In many countries around the world, determining what languages or dialects should be the instrument of education in schools is a major issue. Today, in Kurdistan this issue is a growing concern, particularly amongst students who speak a Kurdish dialect known as Kurmanji (Hassanpour, 2008, 2012). This thesis is an attempt to investigate the difficulties that Kurmanji students encounter in schools. Its aim is to investigate their attitudes and perceptions towards the Sorani dialect and Sorani speakers. For this reason, twenty students, including 10 males and 10 females, participated in this study. The students were from a Kurmanji town known as Akre. For this study,the qualitative method was used as it allowed the students to describe in detail the difficulties they have faced in schools and the attitudes they had towards the Sorani dialect and its speakers. The research revealed that Kurmanji students faced different kinds of problems not only in their classes, but also in their neighborhoods and communities. These problems ranged from simple issues with classroom curricula and pedagogical approaches, to more extreme problems. Many of the extreme problems involve being humiliated in the classroom by their teachers, being unfairly disciplined and penalized for language mistakes, and many other forms of punitive action. Further, the study reported how these issues have been addressed through the use of a method called bidalectialsim in several countries, such as America, Australia, Canada, England, etc. This method teaches the dominant dialect through the use of the students own native dialect (Yiakoumetti, 2006, 2007). These approaches and solutions can offer Kurdistan a blueprint for how to address their own problems and how to pave the way for speakers of Kurmanji to learn the targeted standard dialect of Sorani in Kurdistan.

Several definitions exist that offer to identify the boundaries between languages and dialects, yet these distinctions are inconsistent and are often as political as they are linguistic (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998). A different perspective is offered in this thesis, by investigating how closely related linguistic varieties are represented in the brain and whether they engender similar cognitive effects as is often reported for bilingual speakers of recognised independent languages, based on the principles of Green’s (1998) model of bilingual language control. Study 1 investigated whether bidialectal speakers exhibit similar benefits in non-linguistic inhibitory control as a result of the maintenance and use of two dialects, as has been proposed for bilinguals who regularly employ inhibitory control mechanisms, in order to suppress one language while speaking the other. The results revealed virtually identical performance across all monolingual, bidialectal and bilingual participant groups, thereby not just failing to find a cognitive control advantage in bidialectal speakers over monodialectals/monolinguals, but also in bilinguals; adding to a growing body of evidence which challenges this bilingual advantage in non-linguistic inhibitory control. Study 2 investigated the cognitive representation of dialects using an adaptation of a Language Switching Paradigm to determine if the effort required to switch between dialects is similar to the effort required to switch between languages. The results closely replicated what is typically shown for bilinguals: Bidialectal speakers exhibited a symmetrical switch cost like balanced bilinguals while monodialectal speakers, who were taught to use the dialect words before the experiment, showed the asymmetrical switch cost typically displayed by second language learners. These findings augment Green’s (1998) model by suggesting that words from different dialects are also tagged in the mental lexicon, just like words from different languages, and as a consequence, it takes cognitive effort to switch between these mental settings. Study 3 explored an additional explanation for language switching costs by investigating whether changes in articulatory settings when switching between different linguistic varieties could - at least in part – be responsible for these previously reported switching costs. Using a paradigm which required participants to switch between using different articulatory settings, e.g. glottal stops/aspirated /t/ and whispers/normal phonation, the results also demonstrated the presence of switch costs, suggesting that switching between linguistic varieties has a motor task-switching component which is independent of representations in the mental lexicon. Finally, Study 4 investigated how much exposure is needed to be able to distinguish between different varieties using two novel language categorisation tasks which compared German vs Russian cognates, and Standard Scottish English vs Dundonian Scots cognates. The results showed that even a small amount of exposure (i.e. a couple of days’ worth) is required to enable listeners to distinguish between different languages, dialects or accents based on general phonetic and phonological characteristics, suggesting that the general sound template of a language variety can be represented before exact lexical representations have been formed. Overall, these results show that bidialectal use of typologically closely related linguistic varieties employs similar cognitive mechanisms as bilingual language use. This thesis is the first to explore the cognitive representations and mechanisms that underpin the use of typologically closely related varieties. It offers a few novel insights and serves as the starting point for a research agenda that can yield a more fine-grained understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that may operate when speakers use closely related varieties. In doing so, it urges caution when making assumptions about differences in the mechanisms used by individuals commonly categorised as monolinguals, to avoid potentially confounding any comparisons made with bilinguals.

Students who participate in study abroad programs have the opportunity to interact with native speakers in a variety of settings. "Composition and Formation of Social Networks during Study Abroad Programs" explores the kinds of social networks that students form while abroad focusing on the areas of host families, church, school, community, and friends from the program. The kind of network that students form is heavily influenced by the nature of their program. Students from the same program often have social networks similar to those of their peers in the same program. Students who went abroad generally made friends in categories that were most accessible to them. Apart from the program structure, individual initiative also plays an important role in the size and composition of a student's social network. Also, students who had more intense friendships were found to be more likely to create second order networks and meet more friends through their established friendships. Children who grow up exposed to two dialects of the same language may become bidialectal giving them an extra set of choices when they speak. The decision of which dialectal features to use is often socially motivated and demonstrates the speaker's perceived identity. In "Bidialectalism and Language Attitudes: A Case Study of a Bolivian-Argentine Family in the United States," two sisters were interviewed regarding their language use and attitudes. One of the sisters felt a strong connection to her Argentine heritage and thus chose to use an accent and words that would identify her as Argentine. The other sister in this study does not feel the need to identify herself as Argentine and prefers to simply fit in. She thus strives to employ a regionally unmarked variety of Spanish when she speaks. Both sisters are able to accommodate their speech to that of their interlocutors, but have preferred dialectal features based on their language attitudes.