Italy between 1992 and 2010, concerning two specific linguistic minorities in each country. These include Catalan-speakers in Catalonia and the German-speaking minority in Alto Adige/Südtirol, which have received considerable recognition and find themselves in a comparable situation within their respective states. In contrast, the Asturian- and Sardinian-speaking minorities have received the most minimal recognition at both the regional and state levels. Three sources of primary data were identified for the purposes of this study: official state documentation and legislation, elite interviews with political and institutional representatives, and state-wide newspapers. The research reveals the rationales, ideologies and motivations behind the actions of the central states of Spain and Italy in their approaches towards these distinct groups. New insight is provided by considering cases which have not previously been compared, as well as focusing on the typically hidden language policies of the state in contrast to the visible and widely studied policies implemented at the regional or provincial levels. This approach allows conclusions to be drawn on the extent to which both states may be moving away from the traditional monolingual nation-state model and provides recommendations for future approaches to linguistic minorities at the state and European levels.

I present a qualitative study using the narratives, elicited through interviews, of seven second-generation South Asian Britons; five men and two women, aged at the time of the interviews between 35 to 50 years. My participants are higher professionals who have married out of their ethnic and linguistic communities, and who are parents of dual-heritage children ̶ a target group that is under-represented in linguistics research. I investigate the participants’ relationship with their South Asian Heritage Language ̶ the languages being Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil and Konkani ̶ and the dynamics of languages in their families (their birth families and their own families), showing that the factors which influence language maintenance and transmission are varied and unpredictable, and not always related to proficiency in or affinity to the Heritage Language and culture. I also investigate how the participants exploit the interview platform I give them, arguing that the participants perform the habitus (Bourdieu, 1991) of a member of the South Asian diaspora, with acute awareness of how their lives share similarities with and differ from the Discourses (Gee, 1999) surrounding South Asians in Britain. I analyse the narratives using an emic perspective of the functional use of discourse, using aspects of conversation analysis and using a Bakhtinian perspective of language. I show how the participants use the discourse to point to Discourses as well as different linguistic and cultural capitals (Bourdieu, 1990) available to them. My thesis regards the narratives firstly as a body of text for discourse analysis, offering three themes: how the participants use temporal and spatial references, how they use ‘voices’, and how they ‘recreate’ their pasts using chronotopes (Bakhtin, 1981). Secondly, by regarding the narratives individually, I show that within the interview-time the participants present a macro-narrative of themselves, explaining and/or justifying how they have become the person they are now. By treating the narratives in these two ways I contribute to the exploration of methodologies that can be used in narrative enquiry while providing new insights into practices surrounding language maintenance and loss in dual-heritage families.

Each human language possesses a distinctive set of syntactic rules, and early, balanced bilinguals must learn two syntactic systems. The organisation of these systems in the bilingual brain is not yet clear; do they remain autonomous, or do they interact? This thesis examines the extent to which bilinguals’ knowledge of syntactic rules are co-active during monolingual sentence processing. Thus, the primary objective is to assess (a) whether bilinguals co-activate idiosyncratic syntactic rules, (b) how syntactic co-activation occurs, and (c) when syntactic co-activation occurs, focusing on contextual constraints. To this end, I manipulated English sentences according to the Welsh rules of soft mutation (a morphosyntactic process that alters the initial consonant of words), such that English sentences included ‘mutated’ (e.g. prince  brince) or ‘aberrant’ (e.g. prince  grince) nonwords, presented either explicitly or implicitly. In Chapters 3 and 4, syntactic co-activation led to the modulation of the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN), but only in sentences that would elicit a mutation in Welsh. Crucially, processing of explicitly processed nonwords was not influenced by lexical overlap between languages, indicating that bilinguals co-activate abstract syntactic rules during sentence processing. In Chapter 5, eye-movements were measured to determine the extent to which syntactic co-activation occurs in natural sentence reading (in which manipulated target words were implicitly processed). Syntactic co-activation manifested on later processing measures, reflected in longer reading times. Interestingly, this effect was restricted to trials in which there was lexical overlap between languages, suggesting that co-activation is sensitive to a lexical boost effect. Based on these findings, I propose a model of syntactic co-activation that is constrained by contextual demands: syntactic co-activation can occur via abstraction of syntactic rules, but may also be reliant on cross language lexico-syntactic associations during certain contexts.

This thesis seeks to analyse two types of linguistic features of Welsh, code-switching and mutation, as sociolinguistic variables: features which encode social information about the speaker and/or stylistic meaning. Developing a study design that incorporates an analysis of code-switching and mutation in naturalistic speech has demanded a relatively novel methodological approach. The study combined a variationist analysis of the vernacular use of both variables in the 40-hour Siarad corpus (Deuchar 2014) with a technique that ranks radio programmes in order of formality through the use of channel cues and other criteria (Ball et al 1988). This allows for a comparison of the use of code-switching and mutation in multiple stylistic contexts, each of which show varying degrees of emotional engagement and self-monitoring by speakers. The analysis found that code-switching was strongly correlated with the level of formality of each radio programme, and that at least one aspirate mutation trigger, (a), also patterned in a similar way. Some other mutation triggers, most notably including the nasal possessive trigger (fy), seemed to be primarily affected by the speakers’ backgrounds and their relative ages in particular. A qualitative analysis of the type of discourse found in each radio programme made further links between the institutional style of each programme and their use of the stylistically controlled ‘marker’ variables, with non-standard variants appearing to be indexical of solidarity, subversion and irony, while standard variants indexed prestige, authority and earnestness.

It may be tempting to think that humans generally say or do things once in communication. However, repetition for the communication of a particular stylistic effect is a commonplace and everyday occurance. Think of texts with repeated kisses and emoji, lively conversations with friends who excitedly produce the same utterance again, and adverts and branding campaigns that feature repeated utterances and forms. Within Relevance Theory pragmatics, pragmatic stylistics generally, and in some areas of linguistics proper, stylistic repetition is understudied and under-understood. The term is applied to a rag-tag muddle of phenomena that have little in common from the point of view of form, interpretation or effects. Utterances repeated due to illness, repeated forms mandated by the grammar (reduplication), forms necessarily repeated due to limits on linguistic resources (e.g., re-use of the common conjunction ‘and’), and the repetitions in poetry or rhetoric, or the repetitions produced by emphatic speakers are often lumped together, without consideration of speaker intentions, the nature of communication, or the division of labour between linguistic en-/decoding and pragmatic inference. Yet, these are all qualitatively distinct. This thesis (re)assesses a set of phenomena which have been called repetition, for example, reduplication, epizeuxis, and ‘long distance’ repetition, as well as repetition phenomena which have not yet been given detailed treatments within cognitive pragmatics, pragmatic stylistics or linguistics, such as repeated gradable adjectives, repeated intensifiers, repeated yes/no particles, and repeated face emoji. Study is restricted to the deliberate and ostensive repetition of such items for communicating vague and non-propositional effects. It is noted that many repetitions, particularly epizeuxis, are often called emphatic, or intensifying, or both. A key aim of this work is to combat the conflation surrounding the effects of stylistic repetitions, and to explain how such repetitions are recognised in the first instance as intended to communicate non-propositional effects. The work is carried out within Relevance Theory pragmatics (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995) and draws on the showing-saying continuum developed by Wharton (2009). From the point of view of how they achieve relevance, the repeated forms examined are all analysed as cases of indeterminate showing (Sperber & Wilson, 2015), and stylistic repetition is, as such, a non-verbal behaviour which allows a speaker to communicate a vague range of effects by providing relatively direct evidence for what their communication. Along the way, it is suggested that intensification is a processing phenomenon and not an effect, while emphasis is also judged not an effect, and is defined instead as highly ostensive showing on the part of a speaker. With support from repetition data, the author proposes a continuum of cases from mere display, through what is called highlighting (Wharton & Wilson, 2005), to emphasis, allowing for more fine-grained analyses of pragmatic phenomena in similar contexts.

This thesis presents an investigation of the potential effect of sociolinguistic factors on the acquisition of Arabic by 22 four-year-old children in Jordan. The focus of the current thesis is on Arabic-English bilingual children acquiring English in their early childhood alongside Arabic. The three main extra-linguistic factors under study are: parental attitudes towards Arabic and English, the input children receive in both languages, and the presence of foreign domestic helpers in the household (speaking English or pidgin Arabic). At first, data was collected in a naturalistic session in the first visit and three elicitation tasks conducted in the second visit. In addition, a time 2 vocabulary test adapted from Shaalan (2010) with amendments was run a year and a half later for 12 children. Besides the data from children, an attitudinal questionnaire was filled by the parents towards Arabic and English to measure their attitudes towards the two languages under study and elicit input children receive. This thesis reports on children's Arabic mainly in terms of phonology and morpho-syntax. In terms of phonology, I examined children's pronunciation of Arabic sounds not found in English (e.g. emphatics, pharyngeals, and uvulars) and their ability to assimilate the definite article /al-/ when needed. Regarding morpho-syntax, I tested children's ability in: dual and plural forms in Arabic, gender agreement, word order and the gender of the second person pronoun. In addition, I looked at children's code-switching between Arabic and English. Results indicate that reported attitudes do not seem to explain children's results. The reported input shows that the more English children hear the more errors they make mainly in forming numbers, the gender of the second pronoun and word order, and the more they code-mix. As for the recorded input, the more English the mothers speak, the more errors children make in assimilating the definite article and forming duals and plurals, and the more they switch to English in their speech. On the other hand, the more Arabic the children hear, the fewer errors they make in these variables. When looking at the presence of the domestic helpers, it has been found that children raised in households with domestic helpers (regardless of the language they speak) make errors in pronunciation, the assimilation of the definite article, forming numbers and gender agreement. When comparing children raised in households with domestic helpers speaking English and those raised in households with domestic helpers speaking pidgin Arabic, results show that those with domestic helpers speaking English make more errors in the assimilation of the definite article, forming duals and plurals and the gender of the second person pronoun. In the time 2 vocabulary test, no difference is found in the total vocabulary size for children who are exposed to English more than Arabic and those who are exposed to more Arabic. When looking at the vocabulary size of both groups in one language (i.e. Arabic), no significant difference is found. This result might indicate that some children act as typical bilinguals. It has been also found that children who were raised in households with domestic helpers speaking English scored higher in the English test than their peers.

Since the turn of the 21st century, many EU countries have introduced language and/or civics tests in the context of citizenship and migration policy. Recent studies have critically analysed the discursive justifications of these language requirements and/or testing procedures in various EU member-states (Extra et al., 2009, Hogan-Brun et al., 2009). It has also been argued that the scope of language policy should be widened to include research on the experiences of people who are directly affected by formal ‘language policy mechanisms’ (Shohamy, 2009). Moreover, there have been calls for the discursive study of citizenship to broaden its range beyond the aspect of language testing in order to investigate how citizenship is enacted by individuals (Milani, 2015). This thesis responds to these recent trends by focusing on the case study of Luxembourg. In Luxembourg, a new law on ‘la nationalité luxembourgeoise’ (Luxembourgish ‘nationalité’) came into effect in 2009 which stipulates that applicants need to pass a Luxembourgish language test and attend ‘civics’ instruction lessons in order to become citizens. Drawing upon 27 semi-structured interviews conducted with recent applicants for citizenship, this thesis considers three aspects: it first asks how the participants construct their experiences of moving to Luxembourg. Secondly, it investigates how they discuss the language testing procedure and thirdly, it queries how the concept of citizenship is understood. Through thematic analysis and discourse analysis, this thesis shows that the participants discuss their experiences of moving to the country in a variety of different ways. Some participants for example talk about experiences of discrimination, others mention the attractiveness of Luxembourg. It also illustrates that there is a broad range of perceptions on the Luxembourgish language testing procedure. In addition to this, the analysis shows that the participants attach a wide range of meanings to citizenship and ‘Luxembourgishness.’ This thesis offers important insights into the complexities of how policy affects people’s lives and demonstrates the importance of combining the areas of migration studies, citizenship studies and language policy.

A main theme in sociolinguistics is register variation, a situation and use dependent variation of language. Numerous studies have provided evidence of linguistic variation across situations of use in English. However, very little attention has been paid to the language of corporate blogs (CBs), which is often seen as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Previous studies on blogs and corporate blogs have provided important information about their linguistic features as well as functions; however, our understanding of the linguistic variation in corporate blogs remains limited in particular ways, because many of these previous studies have focused on individual linguistic features, rather than how features interact and what the possible relations between forms (linguistic features) and functions are. Given these limitations, it would be necessary to have a more systematic perspective on linguistic variation in corporate blogs. In order to study register variation in corporate blogs more systematically, a combined framework rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and register theories (e.g., Biber, 1988, 1995; Halliday & Hasan, 1989) is adopted. This combination is based on some common grounds they share, which concern the functional view of language, co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features, and the importance of large corpora to linguistic research. Guided by this framework, this thesis aims to: 1) investigate the functional linguistic variations in corporate blogs, and identify the text types that are distinguished linguistically, as well as how the CB text types cut across CB industry-categories, and 2) to identify salient linguistic differences across text types in corporate blogs in the configuration of the three components of the context of situation - field, tenor, and mode of discourse. In order to achieve these goals, a 590,520-word corpus consisting of 1,020 textual posts from 41 top-ranked corporate blogs is created and mapped onto the combined framework which consists of Biber’s multi-dimensional (MD) approach and Halliday’s SFL. Accordingly, two sets of empirical analyses are conducted one after another in this research project. At first, by using a corpus-based MD approach which applies multivariate statistical techniques (including factor analysis and cluster analysis) to the investigation of register variation, CB text types are identified; and then, some linguistic features, including the most common verbs and their process types, personal pronouns, modals, lexical density, and grammatical complexity, are selected from language metafunctions of mode, tenor and field within the SFL framework, and their linguistic differences across different text types are analysed. The results of these analyses not only show that the corporate blog is a hybrid genre, representing a combination of various text types, which serve to achieve different communicative purposes and functional goals, but also exhibit a close relationship between certain text types and particular industries, which means the CB texts categorized into a certain text type are mainly from a particular industry. On this basis, the lexical and grammatical features (i.e., the most common verbs, pronouns, modal verbs, lexical density and grammatical complexity) associated with Halliday’s metafunctions are further explored and compared across six text types. It is found that language features which are related to field, tenor and mode in corporate blogs demonstrate a dynamic nature: centring on an interpersonal function, the online blogs in a business setting are basically used for the purposes of sales, customer relationship management and branding. This research project contributes to the existing field of knowledge in the following ways: Firstly, it develops the methodology used in corpus investigation of language variation, and paves the way for further research into corporate blogs and other forms of electronic communication and, more generally, for researchers engaging in corpus-based investigations of other language varieties. Secondly, it adds greatly to a description of corporate blog as a language variety in its own right, which includes different text types identified in CB discourse, and some linguistic features realized in the context of situation. This highlights the fact that corporate blogs cannot be regarded as a simple discourse; rather, they vary according to text types and context of situation.