Magister Artium - MA / The study investigated the practice of codeswitching within the Cape Flats speech community of Cape Town. Members of this speech community have always been exposed to both English and Afrikaans in formal as well as informal contexts. Due to constant exposure to both languages, as well as historical and political experiences, members of the speech community have come to utilize both languages within a single conversation and even within a single utterance. Codeswitching is an integral part of the community's speech behaviour. The main purpose of this research was to uncover and analyze the motivations behind codeswitching in the bilingual communities of Cape Town, while also providing a strong argument that codeswitching patterns evident in their speech do not always correspond completely with linguistic constraints that are regarded as 'universal'. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / This study explored Cameroonian migrants language use and the various language forms they use to manifest their identity. It also dealt with multicultural/multilingual people in an equally multicultural/multilingual society - Cape Town. The study was carried out in the wider and interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics with focus on the specific domain of sociolinguistics. / South Africa

Magister Educationis - MEd / This thesis aims to explore the ways in which space patterns regimes of language use and language attitudes among Cameroonian immigrant children in a primary school in Cape Town. The presence of migrants in any classroom represents a significant challenge from the theoretical as well as practical point of view, given that schools are responsible for both socialization and learning (Gajo & Mondada 1996). Most African countries are going through large-scale migration from rural to urban areas as well as increasing transnational migration due to recent socio-economic and socio-political trends. These flows affect the sociolinguistic economy of the places concerned, not only the individuals within them. Thus immigrants' movement into an urban area not only affects their repertoires, as they find themselves confronted with the task of acquiring the communicative resources of the autochthonous population, but also those of the autochthonous population who find themselves confronted with linguistic communicative processes and resources ‘alien’ to their environment. Similar effects are felt by local educational and other institutions, now faced with learners with widely varying degrees of competence in the required communicative skills. The participants in this study are a group of young migrants from Cameroon where English and French are the two official languages. These learners already have some languages in their repertoire, which may include their mother tongue or either of the two official languages. My focus will be on the multilingual resources of these learners and how they make use of these in the daily life of their new spaces, the school, the homes and community spaces, to construct new social identities. / South Africa

L’écrit politique en occitan en Gironde (1860-1914) Le projet de thèse consiste en une analyse des usages non-littéraires de l’occitan en Gironde entre 1868 et 1914, essentiellement dans et autour de la presse. Le projet est servi par l’existence d’un imposant corpus déjà dépouillé, référencé et listé, d’articles, billets, chansons et poèmes en langue d’oc, parus au cours de cette période au sein de divers organes de presse girondins. Il s’agit d’un occitan dit de connivence utilisé à des fins politiques : il s’agit de toucher les masses d’électeurs issus des milieux ruraux, qui ne maîtrisent pas encore, pour la majorité, le français. Cette étude a permis de mettre en lumière un pan quasiment inexploré du monde de l’édition bordelaise du XIXe siècle : l’écrit politique en langue d’oc. Soit sous la forme de pamphlets imprimés, sans utilisant le nouveau vecteur de diffusion de l’information et de l’opinion qu’est la presse, cet écrit a donné lieu à de véritables productions d’envergure. S’intégrant à des pratiques langagières occitanes antérieures propres à Bordeaux, il a su se renouveler jusqu’à rejoindre les marges du mouvement renaissantiste occitan, par ailleurs quasi-inexistant en Bordelais à cette époque. Dévoilant l’intérêt pour les milieux politiques d’utiliser l’idiome minoritaire jusque dans l’agglomération bordelaise, cet écrit nous permet de toucher du doigt une réalité sociolinguistique encore mal connue, dans laquelle la conscientisation des masses dans le projet républicain (ou pour s’y opposer) passe par la langue d’oc. / Occitan and political paper in Gironde ( 1860-1914 ) The project of thesis consists of an analysis of the non-literary practices of the Occitan in Gironde between 1860 and 1914, essentially in and around the press. The project is served by the existence of an impressive already skinned, referenced and listed corpus, articles, bills, songs and poems in langue d'oc, appeared during this period within diverse Girondist organs of press. We are talking about an Occitan of complicity used for political purposes: it is a question of touching the masses of voters stemming from rural circles, which do not still master, for the majority, French. This study allowed to highlight an almost unexplored piece of the publishing of Bordeaux world of the XIXth century : the political paper in Occitan. Or under the shape of printed pamphlets, without using the new vector of distribution of the information and the opinion that is the press, this paper gave rise to real large-scale productions. Becoming integrated into previous Occitan linguistic practices peculiar to Bordeaux, it knew how to be renewed until join the margins of the Occitan rebirth movement, besides quasi-non-existent in the country at that time. Revealing the interest for the political circles to use the minority idiom to the urban area of Bordeaux and around, this paper allows us of touch of the finger a still badly known sociolinguistic reality, in which one conscientizacion of the masses in the republican project (or to oppose it) needs the occitan language.

The purpose of this study was to examine the implicit language attitudes of college-level instructors toward accented English and the effect of gender, teaching experience, and home language background on those attitudes. The auditory multifactor Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to measure the implicit attitudes toward Standard, Chinese, Hispanic, and Korean accented English. For the current study, audio stimuli were embedded into the multifactor IAT, which became available for the first time in 2014. The auditory multifactor IAT generated implicit preference scores of six pairs of accented English: Standard vs. Chinese, Standard vs. Hispanic, Standard vs. Korean, Chinese vs. Hispanic, Chinese vs. Korean, and Hispanic vs. Korean accented English. Participants (N = 93) included college instructors at an urban university in Florida. Statistical analysis results suggested that college instructors in this study exhibited some bias towards speakers of Hispanic-accented English, but no bias toward the other five. However, analysis of the frequency distributions of the responses showed bi-polar accent biases did exist. It was possible that the similar numbers for the polar opposites balanced each other in the statistical results of no bias. Gender and home language background had no effect on implicit preference scores. The years of teaching experience had significant effect in Hispanic- vs. Korean-accented English, but not in the other five accented language pairs. However, close examination of the beta coefficient per year indicated that the relationship was weak even though the effect was significant. Faculty, administrators, and students could use test results as a topic of discussion in faculty development, teaching assistant training, student services, and diversity training in higher education institutions. The discussions might help awareness of hidden-yet-present accent bias and prevent potential prejudice toward other accented English speakers. The administrators need to be aware that preferences do exist toward accented English speakers. These preferences--or biases--toward an accent may be important in selecting instructors.

Continuing from Eckert’s line of research, I aim to explore the social meaning of common features loaded with gendered ideology: uptalk, creaky voice, and tag questions to name a few (Eckert 2008). Some indexical properties of these features have been alluded to in a study by Ikuko Patricia Yuasa, who found in a match-guise test that many female users of creaky voice are perceived as “educated, urban-oriented and upwardly mobile” (2010). Yet these findings are divorced from the “interactional and stylistic ends” to which girls used these marked features that Eckert and McLemore identify, when in fact they should be in direct conversation. In the process, I aim to make speech used by mainstream populations a conscious object of study, critically examining whether the features index a specific and exclusive construction of femininity that represents any sort of prestige in the specific setting of a women’s college. This entails studying not only who adopts these features and to what means, but who do not and what alternative patterns of speech they pursue instead. Thus, this project aims to elucidate the complicated choices that young women make in speech and the social meanings they convey in those choices.

This sociolinguistic study examines issues of corpus, status and acquisition in Language Planning in Sesotho and isiXhosa in the Eastern Cape. Language plays an important role in the lives of its speakers in society as they interact. Chapter 1 of this study provides the background, definitions of terms used, the objective of the study, the statement of the problem, the research methods used and the literature reviewed. Chapter 2 addresses the context, orientations, stages, and frameworks or types of language planning. Corpus planning forms an integral part of this study. This chapter also looks at different ways of developing terminology. Lastly, the chapter discusses the relationship between corpus planning and purism. Chapter 3 provides the other two types or frameworks of language planning namely, status and acquisition planning. Goals of language planning, and variables for language planning are also discussed in chapter 3. Chapter 4 looks at principles of language planning. Chapter 5 deals with the Language-in-Education Policy, the Eastern Cape Provincial Language Policy Framework, language attitudes and responses to language planning and language policy. Chapter 6 presents the findings and challenges facing the development and use of African languages one of which is Sesotho, as prescribed in the Constitution of the country. A few suggestions and different approaches towards language awareness campaigns are presented in this chapter. Lastly, this chapter concludes the study.

The question of adverbs and the meaning of the present perfect across varieties of English is central to sociolinguistic variationist methodologies that have approached the study of the present perfect (Winford, 1993; Tagliamonte, 1997; van Herk, 2008, 2010; Davydova, 2010; Tagliamonte, 2013). This dissertation attempts to disentangle the effect of adverbial support from the three canonical readings of the present perfect (Resultative, Experiential and Continuative). Canadian English, an understudied variety of English, is used to situate the results seen in the Early Modern English data. Early Modern English reflects the time period in which English has acquired the full modern use of the present perfect with the three readings. In order to address both these questions and current controversies over statistical models in sociolinguistics, different statistical models are used: both the traditional Goldvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith, 2005) and the newer mixed-effects logistic regression (Johnson, 2009). What is missing from the previous literature in sociolinguistics that advocates logistic mixed-effects models, and provided in this dissertation, is a clear statement of where they are inappropriate to use and their limitations. The rate of adverbial marking of the present perfect in Canadian English falls between rates reported for US and British English in previous studies. The data show in both time periods that while adverbs are highly favored in continuative contexts, they are strongly disfavored in experiential and resultative contexts. In Early Modern English, adverbial support functions statistically differently for resultatives and experientials, but that difference collapses in the Canadian English sample. Both this and the other linguistic contexts support a different analysis for each set of data with respect to adverbial independence from the meaning of the present perfect form. Finally, when the focus of the analysis is on linguistic rather than social factors, both the traditional and newer models provide similar results. Where there are differences, however, these can be accounted for by the number of tokens and different estimation techniques for each model.

La discrimination lors de l'insertion professionnelle contribue à marquer des frontières entre les individus nourrissant par là-même les ruptures inter-communautaires en société. Ici, elle est envisagée dans une perspective sociolangagière permettant d'appréhender les liens entre discours et conflits sociaux. Par le réinvestissement de plusieurs méthodologies (observation participante, observation directe, locuteur masqué, questionnaire d'évaluation et entretien semi-directif), la recherche est posée comme permettant de travailler conjointement à : – une réflexion théorique sur l'intégration des pratiques sociolangagières comme potentiels critères de discrimination pour observer comment certains accents peuvent être perçus plus légitimes à certains emplois professionnels et comment ces ressentis peuvent être transposés à l'égard des communautés dont ces parlers apparaissent représentatifs et, – une réflexion méthodologique sur le discours comme vecteur de discriminations où il s'agit de travailler à la création d'un nouvel instrument pour aider la lutte contre ces ségrégations injustifiées, ce par repérage d'indices langagiers récurrents comme preuve(s) d'attitudes discriminatoires / Discrimination at the time of professional insertion contributes to establish boundaries between individuals thus fueling cross-communities divisions in society. Discrimination is considered here within a sociolingual perspective allowing to grasp the links between discourses and social conflicts. Using several methodologies – participative observation, direct observation, concealed speaker, assessment questionnaire and semi-directive interview – the research is assumed as a possibility to work simultaneously on: – a theoretical reflection on the integration of sociolingual practices as potential criterias of discrimination to observe how certain accents may be perceived as more legitimate for certain professional positions and how these sentiments may be replicated to the communities apparently represented by those speeches and, – a methodological reflection on discourse as a vector of discrimination where it is about working on the creation of a new instrument to help fighting those unjustified segregations by spotting recurrent language indices as evidence(s) of discriminatory attitudes

This thesis investigates phonetic and phonological variation in the bilingual repertoire of adolescent Welsh-English bilinguals living in North Wales. It contributes to linguistic research by, firstly, providing an account of language variation in an under-studied area (N. Wales) and context (regional minority language bilingualism) and, secondly, by examining cross-linguistic variation, and the constraints on this variation, in bilingual speech. The two variables under discussion differ in how they are realised in the two languages: /l/ is thought to be heavily velarised in both languages as a result of long-term contact and phonological convergence. Variation in the production of /r/ and realisation of coda /r/ has hitherto been reported as language-specific, though frequent transfer is said to occur from Welsh to English in predominantly Welsh-speaking areas (e.g. Penhallurick 2004: 110; Wells 1982: 390).The first aim of the study is therefore to quantify claims of phonological convergence and transfer in the speech of Welsh-English bilinguals by using a variationist sociolinguistics methodology (e.g. Labov 1966), which also considers the influence of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors on variation. Particular attention is paid to differences between a majority Welsh-speaking town and a town where English is the main language. A further distinction is made between those from Welsh-speaking homes and those from English-speaking homes who have acquired Welsh through immersion education. The second aim is to make empirically-informed theoretical claims about the nature of phonological convergence and transfer, and conceptualise cross-linguistic interaction in the speech of Welsh-English bilinguals in light of existing frameworks. Data (sociolinguistic interviews and wordlists) were collected in Welsh and English from 32 Welsh-English bilinguals aged 16-18. The sample was equally stratified in terms of speaker sex, home language, and area. The two towns compared in the study are Caernarfon (N.W. Wales, where c.88% of the population speak Welsh) and Mold (N.E. Wales, where c. 20% Welsh of the population speak Welsh). The results indicate that English [ɫ] tends to be lighter than Welsh [ɫ] in word-initial onset position for females, and in word-medial intervocalic position for both males and females. The data also show linguistic influences on the realisation of [ɫ] in both languages, and differences between males and females. The realisation of coda /r/ and production of [r] and [ɾ] in English are confined to the speech of those from Welsh-speaking homes in Caernarfon. In Welsh, use of [ɹ] is widespread and is constrained by a more complex interaction between area, home language, and sex. On the basis of these findings, I conclude that features which have undergone phonological convergence due to long-term language contact may be subject to language-specific constraints when implemented phonetically. In terms of transfer, I argue for a ternary distinction between interference, transfer, and transfer which is constrained by linguistic and/or extra-linguistic factors (cf. Grosjean 2012). Finally, I suggest that Mufwene’s (2001) notion of the ‘feature pool’ is the most succinct way of conceptualising Welsh-English transfer and differentiate between more focussed accents of English and a less-focussed variety of North Wales Welsh.